Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia Clan - Brokering Cocaine

Brokering Cocaine

While in Venezuela the clan started to be involved in cocaine trafficking. They became seriously involved when a joint venture of 'Ndrangheta families needed Alfonso Caruana to supply them. Caruana organized a network that smuggled eleven metric tons of cocaine to Italy from 1991-94. Caruana brought together the cocaine suppliers of the Cali Cartel with the Italian distributors from the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria.

The pipeline fell apart when the Italian police seized 5497 kilo's of cocaine (a European record at the time) in March 1994 near Turin. A year later the Turin Prosecutors Office presented the indictment (the investigation was code-named Operation Cartagine). The operation neutralized the most important supply-line of narcotics to Europe, investigators claimed. The Cuntrera-Caruana family was labelled as "the fly-wheel of the drug trade and the indispensable link between suppliers and distributors." One of the suppliers was Henry Loaiza Ceballos of the Cali cartel.

However, Caruana who was not arrested, simply moved the cocaine pipeline towards Canada, where the family took care of wholesale distribution with the consent of Vito Rizzuto the leader of Cosa Nostra, who came from the same region in Sicily as the Cuntrera-Caruana’s. In July, 1998, Alfonso Caruana and his brothers Gerlando and Pasquale Caruana were arrested in an international police action called Project Omerta for trafficking cocaine from Colombia to Canada.

At one time Caruana claimed he was a simple car wash attendant. According to police, he controlled one of the largest drug dealing networks in the world. The Caruana’s pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to import and traffic some 1,500 kilograms of cocaine and was sentenced to 18 years by the Ontario Superior Court in February 2000.