09/21/2024 – 12:08
The Cosa Nostra link in Brazil has a first and last name: Giuseppe Calvaruso, Giuseppe Bruno and Pietro Ladogana. The three are in prison. One of them is suspected of ordering the murder of his informant. Another, the Mafia’s ‘treasurer’, has already been sentenced to 16 years in prison in Italy. And the ‘heir’ to the organization.
The profile of the Cosa Nostra bosses – the Sicilian mafia that inspired the ‘The Godfather’ trilogy in the 1970s, was put together by the Joint Investigation Team, a task force of Brazilian and Italian authorities in Operation Arancia that, last August, blocked the advance of the organization that had established itself in Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba.
In this region of the country, the Cosa Nostra branch in Brazil took root and produced a bold and ambitious scheme to launder R$300 million from drug trafficking and extortion carried out by the Mafia in Italy – investigators estimate that the amount collected by the organization is ten times greater.
Giuseppe Calvaruso is in custody in Italy. Pietro Lagodana is serving his sentence in the state prison of Alcaçuz (RN). Giuseppe Bruno was arrested in August by the Federal Police.
The three were reported as part of Operation Arancia for alleged involvement in an international criminal organization and money laundering.
Last Monday, the 16th, the Federal Court in Rio Grande do Norte accepted the Prosecutor’s Office’s complaint and placed them in the dock, alongside six other suspects, all Brazilians.
According to the Federal Public Ministry, Calvaruso, Bruno and Pietro are the main operators of the Italian mafia scheme in Brazil.
Investigators tracked millions of dollars in assets acquired by the group through shell companies. The Federal Court blocked the registration of 100 properties.
The investigation shows that the three Cosa Nostra leaders set up 12 shell companies in Brazil to launder money raised in their country.
They invested mainly in ventures in Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba, such as a refined restaurant in Natal, apartments in Cabedelo (PB), a luxury house in a resort in Bananeiras (PB) and a large residential subdivision in the municipality of Extremoz (RN).
The Prosecutor’s Office indicates that the Cosa Nostra money laundering scheme in Brazil was set up by Pietro Ladogana. Starting in 2019, he made several corporate and real estate investments in Rio Grande do Norte with mafia funds. The mobster’s trajectory began to unravel when the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office identified his actions in partnership with Bruno and Calvaruso.
In 2014, Pietro was arrested in Brazil on suspicion of having ordered the murder of another Italian, Enzo Albanese. According to the investigation, he ordered Enzo’s execution after having reported him to the Brazilian authorities a month earlier. Enzo Albanese revealed that the mobster was part of a criminal organization focused on money laundering in Rio Grande do Norte through the purchase of real estate and the management of fictitious companies.
The Prosecutor’s Office emphasizes that Pietro’s arrest left Calvaruso and Bruno with a problem: managing investments in Brazil. It was then that Cosa Nostra decided to send Giuseppe Bruno to Brazil in 2016, with the mission of continuing the Mafia’s “business projects.”
Operator of the scheme reported to the courts, Giuseppe Bruno became involved from a very early age with “business projects” of Sicilian mafia organizations, through his deceased father, who was identified as a businessman “close” to “Cosa Nostra”, especially in the mafia district of Bagheria, where he maintained ties with a historical protagonist of the mafia’s ‘cupola’.
Operation Arancia claims that Bruno and Pietro acted as the operational arm of Cosa Nostra in Rio Grande do Norte. Giuseppe Calvaruso, on the other hand, was the real mastermind behind the money laundering scheme.
According to the complaint, Calvaruso is considered the ‘boss manager’ of Cosa Nostra and took over the management of the mafia’s coffers (treasurer). He had “hegemony in the management of the criminal dynamics” of the group.
The investigation shows that Calvaruso was one of the “main actors in the Palermo mafia scene”. His rise through the organized crime hierarchy “stems from historical ties with the most influential leaders of Cosa Nostra”.
Palermo police said the mobster was linked to Giovanni Motisi, one of Toto Rina’s “most ruthless and trusted assassins” – the former Italian Mafia boss who was born in Corleone, the hometown of the main character in ‘The Godfather’.
The Cosa Nostra boss-manager was first arrested in 2002 and spent 10 years in prison. In 2016, he moved to northern Italy, from where he ran the Cosa Nostra money laundering scheme with Giuseppe Bruno.
Between 2019 and 2021, the year he was arrested, he lived in Brazil. The mobster was captured when he returned to Palermo in April 2021. Today he is confined in the Spoleto Prison, located in the Province of Perugia, “under a strict regime due to his dangerousness and his leadership over the international mafia”.
“The group built a complex and extremely organized structure in Brazil through dozens of front companies that moved millions of reais through people without compatible financial backing, ‘front men’, who were under the command of the Italian mafia leaders of Cosa Nostra in Brazilian territory”, states the Federal Public Ministry.
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