The crime boss of the two sides linked to families in the Como area

It is now a fact that the Mafia families have selected Ticino as one of their cross-border operating bases. Tomorrow morning there will be further proof of this in the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona. In fact, the sentence on a case that involves a Lugano jeweler accused of laundering valuables of illegal origin is due to be announced.

Meanwhile, the other day news of the arrest in Brazil of Rocco Morabito, the number-one of the ‘ndrangheta, and the most wanted man in Italy after Matteo Messina Denaro.

Originally from Africo, a small town in the Locride area, the home of one of the bloodiest and most powerful ‘ndrangheta families, Morabito is, in reality, the boss of the brokers managing the trafficking of cocaine for the South American cartels.

A decision on a money laundering case is expected tomorrow at the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona.

A cousin of the boss Giuseppe Morabito, known as ‘u tiradrittu, and considered by the investigators to be the real king of drugs. Since the late eighties he has been in charge of the huge passage of cocaine from the South American plantations to the Italian and European drug markets.

The ties of Morabito with the Lombard territories bordering with Switzerland are by now well known and also confirmed in numerous sentences of several Courts. No more than a year ago, the head of the Anti-Mafia District Directorate (DDA) of Milan, Alessandra Dolci, defined Cantù and the Marianese area as similar to Locri, «a piece of Aspromonte in Lombardy, land of ‘ndrangheta, terror and omertà».

By the end of the seventies, the «King of Africo», ‘u tiradrittu, had selected Como’s Brianza precisely because it was a stone’s throw from Ticino and Chiasso. These were the times in which money filled the Swiss vaults without almost any control and the big money of the «locales» of Como travelled non-stop from one side of the border to the other.