Paul Kirby
Europe digital editor
When anti-mafia police swooped on the Sicilian mob on Tuesday, their main aim was to stop them regrouping and creating a new governing body or cupola.
But what has emerged from their wide-ranging investigation is an organised crime group having to adapt to modern realities and displaying a nostalgia for the loftier ambitions of the past.
They don’t produce mobsters like they used to, Giancarlo Romano told an associate in a wiretapped conversation before he was shot dead a year ago.
Despite its evident yearning for crimes of the past, the Mafia in Sicily is still a force to be reckoned with, warns anti-mafia prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia: “Cosa nostra is alive and present.”
Investigators have revealed that the new generation of gang bosses have taken to using encrypted mobile phones and thousands of short-life micro-sim cards smuggled into prisons.
This way they sought to avoid being eavesdropped as they focused their activities on drug crime, money-laundering and online gambling.
Sicily’s Cosa Nostra has even started working with other gangs, including the notorious and far larger ‘Ndrangheta in mainland Italy.
Of the 181 arrest warrants served on suspected Sicilian gangsters across four districts of the capital Palermo, 33 were for convicted figures already in jail.
National anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Melillo said that, despite all the crackdowns, the high-security prison system was at the mercy of the mob.
The inquiry revealed that one gangster had been able to watch a beating he had ordered from inside jail in real time via video-link.
The Mafia became supremely confident about the encrypted messaging platform it was using, which featured text-messages, voice notes and images.
But a year ago a bug installed in the home of one gangster recorded him and another man complaining about the connection going down on an encrypted chat. As they tried to restore the link, the names of several Mafia figures were mentioned out loud.
Sicily’s authorities heard every word.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni praised the operation by Italy’s Carabinieri military police and promised that the fight against the Mafia “has not stopped and will not stop”.
Half of those arrested are in their 20s and 30s.
In late 2023, Giancarlo Romano, considered an up-and-coming Mafia figure in the Brancaccio area in the heart of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, was recorded complaining about the decline of the mob and poor quality of new recruits.
“The level is low, today they arrest someone and if he becomes a turncoat they arrest another… wretched low-level,” he was quoted as saying over his wiretapped phone.
He was overheard telling an aspiring mafioso to go to school, meet doctors and lawyers, and learn lessons from watching The Godfather trilogy of films about the fictional Corleone gangster family.
Today’s Mafia was satisfied with selling small bars of hashish while others were now moving in, he complained: “Back in the day, those people who unfortunately ended up in jail for life… they did it because a shipload of hash was supposed to arrive.”
Romano was killed and his associate wounded in February 2024, in an attack apparently linked to online gambling extortion. That murder led authorities to make further arrests within Romano’s branch of the Mafia.
Cosa nostra is a shadow of the notorious organised crime mob it once was, brought down by a wave of campaigns by authorities in the past 30 years.
But despite the drive for a more modernised mob, many of the old practices and codes remain.
“Cosa nostra is like marriage. You are married to this wife and you stay with her all your life,” one mafioso was overheard saying.
The clear implication was there was no leaving the Cosa nostra.
