ROME — The mafia loves a crisis.

Throughout their 150-year history in the south of Italy, the country’s organized crime syndicates have turned a profit from emergencies such as earthquakes and cholera outbreaks by sourcing agricultural workers, fixing construction contracts or siphoning off funds meant for city sanitation.

During the decade-long economic crisis in Italy, mafia groups laundered their vast profits from drug trafficking by investing in and gaining control of troubled businesses, especially in the north.

The coronavirus epidemic sweeping across Europe is providing the mafia with another profitable business opportunity — and not just in Italy.

Strict national lockdowns, police checks and grounded flights have crippled significant revenue streams — including prostitution, drug trafficking and extortion — but predatory criminal organizations are poised to capitalize on what comes next.

The mafia has a specific playbook for profiting from moments of crisis.

As Europe looks to rebuild and reinvest in its economy, the mafia’s tried-and-tested method of infiltrating legitimate private businesses to take advantage of weaknesses in a ravaged economy could prove incredibly lucrative.

“The virus has demonstrated that it doesn’t respect frontiers, and the mafia has demonstrated that it doesn’t either,” said General Giuseppe Governale, head of Italy’s Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate (DIA), an FBI-style multiforce agency. “It is like water, it moves wherever there is a gap.”

With all of Europe affected by the outbreak — and lockdowns starting to bite economically — criminal activity is likely to spike across the bloc in the months ahead, officials warn.

“There is no [EU] country that is exempt from this problem,” said Sabrina Pignedoli, an MEP from Italy’s 5Star Movement, who recently organized an event in the European Parliament to increase awareness of mafia activity in Europe. Russian and Albanian mafias can also pose a risk, she said. “It’s not just an Italian issue.”

'The method'

The mafia has a specific playbook for profiting from moments of crisis.

Italy’s crime syndicates, especially the ’Ndrangheta, which controls much of Europe’s lucrative cocaine trade, will be looking to offer liquidity to troubled companies in exchange for shares, said Maurizio De Lucia, the chief prosecutor in the Sicilian city of Messina.

“The mafia offers a loan to a business owner who needs money. He knows who he is dealing with but thinks he can manage the situation. He is mistaken,” said De Lucia, describing what he called “the method.”

The mafia typically then asks the business owner to hire someone, a favor the owner can hardly refuse. “This person then starts to give orders, changing products or arranging a renovation,” said De Lucia. “The owner protests, saying it is his company. But he is told, ‘Not anymore.’”

The owner is turned into a prestanome, or front man, for the mafia, which benefits from his relationship with the banks, and his books.

Italy's police central crime directive (DAC) has warned forces to expect aggressive moves into businesses in the agro-food supply chain, health infrastructure, medical supplies and the hotel and restaurant sector. Mafia groups are also increasingly looking to economies with high growth rates, such as Eastern Europe. Tax havens and EU countries that are less attentive to money laundering could also become targets, said Pignedoli, the 5Stars MEP.

The mafia has already infiltrated the German economy and has a strong foothold in Spain, mainly in hotels and tourism, according to Pignedoli. There have also been infiltrations in France and Belgium.

Over the past decade, the Italian mafia has developed expertise in siphoning off EU funds tagged for structural works — something that is likely to come in useful as governments inject streams of cash into Europe’s crippled economies for reconstruction.

The ’Ndrangheta in particular has exported this know-how to other European countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, according to Pignedoli. Journalist Ján Kuciak was murdered while investigating the phenomenon in Slovakia in 2018.

“They will work anywhere where there is a capacity to corrupt officials, who will fall into the trap, either because they are ingénues or willing to be corrupted,” said Governale, Italy’s anti-mafia chief.

The trade of counterfeit or substandard masks, gloves and pharmaceuticals is “booming” in the pandemic economy, Europol found.

Massive investment in infrastructure to boost the economy will also provide work for traditional mobster front businesses such as construction, cement manufacturing and haulage.

Although checks on public tenders are designed to root out criminal enterprises, the large scale of planned investments in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic could mean that these processes are rushed and less likely to detect illegitimate businesses, Governale said.

New activities

Already, mafia groups have started to work around the lockdown conditions that have put more police on the streets and affected international trade and travel.

Some groups are risking home drug deliveries to reach clients, while others sell discreetly from the queues outside supermarkets or find alternative spaces including churches, according to a Cosa Nostra insider.

Prices have increased and demand remains undented. “People always find money for drugs,” the source said.

Racketeering has been hit hard by the closure of many shops and all bars and restaurants. But on their own territory, mafia groups have been keen to show understanding.

They apply “the blacksmith principle,” said Governale. “There are times to endure and times to strike. Right now they need to be like an anvil and endure and wait for better times, but when it comes to the reconstruction they become the hammer and strike again and again.”

Some criminal groups are also developing new activities to exploit the emergency, according to a report by Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency.

The trade of counterfeit or substandard masks, gloves and pharmaceuticals is “booming” in the pandemic economy, it found. Last month, a transnational operation by the agency led to 121 arrests and the seizure of €13 million in potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals and 34,000 counterfeit surgical masks.

The agency also reported burglaries in multiple EU states that used identical modus operandi: perpetrators impersonating law enforcement or health care officials offering information material, hygiene products or “corona tests.”

Filling the gap

In the mafia heartlands of southern Italy, where many work off the books without paying taxes, police fear that poverty, exacerbated by the lockdown, could provide fertile ground for the recruiting of new mafia lieutenants.

What appeared to be organized looting in supermarkets in Sicily last week could be a harbinger of more social unrest, officials warned. To combat this, Pignedoli’s 5Star Movement has called for state handouts for all those without any income.

Across Europe, too, business leaders are increasingly calling on governments to intervene. States should put liquidity in the system and guarantee banks so that they can lend to companies that have been hard-hit by the epidemic, they say.

“The state must stand with those in difficulty or someone else will,” said Governale. “The mafia becomes powerful when the state is absent. It is like the principle of communicating vessels — if the state is not present the space will be filled by someone else.”

Like the virus itself, the uptick in criminal activity across the bloc is likely to require a Europe-wide remedy.

But effective responses may be limited by a lack of specific anti-mafia legislation in individual states and tax havens. In Germany, for example, there is no cash payment limit. Lack of awareness in countries such as the Netherlands has allowed some sectors, including horticulture, to be infiltrated by the ’Ndrangheta, which exploits it for money laundering and concealing shipments of drugs. Although Dutch authorities have since increased judicial cooperation with other countries, strong anti-mafia legislation is still missing.

At the moment, criminal organizations have one major advantage: distracted leaders consumed by the immediate health risks of the outbreak.

“For now, organized crime is not among the [European] Commission priorities,” said Pignedoli.