Gianfranco Romeo sits at a table at his trattoria off the Pantheon, casting scorn over the idea that he is a frontman for a feared mafia clan.
“I always had a passion for restaurant work, I began as a dishwasher,” Romeo said at Il Barroccio, as pizza makers prepared to fire up the oven and shovel in the pies for the evening crowd of tourists.
Romeo is among several people under investigation for suspected false property registration in one of a growing number of investigations in which mobsters are suspected of systematically buying up Roman tourist restaurants to launder cocaine profits, allegedly installing people like Romeo as figurehead owners.
Photo: AFP
Romeo bitterly said that investigators were targeting him and others merely because they are natives of Calabria, the southern region that is home to the ’Ndrangheta, one of the most-feared global crime syndicates.
In seizing restaurants from hard-working people like himself, he said, authorities are essentially alleging that all Calabrians in Rome are crooks.
He said he is looking forward to his day in a court so he can ask prosecutors: “Why do you say I’m a figurehead when I paid with my own money?”
Prosecutors are confident they will have the right answer.
Along Rome’s narrow Via dei Pastini, a street thronging with tourists in search of quaint restaurants, authorities raided three trattorias, including Il Barroccio, this year as alleged fronts for money-laundering operations for the ’Ndrangheta. Authorities say the financially savvy ’Ndrangheta is hungry for legitimate businesses to launder the billions it rakes in from cocaine trafficking. Elsewhere in Rome, the Naples-based Camorra is allegedly following a similar recipe, prosecutors say.
The restaurants and cafes targeted in the probes still operate. Many are near landmarks, such as Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona. As chefs dish out pasta and waiters pour wine, anti-mafia investigators — huddled in their offices — scrutinize tax returns and property deeds and leases.
Beyond mob-owned restaurants, tourists also stand a good chance of sleeping in hotels where more than sheets are being laundered.
In one case, prosecutors alleged that a convent turned into a hotel was acquired by the ’Ndrangheta just in time for the 2000 Holy Year — when millions of devout pilgrims poured into Rome.
“We can seize 10 businesses a day,” anti-mafia prosecutor Michele Prestipino said. “And they can buy up 10 more in a day.”
What is more, the restaurants do not suffer any hit to their business from the mafia taint, since most tourists are blissfully unaware of the probes.
Romeo recounted how police roused him from sleep the morning two Via dei Pastini restaurants were seized. Two days later, the doors reopened, and tourists flocked back.
However, that has not been the case with the lawmakers at parliament, a short walk away from Il Barroccio.
“The politicians used to come here,” Romeo said, his face glum. “Now they say they can’t come any more.”
While a few lawmakers might be avoiding the trattoria, Rome’s status as the Italian political and administrative capital is an added attraction for the mob.
“You make connections, important friendships,” Prestipino said in his Rome office.
And Rome offers the right ingredients for mobsters, being hundreds of kilometers from their centuries-old power bases.
“It’s a place where even conspicuous wealth blends in with other wealth,” Prestipino said.
Restaurants and hotels in Milan, Turin and other northern cities, including in the prosperous regions of Veneto and Emilia Romagna, are also becoming ’Ndrangheta properties, said Prestipino, who used to fight the ’Ndrangheta on its home turf in impoverished Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot.
Alfonso Sabella, a former Sicilian magistrate who battled Cosa Nostra, has urged Rome to create a mechanism to help spot anomalies like frequent ownership changes.
The lobby group for Rome’s 15,000 restaurants is alarmed by organized crime infiltration, saying that mobsters — unlike honest restaurateurs — have nearly unlimited funds to make establishments successful as eateries, not just fronts for organized crime.
“There are locales seized in the past years that were flourishing,” FIPE Confcommercio Roma president Fabio Spada said. “They raked in a lot, independent of their vocation as money-launderers.”
Indeed, in recent years, organized crime has been increasingly aiming to “make clean money from dirty money” by investing illicit revenues into legitimate sectors of the economy, Lieutenant Colonel Gerardo Mastrodomenico of the organized-crime squad of Italy’s tax police said.
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