Police in Italy and Germany on Wednesday arrested 37 Sicilian mafia suspects in an operation against its Rinzivillo clan, seizing over 11 million euros of assets.
Police held 35 people in Italy, in Sicily, in the central Lazio region, and in the northern Lombardy, Piedmont and Emilia Romagna regions, Il Giornale della Sicilia daily said, citing police.
Among the suspects arrested was 57-year-old clan boss Salvatore Rinzivillo, who had lived in Rome since his release from jail in 2013, the daily reported.
Those arrested included two Carabinieri police officers accused of hacking police databases and passing confidential information to the Rinzivillo clan, one of whom also allegedly planned to extort money from the owner of a bar on Rome's famous Via Veneto, the daily said.
Also targeted by the operation was a Rome-based lawyer, Giandomenico D’Ambra, who faces charges of mafia association, according to the paper.
The other two arrests were made in unspecified locations in Germany, the Giornale della Sicilia said.
The bust came after a "complex" probe coordinated by Italy's national anti-mafia and anti-terrorism directorate, which involved anti-mafia prosecutors in Rome and Caltanissetta, according to police.
The investigation uncovered the Gela-based Rinzivillos' operations in Rome, northern Italy and in Germany, where the clan was building a drug trafficking racket and was in contact with notorious Calabrian mafia fugitive Antonio Strangio, Giornale della Sicilia reported.
An Italian court jailed Strangio for life in absentia for the 2007 gangland-style massacre of six people outside a pizzeria he owned in the western German city of Duisburg, an attack that underlined the Calabrian mafia's international reach.
Strangio was one of eight people convicted over the Duisburg massacre and given Italy's stiffest sentence for their roles in a longstanding and violent feud between the Calabrian mafia's Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari-Romeo clans.
