Milan – The clans are betting on the Pnrr and the Winter Games Milan-Cortina, but also on matches that are only apparently less relevant, in the risk of a “mafia economy which has expanded its presence” in Lombardy, going beyond sectors that have always been at risk of infiltration such as construction, catering and logistics, diversifying its interests. They are aiming for real estate, the management of pharmacies and health services. And so amateur sportas emerged from the investigation by the DDA which in 2022 led to the preventive seizure of eight padel courts worth approximately 700 thousand euros, inside a municipal sports center in Milan. The alarm, in the metropolitan city of Milan, also concerns “public investments or investments of public origin which will be managed by formally private entities and which will tend to escape any type of public control”.
The evolution ofmafia economy in Lombardy is told by the observatory’s latest research Cross of the Milan State University and the CGIL, conducted by Nando dalla Chiesa and Andrea Carnì. The. is confirmed in the territory dominance of the ‘Ndrangheta compared to other organizations, with a “new activism” of Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, in a substantial coexistence with foreign crime, with non-belligerence pacts to do business in silence. One develops “low intensity violence”, demonstrated by an increase in the so-called spy crimes, such as arson and damage, in almost all the Lombardy provinces.
“An economy that loses pieces of industry one after another, opening up relentlessly to new leisure services, from catering to wellness to entertainment, becomes physiologically vulnerable to subjects who are perhaps poorly educated but have interposed holders of considerable liquidity”, analyzes Nando from the Church. The problem “appears not so much to be the new mafia conquest of already existing sectors but the massive diffusion of mafia capital in the sectors experiencing the most rapid and uncontrolled proliferation, which do not require high professional standards”.
The “Milan2 case is emblematic, with the infiltrations in padel and the increase in reports of bars and restaurants at the center of whirlwind ownership changes and continuous renovation work, a tool for laundering money. Then there is logistics, which ended up at the center of a long series of investigations by the Milan Prosecutor’s Office into gangmastering and labor exploitation. “The economic scenario in which this phenomenon is inserted is a competitive dynamic without rules – underlines the general secretary of the CGIL of Milan, Luca Stanzione – which has favored the emergence of illegal phenomena and also mafia phenomena”.
Nando dalla Chiesa talks about one “mafia ubiquity”, because “the phenomenon can be encountered in almost all areas of the economy”. In this criminal geography, Milan is the economic heart, but no province is spared from a phenomenon that is still “underestimated and underestimated”. Como and Varese, according to the research, stand out for “the clans’ ability to take root and take advantage of their proximity to the border”. Spaces of conquest have been created in the Lake Garda area, we are witnessing a “territorial rise” from Emilia Romagna towards South-East Lombardy. The research also includes an interview with an employee Sparkling winehistoric soft drinks producer in the Como area who in 2022 ended up in judicial administration due to infiltration by the ‘Ndrangheta: “There wasn’t anything legitimate in that environment (…) There was something underneath”.
