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Italy’s Nigerian mafia hit by major police raid

Italian police arrested 19 suspected members of a Nigerian mob on Thursday, including the leaders of a clan which forged alliances with other mafias and violently punished any who rebelled.

Italy's Nigerian mafia hit by major police raid
Police and soldiers outside the Italian National Anti-Mafia Services (DNA) headquarters. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

In an operation dubbed “Burning Flame”, coordinated by police in Bologna and Turin, over 300 officers carried out arrests and searches in nine cities across northern Italy, from Bergamo to Modena, Parma and Ravenna.

A two-year probe — aided significantly by an insider who fed details to investigators — “has allowed us to destroy much of what, within the Nigerian community, is known as the 'Maphite' cult,” police said in a statement.

It said the acronym stood for Maximum Academic Performance Highly Intellectuals Train Executioner.
“Among those arrested were those who held a leading role within the criminal organization.

READ ALSO: Italy's Salvini in trouble for tweet on 'Nigerian mafia'

“Those who decided on the new initiations, who ran the prostitution rings, who dominated by force the other criminal organisations, who ran the drug trade in the city squares,” it said.

Police said the Nigerian mob used “urban guerrilla warfare which continued for days at a time” to maintain territorial control.

The 'cult' was just one of a series of foreign organised crime groups which had adopted Italian mafia codes, police said.

While they have much in common, they are independently structured and “in strong rivalry with each other”, it added.

'Green bible'

Maphite was founded back in the 1980s – along with other Nigerian gangs such as the Black Axe and the Vikings – before developing into a full-blown organised crime group in the 1990s, police said.

It adopted the moniker Green Circuit Association to camouflage its international expansion and is now widespread in many countries around the world.

The top mobsters are known in gang lingo as the Main Chief, Deputy Don, Checker (the treasurer) and Fire — who is in charge of giving orders, while an executive committee carries them out.

READ ALSO: Italy's 'Ndrangheta mafia 'on all continents' and still growing

Members have to follow strict rules of conduct laid out in the so-called “Green bible”, kept safe by the leader.

“New members are initiated following precise rituals, and treason is met with corporal or lethal punishment,” police said.

Maphite maintains close ties to Nigeria, so that those who cross it fear retaliation not just in Italy but there too, police said.

Paolo Borgna, deputy prosecutor in Turin, said the foreign mafias “are born and develop by giving protection to their countrymen and developing a kind of parallel, ruthless and criminal justice”.
“It is a characteristic shared by all mafias: protection is offered, 

compensation is requested, protection is imposed and, finally, those who do  not accept it are punished,” he told journalists at a press conference.

He said Maphite had a common fund which the newly-affiliated paid into when they joined.

“It's not a refined mafia… but not one to be underestimated. It must be contained now,” he added.

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CRIME

Italy has most recovery fund fraud cases in EU, report finds

Italy is conducting more investigations into alleged fraud of funds from the EU post-Covid fund and has higher estimated losses than any other country, the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) said.

Italy has most recovery fund fraud cases in EU, report finds

The EPPO reportedly placed Italy under special surveillance measures following findings that 179 out of a total of 206 investigations into alleged fraud of funds through the NextGenerationEU programme were in Italy, news agency Ansa reported.

Overall, Italy also had the highest amount of estimated damage to the EU budget related to active investigations into alleged fraud and financial wrongdoing of all types, the EPPO said in its annual report published on Friday.

The findings were published after a major international police investigation into fraud of EU recovery funds on Thursday, in which police seized 600 million euros’ worth of assets, including luxury villas and supercars, in northern Italy.

The European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, established to help countries bounce back from the economic blow dealt by the Covid pandemic, is worth more than 800 billion euros, financed in large part through common EU borrowing.

READ ALSO: ‘It would be a disaster’: Is Italy at risk of losing EU recovery funds?

Italy has been the largest beneficiary, awarded 194.4 billion euros through a combination of grants and loans – but there have long been warnings from law enforcement that Covid recovery funding would be targeted by organised crime groups.

2023 was reportedly the first year in which EU financial bodies had conducted audits into the use of funds under the NextGenerationEU program, of which the Recovery Fund is part.

The EPPO said that there were a total of 618 active investigations into alleged fraud cases in Italy at the end of 2023, worth 7.38 billion euros, including 5.22 billion euros from VAT fraud alone.

At the end of 2023, the EPPO had a total of 1,927 investigations open, with an overall estimated damage to the EU budget of 19.2 billion euros.

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