Italian mafias earn more than three billion euros a year from the tourism sector and are ready to pocket even more from upcoming large-scale events, a research institute warned on Tuesday.
Organized crime groups preying on vulnerable businesses, from hotels to restaurants, currently take in €3.3 billion ($3.5 billion) a year and are poised to cash in on the celebrations of the Jubilee of the Catholic Church in Rome and the Winter Olympics. Institute for Demographic Research he said
“Italian tourism is under attack. The 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics and the 2025 Jubilee whetted the mafia’s appetite,” Demoskopika president Raffaele Rio said in a report.
The powerful ‘Ndrangheta Mafiawhich is rooted in Calabria, accounts for only half of the total turnover, according to the report.
The Camorra, based in Campania, the Sicilian mafia and organized crime groups in the Puglia region also raise huge amounts of money from tourism.
Although these mob centers are in southern Italy, the groups earned almost 1.5 billion euros from tourism in the country’s rich north, the report added.
“More than seven thousand vulnerable companies are at risk of becoming delicious prey for criminal associations,” Rio warned, saying that almost 15 percent of the 48,000 companies in the sector were struggling with liquidity and debt crises, which made them vulnerable to the mob’s “offers” of help. .
Organized crime groups lend money to companies on punitive terms and use it to clean up ill-gotten gains.
“The mobs are building a criminal welfare system that crushes struggling businessmen,” Rio said.
“They promise financial survival, cover debts and guarantee liquidity but at a very high price: the control or total acquisition of companies.
“This perverse system not only strengthens the power of criminal families in the territory, but also feeds a circuit of money laundering, usury and extortion that suffocates the legal economy of our country”, he said.
The report on tourism in Italy comes a few days after a The Catholic nun was arrested by the Italian police for allegedly carrying messages for the mafia to the prisoners.
In March, Italy expanded a controversial program removing children from their mafia families to break the cycle of criminal behavior that is passed on to new generations.
At the beginning of this year, Interpol published a report showing that mafias, cartels and gangs in Europe are using fruit companies, hotels and other legal businesses as fronts for huge profits. According to the agency, hundreds of criminal networks are able to infiltrate the legal economy to hide their activities and launder their criminal profits.
Europol said the ‘Ndrangheta mafia’s profits from drug and arms trafficking, as well as tax evasion, are invested across Europe in real estate, supermarkets, hotels and other commercial activities.