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MAFIA

Spain’s ‘mafia’ eateries spark Italian outrage

A chain of mafia-themed restaurants is winning plenty of fans in Spain but some Italians are less than thrilled about the crime-inspired eateries.

Published: 20 February 2014 12:11 CET
Spain's 'mafia' eateries spark Italian outrage
Spain's La Mafia restaurant chain has plans to open 15 new stores by the end of 2014. Screenshot: YouTube

Spain's La Mafia restaurant chain is going from strength to strength. A rare success story during the country's economic crisis, the franchise-model business has grown to 34 restaurants nationwide since opening in 2000. It even has plans to expand into Portugal.

But the Cosa Nostra-themed pizza and pasta restaurants have raised more than a few eyebrows in the Bel Paese.

One of Italy's top writers on organized crime, Attilio Bolzoni, recently visited two La Mafia eateries in Spain to investigate the success of a business with "a lot of marketing and few scruples".

In an article printed on Tuesday in Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper, Bolzoni highlighted the irony of signing up for La Mafia’s loyalty club while members of various mafia clans carried out their activities in Spanish cities including Malaga, Madrid, Barcelona and Toledo.

"In times of crisis, we are growing," the firm’s public relations manager Pablo Martínez told the Italian journalist.

"The word mafia is a brand that is immediately recognized, it’s a call to attention and everyone remembers it.

"We didn't create it, we just use it."

Martínez stressed that images of violence were prohibited in the firm's restaurants and that the model was the mafia of the movies like The Godfather.

"We apologize to those Italians who feel offended [by the name] but that’s not our intention."

The PR man went on to tell Bolzoni there had been on official complaints about the restaurant chain, "only the occasional blog piece".

"Imagine what would happen in Spain if someone in Italy opened a restaurant dedicated to the [Basque] terrorist group Eta," speculated the resigned-sounding journalist.

"Or what would happen in Germany, if in Rome or Milan they opened up three beer houses with sausages and sauerkraut honouring [Germany’s left-wing terror group] the Red Army Faction?

"But the mafia is the mafia. Everyone is comfortable with them," Bolzoni concluded.

The article caused an immediate reaction in Italy: Marco Anzaldi, an MP with Italy’s Democratic Party (PD), on Tuesday called for an official complaint to be lodged.

"Perhaps we ought to start distributing leaflets outside these Spanish establishments to the families that go in, which show that child victim of the mafia who was strangled and dissolved in acid," Anzaldi was quoted as saying in the UK’s Independent newspaper.

"The mafia isn't what you see in the Coppola film, the mafia is an aberration and we can’t allow it to become Italy’s global brand," the politician added.

SEE ALSO: Sicilian MP blasts the Danes over 'mafia' pizza

George Mills ([email protected])

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MAFIA

‘We mustn’t bow to violence’: Italy’s Covid-hit businesses battle to resist mafia

Mafia hunters warns that the pressure on Italian businesses will only increase as the economic fall-out from Covid-19 and a national lockdown bites.

Published: 23 October 2020 09:57 CEST
'We mustn't bow to violence': Italy's Covid-hit businesses battle to resist mafia
Italian businesses are more vulnerable than ever to mafia infiltration amid the Covid-19 emergency. File photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

Italian entrepreneur Gabriele Menotti Lippolis can still hear the threat ringing in his ears: “Pay up, or we'll slit you from gullet to gizzard.”

He has had to fight off extortion attempts not once, but twice. Speaking about it openly is “not easy”, he told AFP, but increasingly urgent, as the mafia feasts on companies weakened by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I was approached and told to cough up a certain sum,” said Lippolis, who runs an events company, as well as owning restaurants and one of the biggest beach clubs in the southern region of Puglia.

“I didn't say no immediately,” he said about the 2017 incident. “I went to the police station half an hour later to file a complaint.

“They were very difficult moments. I thought of my family, of my colleagues…. The threats were clear,” he added.

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Italy has a long history of extortion by its mafias, from the Cosa Nostra in Sicily to the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Campania, with rackets run from the country's southern beaches to its bustling northern cities.

Lippolis, 43, insists that the only thing to do in such situations is to report it. His aggressor was arrested.

“We mustn't bow to violence or threats, but make people understand that the state is the strongest. Only together will we beat the mafias,” he said.

He is not the only one rebelling: a revolt by shopkeepers in Palermo in Sicily against demands for “pizzo” protection money lead to 20 arrests last week.

But mafia hunters warn that the pressure on businesses will only increase as the economic fall-out from the virus — and nationwide lockdown — is fully felt.

“The lockdown has left many companies in difficulty and brought some to their knees,” said Enzo Ciconte, the author of numerous books on Italian organised crime.

“The mafia try to take advantage of that to infiltrate [businesses]. One of their strategies is to lend money; when it is not returned, they take over the companies,” he said.

Often the rates offered to business owners on the verge of bankruptcy — who are unable to get the necessary bank loans — are exorbitant, sometimes topping 500 percent. The pressure to repay gradually increases, with phone calls or visits.

Once the business owner is cornered, “the mafia may leave him or her in place, but the profits go into their pockets. It's a good technique because it makes police investigations more complicated,” Ciconte said.

READ ALSO: 

Cosa Nostra may be Italy's most famous mafia, thanks to films like The Godfather series, but its efforts to infiltrate the rich, industrial north pale into comparison with its fellow organised crime groups.

The influence of the Sicilian mob waned following a fierce crackdown by the authorities after the 1992 bombings that killed top anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Ciconte said.

Conversely, the wealthy 'Ndrangheta is all powerful in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont, having settled there in the 1950s. It also has a large presence in Veneto and Lazio, along with the Camorra, he added.

Infiltrating a company can be an easy way to launder huge amounts of dirty money from drugs or prostitution.

But it can also prove a cash cow. Experts have warned the mob will be quick to not only infiltrate but also create new companies to benefit from the billions of euros soon to be available under the EU recovery plan.

“The history of organised crime has taught us that whenever there are large flows of money, there is a risk of infiltration,” Marco Valentini, who is Naples' prefect or security chief, told AFP.

“We are certain that there will be attempts, and we are implementing all preventive measures to ward them off.”


Police in Ostia, a hub for the Rome mafia. Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP

Valentini said fraud investigators look closely at who is on company boards — and how that make-up may change — as well as whether there are ties to known crime families or suspicious transfers of holdings or headquarters.

Like his counterparts across the country, this year he is making extensive use of “anti-mafia bans”, administrative measures that blacklist companies from bidding for public contracts.

Italian prefects have issued more than 1,600 such bans since the start of the year, the interior ministry said, some 25 percent compared to 2019, according to the Repubblica daily.

Two southern regions — Campania and Calabria — account for half of them, but the north is also affected, with over 200 slapped on businesses in Emilia-Romagna.

“The most affected sectors are the catering industry — restaurants, pizzerias, bars — and construction and the health sectors,” Valentini said.

Anyone being approached by someone suspicious “must have the courage to report them”, he urged.

READ ALSO: 

Lippolis, who is also head of the Confindustria organisation for young entrepreneurs in Puglia, knows from personal experience how hard it is to find that courage.

“Historically, business owners have been proud creatures, with difficulty confiding in people when problems arise. But that's changing,” he said.

Southern Italy may sometimes have a bad reputation, but he refuses to see it as a “no-man's land” where the mob has free rein, insisting instead that it has “enormous potential” for investments in the region.

Italy may have entrepreneurs ready to speak out and world-class mob hunters on high alert for the risks of increased mafia activity due to the pandemic — but do others?

“I am very concerned that other European countries underestimate the risks, and have not put in place preventive measures,” Ciconte said.

“If an Italian company infiltrated by the mafia moves to work in France or Germany, it's the Italian mafia that emerges stronger.”

By AFP's Céline Cornu

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