Italian police raid Chinese mafia

An operation targeting the Chinese Mafia in Italy has led to police issuing more than thirty arrest warrants.

In Florence, police coordinated a number of dawn-raids. The arrests took place not only in multiple parts of Italy but also in neighbouring France and Spain.

Italian police forces have struggled with the rise of Chinese criminal gangs which create fake goods and often run prostitution rings.

Contraband material which enters Italy and other European countries illegally has previously been seized by the authorities. Full Story

Police in Italy says they have cracked open a violent Chinese criminal group which had infiltrated the national transport sector and expanded into France, Germany and Spain.
Thirty-three suspects were arrested in a sting which disembowelled a “Chinese mafia organisation” accused of using “intimidation and violence” to prey on Chinese companies looking to transport products by road, police said on Thursday.

As well as controlling the movement of goods throughout Italy and on to Paris, Madrid and the German city of Neuss, the gang was also lining its nest with money from “extortion, usury, illegal gambling houses, prostitution and drugs peddling,” it said.

The mastermind was one Zhang Naizhong, 57, who goes by the nickname “the black man” and who behaved like a stereotypical mafia boss, dining in fine restaurants while underlings grovelled, according to La Repubblica.

His young lover was among those arrested by officers, who found bundles of cash stashed in her apartment, it said.

The investigation, dubbed “China Truck” and opened in 2011, was carried out by police in Prato, a city in Tuscany with a large Chinese community, working mainly in the textile industry. Full Story

Italian police raid Chinese mafia

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