Sweet justice: catching Sicily’s gelato gangsters

• By Victor Le Boisselier, with Gael Branchereau in Rome / AFP, PALERMO, Italy

Two scoops of pistachio, one scoop of corruption. For years, holidaymakers have sipped Sicilian ice cream in famous salons in Palermo, unaware that the booming businesses were controlled by organized crime.

The fraud was a textbook example for detectives trained to track down dirty money, but even with three gangster classics – a suspected bankrupt, a frontman and a scheming ‘Godfather’ – it took years for investigators to shut down the operation.

The Brioscia brand, made up of two ice cream parlors, flourished in the late 2010s, attracting both local and foreign visitors with its glittering gold stars on travel websites.

Photo: Reuters

The stores were run by Mario Mancuso. Behind the scenes was Michele Micalizzi, who had been in prison several times for ties to the mafia.

Mancuso provided the ice, Micalizzi did the rest.

That included a cut of profits for protecting Mancuso from extortion attempts by other mobsters, a judicial source said.

However, the company was in Mancuso’s wife’s name and when divorce loomed, the men feared they would lose control.

They declared Brioscia bankrupt in 2021, blaming the €4 million hole in the books on the COVID-19 lockdown, the source said.

“It was a thriving company, very well known in Palermo. The bankruptcy was therefore unjustified,” he said.

Suspicious investigators used telephone taps to discover that the two men – far from bankrupt – had grand plans to open salons abroad.

The pair launched a new company called Sharbat, with the stores rebranded, the source said.

“I’m not even sure if the employees knew who they were working for,” said a nearby store employee, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Investigators say the men split the windfall, with Micalizzi passing some of it on to his imprisoned relatives to pay legal fees or miscellaneous items.

However, on August 12, the police intervened, arresting both men and four accomplices and confiscating 1.5 million euros.

Mancuso and Micalizzi are being prosecuted for criminal associations with a mafia character, extortion and fraudulent bankruptcy.

Between drug trafficking, extortion, government procurement, legitimate businesses and money laundering shells, Italy’s central bank estimates the annual turnover of the country’s organized crime groups at 40 billion euros, or 2 percent of national wealth.

The mafia still makes good money from traditional crimes such as drug trafficking.

For example, the ‘Ndrangheta in the southern region of Calabria are responsible for much of Europe’s cocaine trade.

“It also makes direct investments in the legal economy,” says Rocco Sciarrone, who teaches criminal psychology at the University of Turin.

More than two-thirds of mafia infiltrations occur in the construction, commercial, real estate and manufacturing sectors, according to a 2022 report by economist Antonio Parbonetti.

The crowd also has tentacles in agriculture, hotels and restaurants, logistics, transportation and waste management.

How much the crime groups ‘invest’ in each sector varies considerably from region to region.

“The socio-economic fabric (in Sicily) consists of small family businesses that lend themselves very well to money laundering,” says Eliseo Davi of the University of Palermo.

One in two mafia-controlled companies is a ‘star company’, which generates a comfortable income and employs people, and therefore enjoys broad social, economic and political support, the Parbonetti report said.

In the Palermo gelato affair, the company did not have the necessary permits for either of the two stores, prompting an investigation into whether there was collusion with government officials.

Near the salons is the former home of Giovanni Falcone, an anti-mafia judge whose 1992 murder by the mafia led to a state crackdown that permanently weakened Cosa Nostra.

Like American law enforcement agent Eliot Ness, who took down gangster Al Capone, Falcone had a simple rule: follow the money.