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Roundup: Italian police target at leading mafia clans in south region

Xinhua, March 15, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Italian police Tuesday carried out an anti-mafia operation against the "Ndrangheta mob in Reggio Calabria, the capital city of the southern Calabria region," local media reported.

Properties and commercial assets worth about 10 million euros (11 million U.S. dollars) were seized in the operation, including several cafe shops, a gas station, a car dealer and some fish shops.

At least 19 arrest warrants were issued against alleged members and leaders of major mafia clans ruling Reggio Calabria, including the most powerful De Stefano family, the Ansa news agency said.

The arrested were respectively charged with having external links with mafia, extortion and other mafia-related crimes.

Among the netted people was Giorgio De Stefano, a 68-year- old lawyer and the alleged boss of the crime family. He served three-and-a-half years in jail recently for external mafia links.

De Stefano would have kept running his clan even when he was behind the bars, and was proved capable "to develop all the (family) strategies, and identify the most lucrative criminal activities with a typically managerial approach," prosecutors told a press conference.

Other clans targeted in the operation were the Rosmini, the Franco, the Serraino and the Araniti families. All of them historically rooted in Reggio Calabria and allied with the De Stefanos.

The five crimes families have exerted a coercive and comprehensive control over the city's economy for long, according to investigators.

Tuesday's operation was ordered by prosecutors of the Anti-Mafia District Directorate in Reggio Calabria, and carried out by 250 members of the police flying squad, the authorities said.

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano welcomed the operation and congratulated prosecutors and the police on the "brilliant successes" against crime syndicates in the country.

In another operation on Tuesday, 31 people were arrested in the southeastern Puglia region, and charged with mafia association, extortion and violence. Endit