(ANSA) - Rome, October 10 - Italian police on Tuesday arrested 19 people linked to suspected drug trafficking between South America and Italy run by the Calabria-based 'Ndrangheta mafia.

A Roman broker, Mauro De Bernardis, was said to be the ringleader of the gang that allegedly brought cocaine to Italy hidden inside the catering containers of airlines.

The coke was headed for the Italian capital, police said.

'Ndrangheta, Italy's richest and most powerful mafia, controls the European cocaine trade.

'Ndrangheta (from a Greek word meaning 'heroism' or 'virtue') once lived in the twin shadow of Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Camorra in Naples.

While those two syndicates, notably the Sicilians, were feeding off the transatlantic heroin trade through operations like the infamous 'French connection', 'Ndrangheta was only just emerging from its traditional stock-in-trade of kidnappings in the Calabrian highlands.

It has since become a highly sophisticated global network with a chokehold on the European cocaine trade and control over swathes of its home turf where police fear to tread, Italian officials say.

As well as being the richest, 'Ndrangheta is also regarded as the most impenetrable of Italy's mafias, with its close-knit family-based organisation outdoing the Sicilian mafia in its ability to defeat police efforts to turn members into State witnesses.

The European law enforcement agency Europol has identified the 'Ndrangheta mafia as one of the "most threatening" organized crime groups on the global level, due to its "enormous financial might" and "immense corruptive power," with a presence in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, US, Colombia and Australia, where 'Ndrangheta turf wars have gained headlines.

In Europe, 'Ndrangheta really only came into the public eye in 2007, when six clan members were gunned down on the midsummer Ferragosto holiday in the German city of Duisburg in a feud that began as a wedding spat in 1991.

A string of 'Ndrangheta-linked businesses have been seized in the last few years all over northern Italy, and especially in the affluent Lombard belt around Milan, and a Lombardy regional councillor was placed under investigation for buying votes from transplanted clans.

On the Italian Riviera, the town councils of Bordighera and Ventimiglia were dissolved for 'Ndrangheta infiltration in 2011 and 2012, the first non-Calabrian municipalities to be wound up because of such penetration.

In Rome, the Calabrian Mob has laundered money in a string of plum properties, as attested to by recent seizures police say are only the tip of the iceberg.

In November 2013 Grand Hotel Gianicolo, a former monastery converted into a four-star hotel for the Catholic Church's Jubilee in 2000, was seized from Calabrian businessmen linked to the 'Ndrangheta.

It is one of the swankiest properties on the hill, Gianicolo or Janiculum, that affords one of the most breathtaking views over Rome.

Eight years ago a former Dolce Vita-era bar and restaurant on the storied Via Veneto, the Caffe' De Paris, turned out to be in the hands of the Calabrian Mob.

