Four Mafia Bosses Arrested

Mafia boss Giovanni and his brother Renato Sutera were arrested last week due to their affiliation with a €100,000 drug operation which included funding marijuana greenhouse plantations in Spain and drug trafficking throughout Italy. Their illegal activity was carried out under the auspices of owning Caffé Curtatone, a cafe on Borgo Ognissanti in the historical center of Florence. They used the bar as part of their business operations to order launder money.

Giovanni has a long history of crime. A Sicilian native, born in 1958, he has already been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Graziella Campagna, a 17-year-old girl killed in the province of Messina in 1985, and he was also found guilty of the murder of a Florentine jeweler. He was released in 2015, which is when he began to invest in the heart of Florence to promote drug trafficking.

The indoor drug cultivation was discovered and seized in June 2017 by the Spanish police, and since then the brothers have been arrested in connection with the illegal activity at the order of the investigating judge Paola Belsito, while two others, 43-year-old Spaniard Ruben Crespo Guerra and 38-year-old Albanian citizen and Italian-resident Pavlin Delia, have been arrested for their role as well.

To read more in Italian, visit Florence’s La Repubblica news site.