European Central: Italy's Mafia Is Modernizing. How Has Italy Responded?

There are very few organizations in the world with reputations as storied and immortalized in popular media as Italy’s mafias. Their grip on Italian life was a vice on civilian and political life, with hundreds of homicides per year alongside extortion and drug trafficking.

However, since the peak in the 1990s, mafia activity has drastically changed. As the Italian government cracked down and public sentiment shifted against them, the mafias had to adapt to the changing times. According to a recent report from Italy’s Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA), Italy’s mafias are beginning to set aside their differences and collaborate in a host of criminal enterprises, along with modernizing their operations.

This has presented a unique challenge to Italy’s ruling government, but the country’s fight against organized crime can provide some key lessons for other European nations facing similar issues. 

A Digital-Age Mafia

According to the DIA’s report, they found that Italy’s three biggest mafias, the Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, and the 'Ndrangheta, have begun retooling their operations for the new century. Encrypted communications, short-life micro-sim cards, and drones have helped communication between members, including those in prison. They have also used social media to recruit marginalized young people.

But on a larger scale, the mafias are shifting their activities to new venues. Drug trafficking and money laundering are still prevalent, but mafias have begun embracing other sources of income like online gambling and infiltrating the management of visa applications to set up a pay-to-enter system for migrants.

Another major development has been their investment in public works projects. This also isn’t a new strategy; mafias in southern Italy have long flexed their integration into public life by controlling construction in local municipalities. 

However, Italy has been reinvesting in its infrastructure thanks to preparations for the 2026 Winter Olympics and a project to build the world's largest suspension bridge across the Strait of Messina. Both of these projects have been targeted by the mafia, and the government knows this, with 38% of administrative anti-mafia measures in 2024 being focused on the construction sector, along with 200 active investigations into public projects. 

Alongside a focus on public works, the mafias have also shifted more towards financial crimes to avoid detection. Using what some call “shadow banks”, often involving unlicensed Chinese money brokers, mafia members have been able to navigate international anti-money laundering measures by avoiding the banking system and its watchdogs altogether. 

With the mafia’s multi-faceted approach to its operations, the Italian government has countered with a two-pronged plan to clamp down on mafia activity.

The Top-Down Approach

Since arriving in office in 2022, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has placed law and order through a renewed police presence high on her list of priorities. From large-scale arrests in Naples to targeted anti-mafia arrests against one of the biggest criminal organizations in Italy back in February, her government has been hyper-focused on tackling Italy’s mafias. This fervor has extended to all parts of Italian culture, including arrests of hardline soccer fans linked to the Ndrangheta mafia and far-right groups.

Most of the legislative heavy-lifting was undertaken by her predecessors in past decades. The creation of the DIA and other directorates in the 90s and the successful prosecutions of many mafia members in the early 2000s have helped lay the groundwork for Meloni to build on today. The controversial Article 41bis Penitentiary Act of 1975, which allows authorities to suspend certain prison regulations for mafia bosses, has proven effective in persuading members to become informants in the face of harsh prison conditions.

One key initiative began in 2012, when the Ministry of Justice launched the Free To Choose program in Calabria, a mafia stronghold. The program helps remove children from mafia families and places them in foster care, helping to stem generational recruitment into mafias while providing an incentive against becoming a mafia member as a parent. In March 2024, the program was expanded to other regions in Italy, such as Sicily and Naples.

However, Italy’s top-down approach has been significantly watered down in recent years, much of which has actually been self-inflicted by Meloni. Restrictive media reforms have made it far harder to report on the mafia. The abolition of the crime “abuso d’ufficio” (abuse of office) has made it easier for public officials to engage in clientelism, nepotism, and corruption. A law passed earlier this year restricted the length of wiretaps for mafia-adjacent crimes, making it harder for prosecutors to find evidence. 

With the top-down approach stalling, how has the bottom-up approach fared?

The Bottom-Up Approach

In 2017, an Italian organized crime expert argued that “if Calabria stays Italy’s most underdeveloped region, it’ll keep having the most potent mafia, regardless of the families.” This is what categorizes the bottom-up approach: investment in the root causes that drive people to the mafia.

This is not lost on Meloni’s government. The suspension bridge project is part of her attempts to boost the local economies, and the Infrastructure Minister has said that “the bridge will be a catalyst for development” while emphasizing the importance of “creating jobs and giving hope to young people”. 

However, Italy’s government has also made moves counter to this mission. In 2024, its parliament approved a bill granting regions more power, which critics said would increase poverty in the south by allowing richer, northern regions to keep more tax money. Additionally, the government slashed anti-poverty subsidies in 2023.

But the bottom-up approach is more than just investment; it’s a grassroots movement, one that is proving to be a key factor in the fight against organized crime. Mafias often extort local businesses for pizzo, or protection money. But a movement founded in 2004 called Addiopizzo is mobilizing businesses and consumers in support of businesses that don’t pay protection money. 

Today, over 1,000 business owners and 13,500 consumers have joined the movement, with the organization providing guides and stickers for pizzo-free businesses and organizing markets for pizzo-free goods. It also provides reporting and legal assistance to mafia victims. This large-scale civic movement is vital for the government’s anti-mafia campaign and has demonstrated how local-level action can have an outsized impact. 

A fellow movement, Libera, has focused on initiatives, workshops, assemblies, and denunciation actions to fight the cultural control that mafias have had for decades. Other social efforts are equally important, like the Giorgio Ambrosoli Award Ceremony, which highlights people fighting against crime, and the Trame Festival, a cultural event acting as a forum for discussion about mafias in the ‘Ndrangheta’s home region. 

Both the top-down and bottom-up approaches work in conjunction. The former creates the legislative foundation for punishing organized crime and ensures those laws are enforced, while the latter eats away at the support structure of the organizations, which rely on everyday people feeling too trapped and isolated to push back. 

This combination is one that other European nations can learn from as they fight their own battles against organized crime. As organized crime in France and Sweden grows, Italy is proving to be a test case for how to respond.

By expanding its activities against mafia along with investment in potential recruits and a social campaign to support those pushing back, Italy is showing the world that it truly takes a village, and a relatively helpful government, to push organized crime back into the past and leave it there.