Alfonso Caruana - Cocaine Trafficker

Cocaine Trafficker

Meanwhile, Caruana organised a network that smuggled eleven metric tonnes of cocaine to Italy from 1991-94. Caruana brought together the cocaine producers of the Colombian Cartels with the Italian distributors, six 'Ndrangheta families from Calabria. At the time the Cuntrera-Caruana family was labeled as "the fly-wheel of the drug trade and the indispensable link between suppliers and distributors."

The investigation, code-named Operation Cartagine, started when the police seized 5497 kilos of cocaine (a European record at the time) in March 1994 in Turin. A year later the Turin Prosecutors Office presented the indictment. The operation neutralized the most important supply-line of narcotics to Europe, investigators claimed.

He was sentenced in absentia on July 30, 1997 by the Palermo court of appeal to 21 years and 10 months for Mafia association, conspiracy to traffic narcotics and aggravated importing, possession and sale of large quantities of narcotics for his involvement in heroin trafficking in the 1980s. At the same time he was prosecuted in Turin for cocaine trafficking in the 1990s.

The Palermo court concluded that the network was "a further indication of the high criminal capability" of Caruana who had "escaped every judicial initiative during the last decades and succeeded in reaching the top of the international drug trade, adjusting his criminal contacts and showing such skill that he is to be considered as one of the most important exponents in this sector." In July 1998, he was arrested in Woodbridge, Ontario in an international police action called Project Omerta for trafficking cocaine from Colombia to Canada.