Sicilian Mafia decapitated

[Fash]

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

The arrest of supremo Salvatore Lo Piccolo completed the "decapitation" of the Sicilian Mafia, prosecutor Pietro Grasso said Tuesday.

The Sicilian Mafia "has no more leadership. Today it is an organisation without structure that can no longer move except with difficulty," Grasso told a news conference in Rome.

Salvatore Lo Piccolo, 63, who was arrested Monday, took the helm of the Sicilian Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra, a year and a half ago after the arrest of supremo Bernardo Provenzano in April 2006.

Two months later Antonino Rotolo was arrested, leaving Lo Piccolo as the only remaining member of the top hierarchy who was at large, Grasso said.

Lo Piccolo, who had been sought by police for 23 years, was arrested at a farmhouse near the Sicilian capital Palermo along with his 32-year-old son Sandro and two lower-level Mafia leaders, Andrea Adamo and Gaspare Pulizzi.

Visibly pleased, Grasso said: "Now we have arrested them all."

Palermo police chief Giuseppe Caruso added that with the Provenzano-Rotolo-Lo Piccolo triumverate behind bars, no figures remained of the same stature to take their places.

"There will likely be some internal adjustments, but I wouldn't say there will be a war within the Mafia," Caruso said.

Police say they are tightening the noose around Matteo Messina Denaro, the high-flying playboy "boss" of Trapani in western Sicily who is a possible new leader.

Besides him there is Rotolo's godson Giovanni Nicchi, "a young man with grey matter and energy," as Caruso described him. Nicchi is in his mid-20s.

Sicilians who have for so long felt left to their own devices in the face of the Mafia -- and are now refusing in increasing numbers to pay extortion money or "pizzo" -- can finally count on the government for help, Interior Minister Giuliano Amato told the news conference.

"I hope that now Sicilians who have so often wondered 'who can I turn to?' see that it was worth it to trust the state," he said.

A movement dubbed "Addio (farewell) Pizzo" set up in 2004 by Palermo students and the employers organisation Cofindustria decided in September to deny membership to anyone who pays money to the Mafia.

Organised crime -- including the Sicilian Mafia, the Naples Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta of southern Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita in the southeastern Apulia region -- has a turnover of some 90 billion euros (128 billion dollars), some seven percent of Italy's gross domestic product, according to a report last month.

Businesses pay some 30 billion euros in pizzo to crime syndicates each year, the report said, adding that some 160,000 businesses, especially in the south, regularly pay pizzo.

Lo Piccolo was reportedly betrayed by one of his closest lieutenants, Francesco Franzese, who was arrested in August, and members of Franzese's family were taken to an undisclosed location for their protection.

It's lasted this long... how are they so optimistic it's not going to just grow another head?

[Nick]

Of course it will grow another head, it's what happens every single time.

[masteen]

As long as there is demand for shit that's illegal, there will be organized crime.