Italian court seizes £1.1 billion from Mafia front-man

AT £1.1 BILLION, the seizure of Mafia assets, including energy companies, is the biggest in ­Italy’s history.

A court in the Sicilian town of Trapani yesterday ordered the confiscation of €1.3bn worth of companies, properties and luxury goods, first seized in 2010 from Vito Nicastri, a 57-year-old businessman deemed to be a front-man for the island’s mafia, known as Cosa Nostra. Police and magistrates say Nicastri, once dubbed the “Lord of the Wind” because of his vast wind-farm holdings, invested money made from extortion, drug sales and other illicit activities for Matteo Messina Denaro, said to be Cosa Nostra’s boss of bosses.

“We have hit the heart of the grey area of Cosa Nostra,” investigators said in a statement.

“Matteo Messina Denaro is ­behind many businessmen considered above suspicion who manage and take care of the ­assets of the real boss of Cosa Nostra,” Ivan Lo Bello, vice-chairman of business lobby Confindustria, said. “To defeat the mafia, the fight against money laundering is fundamental.”

Most of the seized assets were located in Sicily and in southern Calabria, home of the Cosa Nostra’s sister crime organisation, the ‘Ndrangheta.

The haul included 43 companies, 98 properties and even cars and boats, police said. Messina Denaro, 50, was once known as the “Playboy Boss” because of his fondness for fast cars, women and gold watches. He has been on the run since 1993.

Thanks to his contacts in the criminal underworld, Nicastri went from being an electrician to one of Italy’s biggest investors in alternative energy, a sector that enjoyed huge public incentives until last year.

Investigators said the businessman from Alcamo, in western Sicily, “maintained constant relations with members of Cosa Nostra” in the provinces of Catania, Messina and Palermo, as well as having contacts with the ‘Ndrangheta. This relationship allegedly “facilitated his transformation from an electrician into a businessman specialising in the production of electricity from renewable sources, giving him a prominent position in the south [of Italy]”.

In a “tumultuous business dynamic”, they added, Nicastri had “relations” with companies in Luxembourg, Denmark and Spain.

A wave of arrests over recent years have closed the net around Messina Denaro, one of the world’s ten most-wanted men, according to Interpol.

In 2011, the hunt kicked up a gear when police issued a new identikit picture of him.

A year previously they were able to reconstruct his DNA.

Messina Denaro built up his power base in his native Trapani, in western Sicily, before beating Palermo chieftains to become Mob kingpin after “boss of bosses” Bernardo Provenzano was captured in April 2006.

According to Italian news agency Ansa, his position at the top of Cosa Nostra was assured with the November 2007 arrest of Palermo boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo, a veteran mafia chieftain who had appeared to be vying with the younger man for control of the local crime syndicate. Taken together, Italy’s main crime groups – the Cosa Nostra, ‘Ndrangheta, and the Camorra from the southern city of Naples – would have an annual turnover of €116bn, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, more than the annual sales of Italy’s biggest company, oil giant Eni.