"Today, what we are seeing is this: organized crime, mafias, drug trafficking, dirty money, weapons, and this undoubtedly is going to rapidly increase the levels of criminality," said Vladimir Peña, secretary of the interior for Santa Cruz Department.
"Wiretaps are now the most important tool against all crimes: corruption, Mafia, terrorism, white-collar crime," said Armando Spataro, a veteran counterterrorism prosecutor in Milan.
Ms. Milgram described the smuggling operation as a combination of what she called "old-school organized crime, the Mafia, and new-school organized crime, gangs".
Not only does the UK have no effective legal bar to money laundering, but here – as in other European countries – there is no crime of mafia association.
"What we have here in this case is really the realization of what we feared: connecting old-school organized crime, the Mafia, with new-school organized crime, gangs," Ms. Milgram said.
Mr. Reppetto, who has written extensively on organized crime, said Mafia families were near the height of their power in the city in 1963, and were tied to some of the murders that year.
This is him on the F.B.I.'s campaign against organized crime: "The Mafia was the rotten core of America, and its fat cats fed free off the body of the nation".
