Beware Italy’s ‘Mafia Entrepreneurs’
Organized crime is expanding its reach by taking control of struggling businesses.
"The Wall of Legality" in Palermo representing personalities who died fighting the mafia.
Photographer: Stefano Montesi - Corbis/Getty Images EuropeThe economic and social crisis that’s driving support for Italy’s hard right ahead of the Sept. 25 elections is making the euro zone’s third-largest economy vulnerable to even deeper infiltration by organized crime.
In a speech in May, one of his last before the collapse of his government, now-caretaker Prime Minister Mario Draghi warned that organized crime had “assumed new but equally fearful forms.” Beyond violence — and the threat of violence — “organized crime has insinuated itself into the boards of companies,” he said. “They pollute the economic fabric from the real estate sector to wholesale supply chains.”