A former member of the notorious Rome
criminal organization the Magliana Gang led a drugs gang in the
Italian capital that Italian police have busted with 20 arrests,
judicial sources said Wednesday.
He was named as 66-year-old Roberto Fittirillo, aka Robertino.
The new gang was dedicated to drug trafficking and distribution,
police said.
It placed on the Rome market "huge" quantities of cocaine, they
said.
Fittirillo was charged with drug trafficking and complicity in
several murders in a 1993 operation that led to the arrest of
several members of the Magliana Gang.
He was still in charge of the drug trade run by the new
organisation based in his home turf of Rome's northeastern
Tufello district, police said.
Preliminary investigations judge Angela Gerardi said the new
gang posed a "criminal case of absolute gravity".
The Magliana Gang was an infamous and extremely violent Rome
group of the 1970s that was the subject of Michele Placido's
2005 movie Romanzo Criminale and a spin-off TV series of the
same name.
Named after the Rome district where it was set up, the
Magliana Gang had links to Italy's three main mafias
'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra and Camorra and has also been linked to
rightist terrorist bombings and murders to destabilise Italy in
the 'Years of Lead' of leftist and rightist terror in the 1970s
and 80s.
Conspiracy theorists have also linked it to other murky
crimes including the killing of mud-raking journalist Mino
Pecorelli, for which former Christian Democrat leader Giulio
Andreotti was eventually acquitted, the mafia murder of God's
Banker Roberto Calvi, and the disappearance of a 15-year-old
Vatican resident, Emanuela Orlandi.
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