Mafia bosses have been secretly moaning about the “miserable” quality of recruits leaving them “on our knees” — while dreaming it could be more like “The Godfather.”
“The caliber these days is low, a miserable level,” accused Cosa Nostra don Giancarlo Romano was heard saying in a series of wiretaps released as Sicilian police busted almost 150 alleged mafia members in dawn raids Tuesday.
Romano and other real-life godfathers complained about how new recruits are too quick to snitch, breaking the historic code of omertà — while wishing life could be more like “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 hit movie starring Marlon Brando as crime boss Don Corleone.
“If you watch ‘The Godfather,’ the connections he had… he was very influential because of the power that he built at a political level,” Romano said in one of the intercepted calls.
“But us — what can we do? We’re on our knees, guys. We think we do business, but these days it’s others who do it.
“We used to be number one, now it’s others,” the alleged mob boss continues.
“We’re just gypsies.”
Romano is also heard in the intercepted phone call telling a young recruit to instead “go to school” to “meet doctors, lawyers, the people who run Italy, Europe.”
The wiretaps shared by local police also give a fascinating insight into life inside Cosa Nostra, including the nicknames by which the godfathers refer to each other — including Spider-Man, Bear and Nephew.
One was also known as Robert De Niro, another actor from “The Godfather” franchise.
Some 1,200 officers in the Carabinieri Palermo were involved in the raids across the island off the southern coast of Italy, sharing bodycam footage of the moment gun-wielding cops stormed a series of locations in and around the Sicilian capital.
The raids saw warrants issued for 183 people, including 36 who were already in custody, on charges including murder, extortion, drug trafficking, arms possession and mafia association.
Italy’s elite anti-mafia commandos known as the Cacciatori, or hunters were deployed from helicopters as part of the raids, which prosecutors hailed as dealing a major blow to Cosa Nostra bosses’ attempts to rebuild and reorganize the group’s central power structure.
The Sicilian mafia has declined in recent years, being overtaken by the Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, in terms of influence.
The ‘Ndrangheta controls a vast portion of the European drug trade and is said to make billions through the importing of cocaine from South America.
But Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Maurizio de Lucia, warned that Cosa Nostra is trying to build up its drug trafficking and distribution operations.
He told a press conference that mafia clans have bought firearms on the dark web and are using them to impose protection rackets across Palermo.
“The investigations that led to Tuesday’s arrests demonstrate that Cosa Nostra is alive and present and communicates with completely new communication channels,” he said in the press conference.
“It is doing business and trying to rebuild its army.”
