Huge Cocaine Haul Found at Italian Port Built by the Mafia

Police have broken up a lucrative cocaine smuggling network involving corrupt workers at a port in southern Italy that was built with mafia cash. 

On Thursday, around 300 officers carried out coordinated raids across Italy to arrest 36 people involved in smuggling multiple tons of cocaine from South America to the port of Gioia Tauro in Calabria. 

The two-year investigation – led by the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial crime and smuggling police force – resulted in the seizure of £6 million in criminal assets and four tons of cocaine. This represents over a quarter of the 14 tons of drug that entered Italy via the Mediterranean sea last year. 

The arrests included 14 dock workers, a customs official, road hauliers, field coordinators who managed the corrupt dock workers, and eight gangsters alleged to have overseen the operation, all members of the ‘Ndrangheta clan, the powerful Calabrian mafia group that funded and carried out part of the building of the port in the 1990s. 

Also accused in the wider investigation is Raffaele Imperiale, an alleged kingpin of the Naples-based Camorra mafia. He is already serving eight years for drug trafficking in Italy after being arrested last year and extradited from Dubai. The 48-year-old, who became famous after two originals by the Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh were found in the basement of his Naples home after going missing for 14 years, is newly accused of brokering the smuggling of two tons of cocaine hidden in bananas from Colombia to Gioia Tauro in March last year.

Using undercover officers and accessing encrypted phone conversations, investigators said that one 300kg shipment of cocaine smuggled in a container on the MSC Adelaide from Santos, Brazil, was handled by the corrupt customs officer who falsified the results of an x-ray scan to make it appear there was no cocaine inside. For this he was paid €261,000, three percent of the €8.7 million value of the cocaine. 

Corrupt dock workers then moved the ‘hot’ containers to an unloading area in the port, where the cocaine was transferred to a second container, which was then passed onto what police allege was a corrupt road haulier company to be taken out of the port for distribution by the mafia. For each shipment the gang paid a total of between 8 and 18 percent of its value to the dock workers, truck drivers and others who made up the logistics team. 

“This case shows how the logistics of cocaine importation works when done by ‘Ndrangheta clans at the core of ‘Ndrangheta territory,” said Anna Sergi, a criminology and organised crime professor at the University of Essex who specialises in the Calabrian mafia. “Cooperation at this level is only possible when gains are so high. 

“It is alleged Imperiale [the Comorra kingpin] provided local ‘Ndrangheta brokers with the contacts and the reputation for this operation. Having access to Imperiale's network, this group operated at the highest levels of the supply chain,” said Sergi, author of Chasing the Mafia: 'Ndrangheta, Memories and Journeys.  

Jari Liukku, head of the European Serious and Organised Crime Centre at Europol, which helped with the investigation, said: “This investigation uncovered how the ‘Ndrangheta is using corruption to enable its criminal activity and undermine law enforcement’s efforts. 

“Europol sees the use of corruption, in the private or the public sector, as a major enabler of organised crime. We are very pleased to have joined forces with the Italian Guardia di Finanza to support them in fighting large-scale drug trafficking as well as corruption at an EU entry point.”