RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Cocaine kingpin Rocco Morabito, who rose to fame and fortune as a young man in Milan’s booming drug trade in the 1980s, was extradited Wednesday from Brazil to Italy, where he will begin a 30-year prison sentence.
From a young age, he was known for running the drug trade – from cocaine to heroin – in Italy’s financial capital.
The young Calabrian, who bought nightclubs and trendy bars, became at 25 one of the new faces of the Calabrian mafia, the N’drangheta, which was then in full bloom.
U Tamunga, the nickname he received because of his passion for an old model of a German military SUV, was one of the protagonists of the golden years of the famous nightclubs in the center of Milan, where the sons of the industrial bourgeoisie met in search of thrills.
This environment allowed him to establish relationships with celebrities from the world of show business, allowing the ‘Ndrangheta to penetrate the social and economic fabric of the most prosperous region of the peninsula.
Thanks to the cocaine trade, he gained the trust of the Latin American drug cartels.
His large amounts of money, punctuality in business transactions, and ability to penetrate markets abroad made him a key figure.
THE ‘NDRANGHETA AMBASSADOR
“He was like an ambassador for the ‘Ndrangheta. He came from the ‘noble’ families of the organization,” said Roberto Saviano, a well-known Italian mafia journalist and author of several books on the subject.
“His role was fundamental in linking the powerful families of the Calabrian mafia with numerous international cartels,” he said.
Italy’s second most wanted criminal after Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro, according to Interpol, was one of the men who helped internationalize the Calabrian mafia and supplant the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and Neapolitan Camorra.
The ‘Ndrangheta is now the criminal organization “with the most ramifications in the world, being present on all five continents,” Italian judge Roberto di Bella wrote.
But not all has been rosy for Morabito. In 1994, he was caught trying to pay undercover investigators millions of dollars to deliver a ton of cocaine.
From then on, Morabito was on the run, fleeing Italy and spending 25 years between Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
After living for 13 years under a different identity in the Uruguayan resort of Punta del Este, he was arrested in a Montevideo hotel in 2017 under the name Francisco Antonio Cappelletto Souza a wealthy soy exporter.
While awaiting extradition in an Uruguayan prison, he and three other international criminals made a spectacular escape by cutting a hole that allowed them to escape through the prison roof.
According to the investigation, about US$50,000 was used to bribe the agents.
He was re-arrested in May 2021 at a luxury hotel in Joao Pessoa, in northeastern Brazil, due to a joint Brazilian-Italian investigation and faced a 30-year sentence in Italy.
Brazil approved his extradition last March but was suspended because of ongoing criminal proceedings. Italy feared that the man with a thousand lives and many identities, with bushy eyebrows and a taste for the good life, would once again get away.
With information from AFP