According to Europol’s recent report, Deciphering the EU’s Most Threatening Criminal Networks, the Italian mafia from the Calabria region, the ‘Ndrangheta, has expanded to more than 45 countries worldwide.
This multinational crime syndicate, which global turnover is between $30-50 billion each year, has turned Latin America into its operational hub. Here it buys cocaine and transports it to Europe where it reinvests part of its illicit profits, mainly in real estate and business activities.
In addition to establishing its presence with its networks of intermediaries in the producer countries, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the ‘Ndrangheta also expanded throughout Latin America, especially Brazil, where, since 2015, it has been actively collaborating with the country’s main criminal group, the First Capital Command (PCC).
Both the ‘Ndrangheta in 2008 and the PCC in 2022 ended up on the United States’ list of most dangerous criminal groups, the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. The PCC serves the Calabrian mafia, from which it ultimately buys weapons and hashish, to transport cocaine from producer countries to Brazil and to carry out logistics in Brazilian ports.
In addition to the main hub, the Port of Santos, in São Paulo state, police operations have discovered that the two criminal groups also use other ports, such as those of Fortaleza in Ceará, Itajaí in Santa Catarina, and Paranaguá in Paraná.
The partnership with the PCC is also intense for logistics on the African continent, where the Calabrian mafia has for years controlled the cocaine route to Europe through its operations, especially in South Africa, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, and more recently also Libya.
“The strength of the ‘Ndrangheta,” Antonio Nicaso, a leading international expert on organized crime and professor at Queen’s University in Toronto, Canada, told Diálogo, “is that it is not a monolithic structure, but an organism composed of multiple family entities that move autonomously and are able to adapt continuously in the places where they operate, anticipating their evolutions, including political and social ones.”
The Ecuador strategy
This explains the criminal group’s chosen strategy, for example, in Ecuador. Due to the high fragmentation of local criminal groups and the violence that has erupted in recent years, the Calabrian mafia has preferred to outsource the cocaine supply chain to Albanian and Serbian networks, which have been at its service in Europe since the fall of the communist regimes. Experts have dubbed this the “post-Fordist outsourcing” strategy.
“The ‘Ndrangheta prefers to rely on these networks, especially the Albanian ones, because they are reliable, they know how to impose themselves even violently and they have developed the logistics capability to transport drugs to Europe through the numerous banana companies they bought over the years,” Nicaso said.
Their criminal capability is developed to such an extent that last May, the Italian police operation Car Wash — whose name originated from investigations into car wash operators running marijuana plantations — discovered that an Italian-Albanian cocaine trafficking network between Ecuador and Europe was experimenting with the use of a remote-controlled mini-submarine.
Ties to Mexican cartels
The Albanians and the ‘Ndrangheta have also long been collaborating with Mexican cartels. According to a 2022 investigation by Mexican daily El Universal, Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael Zambada, alias El Mayo, received help from the Albanian brothers Luftar, Arben, Fatos, and Ramiz Hysa to launder drug trafficking profits through casinos and businesses in Mexico, in the states of Sonora, Baja California, and Quintana Roo, as well as in Albania.
As for the ‘Ndrangheta, it protected for years in its Calabria territory the fugitive Tomás Jesús Yarrington Ruvalcaba, former governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas (1999-2004), accused laundering money for Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. In addition, in 2020, Italian police Operation Falcon found that the Sinaloa Cartel planned to establish cocaine smuggling routes from Colombia to airports in southern Italy using private planes.
A 2022 Europol-DEA joint report, Complexities and Conveniences in the International Drug Trade: The Involvement of Mexican Criminal Actors in the EU Drug Market, warned of the expansion of Mexican cartels in Europe and the impact of this phenomenon globally. “An increased presence of Mexican cartels in the European Union could lead to increased violence and greater profits for Mexican cartels and the European criminal networks working with them,” the report states.
In recent years, the Mexican cartels’ fentanyl and methamphetamine expansion strategy has been reinforced in both Latin America and Europe. Attempts to manufacture the synthetic opioid have been recorded with the PCC in Brazil’s São Paulo state, while in the old continent the Sinaloa Cartel is increasingly active in methamphetamine production.
According to the European Drug Report 2024, nine EU countries dismantled 242 methamphetamine laboratories in 2022, many of which employed Mexican chemists. Cartels are also active in distribution, as demonstrated last May by the seizure in Valencia, Spain, of 1,800 kilograms of methamphetamine, the largest ever in the country. According to the Spanish National Police, the Sinaloa cartel had created a drug logistics and storage organization in Spain. In addition, the DEA indicated that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) also created distribution centers in Spain since early 2023.
New alliances
With the expansion of Mexican cartels in Europe and Latin America, new opportunities are also growing for the ‘Ndrangheta. “The geographies of drug trafficking, drugs, and alliances are changing. Criminal dynamics that used to take 10 years to develop now take less than a year. It’s all very fast and this requires the authorities to pay the utmost attention,” said Nicaso, who is also a member of the Arctic Intelligence Observatory.
“For example, with climate change and melting ice, the Arctic will be navigable without the need for nuclear marine propulsion. This opens up a new, even criminal, much faster route from China to Europe and the United States, in addition to the many ports the Chinese already have in Europe, including Trieste in Italy,” Nicaso said.
It is very likely that the ‘Ndrangheta, in addition to opening up to the fentanyl market in Europe where it already handles the heroin market, is also interested in the distribution of synthetic opioid precursors and pre-precursors from China and in new alliances with Mexican cartels also in the United States.
“We know that the U.S. Cosa Nostra is getting weaker and is undergoing a generational change. And, above all, it has not made the technological leap that the Calabrian mafia made worldwide,” Nicaso added. “The ‘Ndrangheta is increasingly infiltrating institutions, including financial ones, and is as active in money laundering as it is in reinvesting already laundered capital. The likely scenario is that the Mexican cartels will totally dominate the U.S. drug market and the ‘Ndrangheta will be able to reinvest its capital.”
According to the report of the Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the Mafia, “the existence of many Mafia families of Calabrian origin has been discovered in the New York area (Commisso, Aquino-Coluccio, Mazzaferro, Piromalli), but still very little is known about their illegal activities.” Even the New York Harbor Waterfront Commission had denounced in 2018 the infiltration of Calabrian criminals in the port.
“The fight against mafias concerns all countries in the world,” Nicaso said, “because organized crime is increasingly hybrid and active, both in the real world and in the digital and cryptocurrency world.”
It is a challenge that requires a global approach, many skills and expertise, and a continuous exchange of information among countries, because the ‘Ndrangheta, like other major criminal groups, is a threat to security and democracy.
