Earlier in the week Italian authorities seized the personal assets of reputed mobster Beniamino Gioiello Zappia with alleged ties to the Bonanno crime family in New York, the Rizzuto crime family in Montreal and the Caruana-Cuntrera clan of Cosa Nostra or the Sicilian Mafia in Italy, and Adrian Humphreys from the National Post expands on the story:
A multi-million-dollar treasure trove of art, jewels, antiques, real estate and luxury cars was forfeited to Italian authorities yesterday by a man named as the longtime financier of the Mafia of Montreal. "He is part of a criminal organization, the Mafia, but he has good taste," said a spokesman for the Italy Direzione Investigativa Antimafia. "We took away everything he had." Beniamino Gioiello Zappia, 71, known as "Don Tito," is currently imprisoned in Italy for gangsterism and financial crimes, after a probe by the Rome-based anti-Mafia police targeted the European operations of the Rizzuto organization, a Mafia clan based in Montreal that has already been called the "pinnacle of organized crime" in Canada by the RCMP. * * * The seizure adds to the picture of the Rizzuto organization as a vastly wealthy, white-collar and internationally active clan. Zappia was described by officials in Rome as the senior representative of Rizzuto in Italy.
Comments