A historic mafia, which year after year tries to make the leap in quality, refining strategies, feeding on drug trafficking and extortion and infiltrating public procurement and Pnrr funds. The latest report from the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate, relating to the first half of 2023 (therefore not current), outlines a division of Puglia between the four criminal organisations, parceled out between clans in their respective areas of influence (which do not disdain expansion even outside the region ), and attractive from several points of view.
Minors
One of the elements that the different organizations have in common, with their own rules and dynamics, is the use of minors to carry out robberies or even bloody acts. This is demonstrated by the arrests of 9 May 2023 in San Severo, against 3 minors for aggravated robbery. Also in Foggia, on 17 March 2023 the Carabinieri arrested three other minors for attempted murder aggravated by the illegal possession of weapons and aggravated robbery. One of those arrested was a relative of a historic and top exponent of the Foggia Society, head of the Sinesi-Francavilla mafia battery. A minor was also among the 10 arrested on May 26, 2023, in Francavilla Fontana, Oria and San Pietro Vernotico for drug trafficking.
“Legal” business
The numerous investigations included in the report confirm the growing trend that sees mafia organizations wearing the role of entrepreneurs, infiltrating (only apparently) legitimate businesses. In all that, depending on what the territory, morphology and economy offers, can represent a source of supply, but above all of laundering ‘dirty’ money. The organized crime of the capital, for example, through increasingly complex forms of money laundering, proves “capable of insinuating itself into the healthy economic fabric, also making use of compliant professionals – the experts report – and sometimes infiltrating the local institutional apparatus”.
In the north of Bari, the leaders of the Annacondia clan and those of the Fiore-Risoli group of Bari, falling within the orbit of the Parisi-Palermiti clan, in agreement between themselves, would have divided the most economically attractive area of Trani (the tourist and of the nightlife in Porto and Castello), so that each could develop their criminal activities unchallenged both in illicit (extortion, money laundering, self-laundering) and legitimate (entrepreneurial activities in the catering and funeral services) sectors.
Public procurement
In the period under review, no accesses to public works construction sites were recorded by the investigative forces, but Puglia is in second place (after Campania and before Calabria and Sicily) among the territories of origin of the main mafia-type criminal organizations , in which more financial operations for the purpose of money laundering were discovered: 28,576, for an amount of 825 million 471 thousand euros.
