Italy's Mafia thrives in global financial meltdown

NAPLES, Italy (AP) -- While businesses around the world are hunkering down for survival, the Italian mob is living a golden moment.

Italy's various organized crime syndicates - often lumped together colloquially as Mafia Inc. - are gobbling up gas stations, muscling in on supermarket franchises, making loans to cash-starved businesses, taking over trattorias and acquiring buildings in swank neighborhoods in Rome and Milan, investigators say.

These mobsters have lots of what is in short supply for many businesses these days - liquidity - as well as centuries-honed expertise in preying on the vulnerable, whose ranks are swelling in the current financial crisis.

It all means the mob is free to sink cash into two areas that lie at the heart of the global meltdown: real estate and credit markets.

The crime syndicates are flush with billions of euros from extortion rackets, drug trafficking and booming sales in fake designer clothing made in China expressly for the Italian mob - an increasingly lucrative trade as hard-hit consumers search for bargains, prosecutors and police said in recent interviews.

For the mob bosses, the global economic meltdown "is only an advantage," said anti-mafia prosecutor Franco Roberti, in his office in Naples, the chaotic port city that is home to the Camorra, one of the Italy's major crime syndicates.

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Italy's Mafia thrives in global financial meltdown

Italy's Mafia thrives in global financial meltdown

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