Italy’s Government Unwittingly Helped Spread the Mafia to Northern Cities

February 11, 2014

Italy’s Government Unwittingly Helped Spread the Mafia to Northern Cities

One reason for the recent pervasive infiltration of southern-Italian crime organizations into the country’s northern regions is a government policy that punishes mafiosi by forcing them to resettle far from their home towns, say Paolo Buonanno of the University of Bergamo in Italy and Matteo Pazzona of Universidad Catolica del Norte in Chile. The Italian government assumed that if gangsters were removed from the south and immersed in the more-law-abiding north, they would reform; nearly 3,000 suspected criminals were resettled under the confino plan from 1961–1974. But these individuals acted as seeds in transplanting crime into formerly mafia-free areas, the researchers say.

SOURCE: Migrating Mafias