The Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan is part of the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra and held a key position in the illicit drug trade and money laundering for Cosa Nostra in the 1980s and 1990s. The Italian press baptized the clan as 'The Rothschilds of the Mafia' or 'the bankers of Cosa Nostra'.
Italian prosecutors described the Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan as an "international holding ... a holding which secures certain services for the Sicilian Cosa Nostra as a whole: drug-trafficking routes and channels for money laundering." The clan is "a very tight knit family group of men-of-honour, not only joined by Mafia bonds, but also by ties of blood." According to the Italian Antimafia Commission the Cuntrera-Caruana clan played a central role in international drug trafficking, extending their interests from Italy to Canada and Venezuela.
Prominent members of the clan are the brothers Liborio Cuntrera, Pasquale Cuntrera, Gaspare Cuntrera and Paolo Cuntrera. At the Caruana side there are Giuseppe Caruana, Carmelo Caruana and his son Alfonso Caruana, and Leonardo Caruana.
Read more about Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia Clan: Origins, Emigration, Five Decades in The Illicit Drug Trade, Brokering Cocaine, Arrests and Convictions
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“We cannot think of a legitimate argument why ... whites and blacks need be affected by the knowledge that an aggregate difference in measured intelligence is genetic instead of environmental.... Given a chance, each clan ... will encounter the world with confidence in its own worth and, most importantly, will be unconcerned about comparing its accomplishments line-by-line with those of any other clan. This is wise ethnocentricism.”
—Richard Herrnstein (1930–1994)