It was a fertile place for drug trafficking and money laundering, as long as no violence was involved. Organized crime groups divided up the Italian capital, the second largest city in Europe by extension, among themselves. Murals in San Basilio, Rome, a neighborhood linked to drug dealers. “If we had not arrested him, he would be huge now,” say sources in the investigation. But he violated the first commandment of the Mafia Constitution: to keep quiet. He replaced his colleagues arrested in the Brasile Low Cost operation, earned more than €10 million in eight months, imported cocaine directly from South America and obtained the ‘Ndrangheta’s approval to operate his business. Even though the city’s share of the pie was already distributed, he behaved like a deity. “I am God,” he proclaimed upon leaving prison in May 2020, after spending six years there for a homicide for which he was acquitted. The symbol of the group’s dazzling rise is Elvis Demce, a 37-year-old second-generation Albanian raised in the outskirts of Rome. The Albanians wanted their share of the city. Its arrival would have definitively changed the landscape of organized crime in Rome. That January, in a case dubbed Brazilian Low Cost, an international police operation coordinated from Rome, involving the US DEA and infiltrated agents, aborted the entry of the shipment of cocaine from Brazil. They planned to bring enough to flood the capital’s 15 districts with drugs, just enough to throw off the balance of the Eternal City’s fragmented criminal scene. With the help of the Casamonica clan, a group that has long operated in the city, the Albanians chartered a private plane to bring seven tons of cocaine from Brazil. That was the idea behind a 2019 operation by an emerging criminal network of Albanians in Rome.
And whoever dominates that economic space will also have power over the territory: the street. A criminal maxim states that whoever controls a drug’s price controls the market.
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