Sacra Corona Unita

(; ; acronym: SCU), also known as the Fourth Mafia, is a Mafia-type criminal organization from the Apulia region in Southern Italy, and it is especially active in the areas of Brindisi, Lecce, and Taranto.

Origin of the name

Informer Cosimo Capodieci said the SCU used "Sacra (Sacred) because at the time of the affiliation the new member is "baptized", the Corona because it resembles a crown, meaning the rosary typically used in Church in order to carry out the functions of Jesus Christ and the cross, Unita because it was necessary to be connected to one another, similar to the rings of a chain."

History

Sacra Corona Unita was formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was formally established in a prison in 1983, according to a document found by investigators in the cell of the organisation's founder, . The Sacra Corona Unita was created to counter the overwhelming power in the prisons and on the Apulian territory of some of the more established mafia organisations, such as the Campania families united in Raffaele Cutolo's Nuova Camorra Organizzata.

According to one account of Rogoli's rise to leadership, the foundations of Sacra Corona Unita were laid by Rogoli on Christmas night 1981. At the time, Rogoli was a 32-year-old tiler from Mesagne who was serving a sentence in Trani prison for a bank robbery and murder in Giovinazzo in 1980.

Activities

Originally preying on the region's substantial wine and olive oil industries, the group moved into cigarette smuggling, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, extortion, and political corruption.

According to a survey conducted by the Eurispes the main sources of income of the organization are:

Drug trafficking — €878 million per year
Prostitution — €775 million per year
Arms trafficking — €516 million per year
Extortion and usury — €351 million per year

Structure

The SCU is made up of three distinct groupings or levels. Members can 'graduate' from one level to the next by going through riti battesimali (baptismal rites). The religious symbolism is probably left over from the SCU's association with the Camorra.

Società Minore – The lowest level, made up of lower-level criminals who do street-level activities. Members start out as picciotti and go through a 40-day trial to ensure they are suitable for criminal work and are not associated with the police. They are then inducted into the next phase of the level, the manovalanza, or worker. The candidate must also swear an oath of devotion to SCU.
Società Maggiore – The second level, made up of two positions.
Lo Sgarro – The position is given only to members who have killed at least three people for SCU, and from now on members cannot leave, on pain of death. Members can now form their own crew of picciotti, known as a filiale. Upon indoctrination into the La Santa position the member is given a firearm (to symbolically use on oneself upon failing SCU), a cyanide pill, cotton (representing Mont Blanc, which is considered sacred), a lemon (treating the wounds of one's comrades), a needle to puncture the index finger of the right hand, handkerchiefs (representing purity of spirit) and a spartenza (a gift of some sort, usually cigarettes).
Società Segreta– The top level, the core of the organization where key decisions are made.

The Sacra Corona Unita consists of about 50 clans with approximately 2,000 members and specializes in smuggling cigarettes, drugs, arms, and people. The Sacra Corona Unita collects payoffs from other criminal groups for landing rights on the southeast coast of Italy.

The SCU uses a hierarchical structure when running its organization, and the higher you climb the more responsibility and money you gain. Men are the predominant rulers of the group. In recent years, the SCU has been finding ways to exploit people online by scamming and hacking individuals for money. This money is then laundered into countries across Europe, such as the U.K., Spain, and Germany.

The organization has long been present in Albania, partly because of the proximity of Apulia and Albania and the diffusion of the Italian language. Albania is a point of arrival for huge quantities of smuggled cigarettes and drugs from Afghanistan.

With the decreasing importance of the Adriatic corridor as a smuggling channel as the situation in the Balkans normalises, and a series of successful police and judicial operations against it in recent years, the Sacra Corona Unita has been reduced to a fraction of its former power, which peaked around the mid-1990s.

Alliances of Sacra Corona Unita

'Ndrangheta

Giuseppe Rogoli, one of the founders of the SCU, was an affiliate of the 'Ndrangheta in Apulia, even before the creation of the Sacra Corona Unita.

The SCU, after Cutolo's downfall, can be considered an offshoot of the 'Ndrangheta in the region, due to Rogoli asked for the permission of the Capobastone Umberto Bellocco to create an "Apulian 'Ndrangheta", which becomes the today's Sacra Corona Unita.

On 14 November 2018, the operation Galassia of the Guardia di Finanza ended, in which the presumed member of the Pesce-Bellocco 'ndrina, Antonio Zungri, some members of the Tegano 'ndrina and perhaps of the Piromalli 'ndrina together with the Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita's Capriati and Parisi clans were illegally included in the commercial network of the online betting companies Planetwin365, Betaland, Enjoybet and Planetwin. The Apulian clans set up its own foreign bookmaker with interests and projections in Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Romania, Vietnam, Panama, Paraguay, Argentina and Russia. In this operation were seized assets worth over €1 billion, while over 80 searches have been carried out throughout Italy.

Camorra

Although the first structured criminal organization in Apulia was created by the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, preceding the SCU, the Apulian underworld frowned upon their region being dominated by an outside organization. Taking advantage of the downfall of Raffaele Cutolo, the local criminals distanced themselves of the Camorra and get more aligned to the 'Ndrangheta.

Balkan organizations

The Apulian mafias have long been rooted in Albania, a neighbouring country where the Italian language is widespread. The Albanian mafia collaborates with the SCU to make Albania a sorting centre for large amounts of smuggled cigarettes, and drugs from Afghanistan, much of which enter Italy through the coasts of Montenegro, Croatia and Albania. On 27 July 1999 police in Durrës (Albania), with Italian assistance, arrested one of the godfathers of the Sacra Corona Unita. This Albanian link seems to confirm that the Sacra Corona Unita and the Albanian mafia are "partners" in Apulia and delegate several criminal activities.

Rosa dei Venti: formed in 1990 by De Tommasi in the Lecce prison, following an internal division in the SCU.

Internal divisions

Società Foggiana

The murder of Giuseppe Laviano, lieutenant of the Sacra Corona Unita in Foggia (whose body was never found), in January 1989, marked a turning point in the mafia war and the rise of Rocco Moretti, known as il porco (the pig), in the context of the Foggia organized crime at the expense of Laviano himself. After the murder, Moretti became the head of the new criminal organization Società foggiana in Foggia. Following the arrests made by the police in the Mantide operation, among the many details, macabre revelations also emerged, such as the photo of Laviano's severed head, shown to the main members of the Società Foggiana during the summits.

The relations between the Foggia delinquency and the Camorra are probably the oldest and deepest ones. The Foggia delinquency has managed to make the qualitative leap thanks to the Camorra, particularly the Nuova Camorra Organizzata; during the NCO period many "Cutoliani" spent periods of imprisonment in the prisons of San Severo and Foggia, making contacts with and recruiting local criminals. Raffaele Cutolo's sister Rosetta Cutolo spent time in San Severo. Cutolo even organized a sort of offshoot of the NCO in northern Apulia, the Nuova Camorra Pugliese; the killing of Don Peppe Sciorio, Lieutenant of Cutolo for Foggia, was another clear sign that the Foggia criminals wanted to become independent.

The Società Foggiana is considered the most brutal and bloody of all the Italian mafias.

The most powerful clans inside the Società Foggiana are the Trisciuoglio clan, the Sinesi-Francavilla clan and the Moretti-Pellegrino-Lanza clan. The investigation started in 2016 against a Maghreb gang based in the region of Trentino-Alto Adige. The vast network of drug traffickers, extended from Morocco, passing through Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands to finally arrive in Trentino and in Bolzano. Arriving in Italy, the drugs were sold in parks, historic centers and near schools by mainly Tunisian and Moroccan pushers. Nineteen people were arrested, with four still being wanted in Italy, Spain and in the Netherlands at the time, and seventy-three under investigation. Over one ton of hashish and 2 kg of cocaine were seized.

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