Italian police detained 130 people on Feb. 11 in an operation against the Sicilian mafia in Palermo, and the country’s top anti-mafia prosecutor said the evidence suggested bosses in high security prisons were still passing on “criminal directives” to those on the outside. The carabinieri—Italy’s national police—said the anti-mafia operation led to the issuing of restrictive measures for 183 people, 36 of whom were already in prison. It was the biggest crackdown on the Sicilian mafia, known as La Cosa Nostra, since the 1990s. The Cosa Nostra—made famous by movies such as “The Godfather”—terrorized Sicily for years and at the height of its power, in 1992, killed two top prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, after they used informers known as “pentito” to prosecute and put in jail hundreds of mafiosi. Since the 1990s the Sicilian mafia has been overtaken as Italy’s most powerful organized crime group by the ‘Ndrangheta, who are based in Calabria on the Italian mainland. The carabinieri said those arrested on Feb. 11 were accused of “criminal association of a mafia nature, attempted murder, extortion aggravated by the mafia method, and association for the purpose of drug trafficking.” Speaking on Feb. 11, Italy’s national anti-mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, said […]