The Italian mafia: Crooked in Calabria | The Economist

The Italian mafia: Crooked in Calabria | The Economist: "the ’Ndrangheta, the mafia of Calabria, Italy’s toe, might have achieved greater notoriety. Police and prosecutors began warning as far back as the 1990s that it had become the country’s richest, most dangerous organised-crime syndicate, ahead of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra. Yet although a third group, the Camorra in and around Naples, has become infamous thanks to Roberto Saviano’s best-selling book “Gomorrah”, the ’Ndrangheta remains almost unknown beyond Italy.
Investigators say that the ’Ndrangheta has prospered largely because its links to the Colombian cartels have given it a pre-eminent role in the transatlantic cocaine trade. The man credited with forging those links is Roberto Pannunzi. Last month, it emerged that the Italian authorities had let him slip away—for a second time. He was first arrested in Medellín, Colombia, in 1994, when his captors refused his offer of “a million dollars, right now”. Extradited to Italy, he was let go when his detention order expired. Mr Pannunzi was then rearrested in 2004 and later convicted. But last year, after a heart attack, he was sent from jail to a private clinic near Rome. In March he disappeared. The news was kept quiet for more than three weeks, ostensibly so as not to obstruct his recapture.
On April 26th the state was partly compensated by the arrest of Giovanni Tegano, reputedly the most senior gangster in the region's biggest city, Reggio Calabria. He was a key participant in Italy’s bloodiest-ever mafia war, which claimed the lives of almost 600 people in the six years to 1991. The interior minister, Roberto Maroni, acclaimed “the heaviest blow that could have been inflicted on the ’Ndrangheta.”"