Mafia and economic crises!

                            Mafia and economic crises...keep working on the society!!!

Economic crises are always thought to generate losses and to make common people poorer and poorer. Neverthless, nobody could hide that somebody is winning now!

It's well-known that the untouchable power -the organized crime- has tightened its grip on the Italian economy during the economic crisis, making the Mafia the country’s biggest “bank” and gaining the control of the financial system.

Old-style gangsters handing out cash in bars have been replaced by apparently respectable bankers or lawyers . The Sicilian Mafia can be considered a "winning model" of organized crime due to its complexity and long-standing role in society, but care must be taken against stereotypes and we have to be aware of its power thanks to the political links.

The mafia's strength lies in its capacity to be both local and international, in the sense that it grew to a worldwide level without losing its roots in Sicilian society. In the last few decades the Sicilian Mafia has grown on the national and international level: it has trafficked heroin with the Corso-Marsigliesi, with Turkish, Middle East and Asiatic clans and now deals cocaine with the Latin American Cartels. Today's society produces criminality because of some of its characteristics, such as the ties of legal and illegal economies and the connection between politics and crime. According to Marco Venturi, president of Confesercenti, which prepared the report <Criminality's Grip On Business> , “organised crime is the biggest earner in Italy, with a turnover of more £100 billion a year (and) a profit of around £116 billion a year, a figure equivalent to seven per cent of the country’s GDP”. Rome was the prime city targeted by organised crime gangs, with the Sicilian Mafia, Naples Camorra, Calabrian N’drangheta and the Sacra Corona Unita from the Puglia region all having an active ‘financial interest’ in the capital city. Neverthless, the actual judicial system is greatly inadequate, the first general Italian law, the so called Rognoni-La Torre Law, was approved on September 13, 1982, after the assassination of General-Prefect Dalla Chiesa and for the first time defined mafia as a specific type of organized crime. According to article 416 bis, introduced by the new law,“the organization is of the mafia type when its components use intimidation, subjection and, consequencially, silence, to commit crimes, directly or indirectly acquire the management or the control of businesses, concessions, authorizations, public contracts and public services to obtain either unjust profits or advantages for themselves or others”. Therefore, the main concern was the crime of laundering money of illecit origin, that was introduced in the Italian legal system with art. 648 bis of the Penal Code in 1978 and it was limited to the profits obtained from aggravated robbery, aggravated extortion and kidnapping for extortion .In 1993 a new regulation extended the crime of money laundering to any case of reinvestment of profits obtained from any type of crime and not only the four crimes covered by the previous laws. The actual European scheme, as regards measures against laundering, is quite confused as well. Regarding the extension of laundering to all grave crimes, such a disposition has not been accepted by the member States and all excluded fiscal evasion, therefore in some countries this legislation isn't applied and tax havens or fiscal paradises are guaranteed. In this scenario what could be done... the adoption of law enforcement measures is auspicable,but are they really effective??? First of all, we should keep working on the society, people have to be aware of what happens and report anything that doesn’t seem right. They have to speak out with a loud voice to leave out the wall of silence, that has always made the mafia- groups powerful and this situation can no longer be accepted!