A tobacconist in the center of Palmi ended up under seizure in the context of an investigation by the Guardia di Finanza which revealed an alleged recycling system of the proceeds of the drug trafficking attributable to organized crime. The provision, urgently ordered by the Reggio Calabria District Anti -Mafia Directorate, led by the Prosecutor who was acting Giuseppe Lombardo, was carried out by the financiers of the Palmi Company.
According to what emerged from the investigations – conducted through stalking, inspections, analysis of current accounts and verification of commercial documentation – The activity would have been fictitiously registered to a figurehead, a employee resident in the Pianigiano municipality who would never have concretely managed the exercise. According to the investigators, the man was a real “wooden head”: he did not attend the tobacconist’s premises, he did not take part in the daily management and did not receive any economic benefit.
To actually manage the activity, always according to the accusation, would have been the family members of two prisoners already sentenced to over 14 years in prison in the context of the“Tre Croci” operationconducted by the same Guardia di Finanza of Reggio Calabria. The two, currently imprisoned, had been involved in a vast international cocaine trafficking managed through the port of Gioia Tauro, taking care of the import of the drug, the recovery of the goods from the port area and, in some cases, the subsequent distribution.
The tobacconist’s, therefore, would have been used to recycle and reuse the proceeds of illegal activity, conveying the financial flows to the family members of the convicted. A system, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, aimed not only at guaranteeing economic advantages to the family of prisoners, but also to concretely facilitate the activities of the ‘Ndrangheta, in particular those of the Pyromalli gangs, Molè, Crea, Alvaro and Gallic, rooted in the Reggio area.
The operation is part of the broader contrast to the illicit assets of criminal organizations, confirming – underline the investigators – of how the local economic fabric remains one of the privileged objectives of organized crime to mask, reinvest and legitimize the illegal capital accumulated through drug trafficking.