Italy Tentacles of the Octopus

By Cathy Booth/Rome

In the Sicilian countryside, helicopters clattered overhead in the early- morning dark as Italian police swooped in to raid a luxurious villa. In the streets of Palermo, Milan, Naples, up and down Italy last week, hundreds of narcotics investigators fanned out to collar scores of reputed Mafia drug traffickers. And across the Atlantic, U.S. FBI agents rounded up still more suspects in eight cities. A trail that began in Buffalo and Philadelphia three years ago had led the two countries to crack open a powerful transatlantic drug ring accused of flooding the U.S. with Italian heroin smuggled in wine bottles, tomato cans and the luggage of Sicilian housewives. At week's end the arrests stood at 80, a virtual Who's Who of Mafiosi in Italy.

Last week's arrests could be just the tip of the iceberg. When police severed the French Connection in the early 1970s, the Marseilles gang was replaced in the heroin business by the Mafia, which began using old cigarette- smuggling routes to accommodate the drug traffic. By the early 1980s, Sicily had become the world's Heroin Central, and Mafia leaders had linked up with Latin American dealers to ship cocaine to the U.S. and Europe.

Today the Mafia is richer and more powerful than ever on drug-related profits estimated in the billions of dollars. La Piovra, or the Octopus, as the Mob has come to be called, has entwined its tentacles around Italy, frequently choking off the government's power. Vincenzo Parisi, chief of the Italian state police, says the Mafia's clout has made it a force strong enough to form an "anti-state." Domenico Sica, the high commissioner named last summer for the specific task of fighting the Mafia, recently warned a parliamentary commission that organized crime was in "total control" of parts of Sicily, Calabria and Campania. The Mob's lucrative drug trade has been shared with its crime families in America.

While the Mafia fed the world's drug habit, the problem initially did not seem urgent in Italy. In 1975 Parliament passed one of Europe's most liberal drug laws, which allowed individuals to possess an unspecified "modest quantity" of narcotics -- even heroin and cocaine -- for personal use. The legislation was hard only on dealers: they could be sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Now the scourge has hit home. Italy is ravaged by an epidemic of drug addiction more widespread and lethal than anywhere else in Europe. The country has the largest number of addicts on the Continent: an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 are hooked on heroin alone. So far this year, 700 Italians, mostly young people, have died from overdoses -- another tragic record -- with the highest death tolls in industrial centers like Milan and Turin. Says Milan Mayor Paolo Pillitteri: "The problem has exploded this year. The quantity of heroin and cocaine on the streets is enormous." Every day, he says, special sanitation crews pick up some 4,000 syringes discarded by drug addicts. "It's as big a problem as terrorism once was."

Alarm over the narcotics epidemic has ignited a divisive debate over drug laws and the best way to attack the problem. Former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi has called for a drastic reversal of the old law: he wants users punished. "You can't ban the sale of drugs from one side and give freedom to buy them on the other," he argues. Craxi's hard line has drawn fire from liberals, especially Minister for Special Affairs Rosa Russo Jervolino, chief author of a new antidrug law calling for stiffer sentences for traffickers, more support for police, and better rehabilitation programs. However, her original version let stand the provision allowing "modest" amounts of drugs for personal use. Craxi blocked passage of the bill, and in the process touched a vein of public support: a survey by the newsweekly Panorama shows that 57% of Italians think users ought to be punished. Jervolino was irate: "Prison never helped any drug user." But a revised version of the new legislation that will outlaw drug possession in the future is still awaiting approval by the Cabinet.

Conspicuously missing from the debate is the central role of the Mafia in spreading the epidemic. Even the heavy blows dealt the Mob in the so-called Pizza Connection trials in the U.S. in 1987 and the mass trial and subsequent imprisonment of more than 300 Mafiosi in Sicily proved to be only temporary victories. Palermo's special investigating magistrates are trying, with little evident success, to untangle the intimate ties between the Sicilian Mob and politicians in the South. Like many legitimate businesses, the Mafia has gone global and uses sophisticated financial strategies to launder drug profits.

Still, says Senator Ferdinando Imposimato, a former magistrate who handled many a Mafia case, the Mob can be defeated "by isolating the Mafiosi as the ((Red Brigades)) terrorists were isolated and fought by a unified country." Not to forget international cooperation: roundups like last week's on both sides of the Atlantic could be a small but useful beginning in the struggle.