In the run-up to Christmas, police in Italy arrested dozens of suspected members of the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra. The arrests confirmed what many in Italy already knew: the mafia’s criminal activities don’t take a festive break.

According to prosecutors, the suspects, arrested between 10 and 13 December in Naples and Caserta, had started to collect the so-called “Christmas pizzo” from shopkeepers – money paid to avoid a smashed window, a mysterious fire or a bomb under their car.

Around the holiday season, mafia bosses often increase their business, commission murders, plan strategies for the new year, and even kill.

On Christmas Day last year, Marcello Bruzzese, 51, the brother of a former mafia member who turned supergrass, was fatally shot by two hooded men, a killing ordered by a clan of the powerful Calabrian mafia, the ’Ndrangheta. According to the police, the killers, who were wearing balaclavas, waited near the victim’s flat in the historic centre of Pesaro, in the Italian region of Le Marche, and fired at least 20 shots at him.

The list of men killed by the mafia at Christmas is long and full of symbolism. It is common for the murder of a police officer, an enemy, or someone else loathed by the organisation to serve as a macabre Christmas gift.

Giuseppe Montalto, a penitentiary police agent in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison, which has held top mafia bosses over the years, was killed on the evening of 23 December 1995 by a mafia hitman while he was getting into his car as his wife and baby daughter looked on. The investigation confirmed that Montalto’s murder was intended as a Christmas present for the bosses locked up in Ucciardone under Italy’s “hard prison” rule, a sort of solitary confinement.

A few months earlier, Montalto had intercepted a message a boss had written on a piece of paper to be delivered to another mobster. He immediately turned it in to his superiors. A former mafioso, Francesco Milazzo, confessed to judges that the mafia had ordered that killing “to give a Christmas gift to friends who were in prison”.

The Christmas period can also be an occasion to make peace with other clans and to settle disputes among mafia members.

Last November, district attorneys in Catania disclosed specific files regarding an investigation in which another mafioso-turned-supergrass, Francesco Squillaci, revealed that when word got out that the brutal war between the Santapaola and Ercolano clans had started after an unintended murder, rival bosses – at Christmas 2007 – held a meeting in a cell in the Bicocca prison to share their yuletide meal. On that occasion the mobsters put an end to a bloody dispute that had plagued the Sicilian city.

“It is not rare for mafiosi, tied to tradition as they are, to spend Christmas with fellow mafia brothers,” according to a former anti-mafia prosecutor, Sergio Lari, who for more than 10 years was head of the Palermo anti-mafia directorate. “The most powerful Palermo godfathers used to do it every year. They’d agree to meet in the home of a boss to exchange holiday greetings and to plan the new year’s criminal strategies.”

In 1991, during Christmas dinner, the head of the Sicilian mafia, Totò Riina, considered one of the most ruthless bosses in Mafia history, after raising a glass of champagne with fellow mafiosi, decided that the time had come to declare war on “the mafia’s enemies”.

“In that precise moment the mafia planned the assassination of the legendary anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino,” said Lari.

There is another reason why Christmas is so “special” to mafiosi: cash. People spend more money at Christmas on presents, decorations and dinners, and the mafia is always waiting to seize the opportunity. The mafia’s requests for protection money, known as the pizzo, become more insistent during the holidays.

“Paying the pizzo at Christmas has now become standard criminal practice in Palermo,” Salvo Caradonna, lawyer for the Addiopizzo association (“Goodbye protection money”), said. Addiopizzo brings together shopkeepers who are committed to refusing to pay the protection money. “At Christmas, many business owners take in more money, and Cosa Nostra, beginning in late November, customarily visits shop owners to remind them that Christmas is around the corner and they’ll soon have to ‘set right’ their payments. This is why Addiopizzo launches several campaigns in December, to sensitise the shop owners to rebel.”

However, the mafia Christmas tales don’t always have happy endings for the mobsters. On Christmas evening in 2015, officers from thecarabinieri burst into the home of the Palermo boss Mariano Marchese. The mobster had donned a Santa suit and was handing out gifts to his grandchildren. In his suit, he was able to evade capture through a back door. On the run for a few months, he was arrested in March 2016 and died in prison a few weeks later.