Italy seizes gold, luxury villas and cash tied to Sicilian Mafia drug-trafficking gains
Authorities say the seizure targets a laundering network that reinvested drug money through luxury resorts, bank accounts and companies across Europe and offshore hubs.
- Italian police seized more than 200 million euros in assets linked to late Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, targeting illicit wealth accumulated by the notorious leader of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra syndicate.
- Messina Denaro, head of Sicily's Castelvetrano clan, evaded authorities for 30 years before his 2023 arrest and died in prison after conviction for involvement in 1992 anti-Mafia judge murders.
- Money was "reintroduced into the legal economy" through 22 properties, including "genuine luxury resorts located between Marbella, Benahavis and Puerto Banus" in Spain's Costa del Sol, police said.
- Italy's top anti-mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, hailed the operation as of "great strategic importance," noting the seizures help "delay and hinder" Cosa Nostra's attempts to rebuild its structure.
- Authorities deployed planes, drones, and thermal scanners "to detect concealed spaces and hidden cavities" during the investigation, with three individuals arrested in connection with the probe.
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85 Articles
RECIT - The Antimafia Directorate of Palermo and the Italian financial police announced on Thursday 28 May that they had seized more than 200 million euros linked to Matteo Messina Denaro, a Sicilian mafia who died in 2023. He had built a financial empire during his 30 years of cavalry.
Matteo Messina Denaro accumulated wealth in several tax havens.
The maxi operation of the Dda of Palermo has re-emerged an accumulated patrimony with the narcotrafficking and its proceeds from at least the eighties.There were the money of the drugs started from Morocco, those of the offshore companies, those that turned in the tax havens. And there was above all the great ghost of Matteo Messina Money, the godfather for invisible years that has transformed Ours into an international holding that, as the Publ…
Italy Seizes $230M of Riches Tied to Late Mafia Boss
Italian authorities have seized more than $230 million in assets linked to the late mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro's drug trafficking network, per the AP . Anti-mafia prosecutors on Thursday described the move as a blow to the Sicilian Mafia's attempts to rebuild its financial power. The seizures included more than...
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