Criminologist Vincenzo Musacchio: The war in Ukraine will also favour the Italian mafias

Criminologist Vincenzo Musacchio: The war in Ukraine will also favour the Italian mafias

(PRESS RELEASE) TERMOLI, Italy, 25-Jul-2022 — /EuropaWire/ — This was stated by the criminologist Vincenzo Musacchio. Economic crisis, national emergencies, unrest, government instability, wars and post-war reconstruction are “manna” from heaven for the mafias who will speculate and do business on such misfortunes. Today this condition is definitely aggravated by the fact that the Italian mafias (‘Ndrangheta in primis) are criminal networks that operate on a transnational level. Both during the conflict and when it ends, the mafias will always be present and will quietly go about their business. The main areas in which the spotlight should be accessed should be arms and bullets supplies, trafficking in human beings and organs and post-conflict reconstruction. There is a lack of monitoring of weapons and ammunition both during the conflict and at the end. How many of these weapons and bullets will fall into the hands of the mafias? We have a precedent to refer to. During the conflict and with the end of it, in the Balkans in the 90s there was a market for the sale of military weapons, where mafia and terrorists were procured. I believe (but I don’t hope so) that the same situation will happen again in Ukraine. Explosives, machine guns, bombs and missiles will end up on the black market and will be easily accessible to criminal networks and terrorist groups around the world. New flows of refugees are also at risk, there is the sector of medical supplies and drugs. Many life-saving drugs are no longer found in legal markets. The drug itself is another area where earnings will increase. Corruption, money laundering will grow and the mafias will thus have the ability to invest in the Ukrainian economy and finance. We will see a script already written and seen in other conflicts of a war nature.

Vincenzo Musacchio, forensic criminologist, jurist and associate at the Rutgers Institute on Anti-Corruption Studies (RIACS) in Newark (USA). Independent researcher and member of the High School of Strategic Studies on Organized Crime at the Royal United Services Institute in London. During his career he was a pupil of Giuliano Vassalli, friend and collaborator of Antonino Caponnetto, an Italian magistrate known for having led the anti-Mafia Pool with Falcone and Borsellino in the second half of the 1980s. Today he is one of the most accredited specialists of the new transnational mafias, an authoritative scholar at an international level of strategies to fight organized crime. Author of numerous essays and of a monograph published in fifty-four states written with Franco Roberti entitled “The fight against the new mafias fought at a transnational level”. He is considered the greatest expert on the Albanian mafia and his in-depth works on the subject have also been used by legislative commissions at European level.

SOURCE: Vincenzo Musacchio