An alleged organization dedicated to illegal and clandestine betting was discovered thanks to an investigation conducted by the Flying Squad and the economic-financial police unit of the Financial Police of Pistoia.
Criminal conspiracy aimed at the abusive exercise of the collection of games and betting and gaming and betting, and also extortion, forgery, trafficking and possession of drugs, fraudulent evasion of the payment of taxes and issuing of invoices for non-existent operations: they are 12 arrests in execution of precautionary custody measures in prison (9 in prison, 3 under house arrest with an electronic bracelet) issued by the investigating judge of Pistoia at the request of the Pistoia prosecutor’s office and carried out with the assistance of the mobile squads of Prato, Rome, Latina, Lucca and Massa Carrara. The suspects are Italian and Chinese.
The Pistoia prosecutor’s office also ordered a preventive seizure aimed at the confiscation of assets with a total value of approximately 1,184,000 euros. The preventive seizure was also ordered against 3 gaming and betting halls, 5 companies and 1 car. Searches were also carried out with the assistance of Sco and Scico.
In total, around 90 policemen and 40 financiers were employed. Also used are experts in the use of high-tech equipment such as ground penetrating radar, to scan the walls in search of hidden compartments and a ‘cash dog’ to search for currency. The investigations by the Pistoia prosecutor’s office, which lasted over a year, would have allowed, as explained in a note from the investigators, “to reconstruct the existence of a stubborn extortion phenomenon and of a real ‘system’ of illegal and clandestine betting” , both “online on special cloned sites, and in slot halls” in Prato, “nominally attributable to Chinese citizens but in fact in the hands of two of the subjects subjected to precautionary measures, who have full access to them in the same way as real owners, making use of of various collaborators”.
It would also have emerged “repeated tax frauds conceived and managed by one of the suspects, a Chinese, in collaboration with several other subjects connected to him, based on the fictitious registration of the ownership of companies to other people, on the issuing of false invoices and on the transfer of substantial sums of money in China” to avoid paying taxes for “entrepreneurial activities gradually acquired by him also through extortion practices”.
