Italy’s mafias make more than three billion euros a year from the tourism sector and are primed to pocket even more from large-scale upcoming events, a research institute warned on Tuesday.
Organized crime groups preying on vulnerable companies from hotels to restaurants are currently taking home 3.3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) a year and are set to cash in on the Catholic Church’s Jubilee celebrations in Rome and the Winter Olympic Games, the Demoskopika research institute said.
“Italian tourism is under attack. The 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics and the 2025 Jubilee whet the appetites of the mafia,” Demoskopika president Raffaele Rio said in a report.
The powerful ‘Ndrangheta mafia, which is rooted in Calabria, alone accounts for half of the entire turnover, the report said.
The Campania-based Camorra, the Sicilian Mafia and organized crime groups in the region of Puglia also rake in large amounts of money from tourism.
While those mob heartlands are in the south of Italy, the groups made almost 1.5 billion euros out of tourism in the country’s wealthy north, the report added.
“More than seven thousand vulnerable companies risk becoming tasty prey for criminal associations,” Rio warned, saying that nearly 15 percent of the 48,000 businesses in the sector were struggling with liquidity and debt crises, which made them vulnerable to mob “offers” of help.
The organized crime groups loan money to businesses under punishing conditions, and use them to clean ill-gotten gains.
“The mafias are building a criminal welfare system that crushes entrepreneurs in difficulty,” Rio said.
“They promise financial survival, cover debts and guarantee liquidity but at a very high price: the control or total acquisition of companies.
“This perverse system not only strengthens the power of criminal families on the territory, but fuels a circuit of money laundering, usury and extortion that suffocates the legal economy of our country,” he said.
The report on tourism in Italy comes just days after a Catholic nun was arrested by Italian police for allegedly bringing messages for the mafia to prisoners.
In March, Italy expanded a controversial program to remove children from their mafia families to break the cycle of criminal behavior being passed down to new generations.
Earlier this year, Interpol released a report showing that mafias, cartels and gangs in Europe are using fruit companies, hotels and other legal businesses as fronts to make huge profits. According to the agency, hundreds of criminal networks are able to infiltrate the legal economy to hide their activities and launder their criminal profits.
Europol said the ‘Ndrangheta mafia’s profits from drug and arms trafficking as well as tax defrauding are invested throughout Europe in real estate, supermarkets, hotels and other commercial activities.
