Sacra Corona Unita (Apulian Mafia)
Sacra Corona Unita, (SCU) or United Sacred Crown, is a Mafia-like criminal organization from Apulia (in Italian Puglia) region in Southern Italy, and is especially active in the areas of Brindisi and Lecce and not, as people tend to believe, in the region as a whole. The SCU was originally founded in the late 1970s as the Nuova Grande Camorra Pugliese (assest in Foggia) by Camorra member Raffaele Cutolo, who wanted to expand his operations into Puglia.
However a few years later with the downfall of Cutolo the organization became operating all on its own under the leadership of Giuseppe Rogoli. Under his leadership the SCU mixed Pugliese interests and opportunities with 'Ndrangheta and Camorra traditions. Originally preying on Puglia's substantial wine and olive oil industries, the group moved into fraud, gunrunning and drug trafficking and made alliances with international criminal organizations such as the Russian and Albanian mafias, Colombian drug cartels and Asian organizations. The Sacra Corona Unita consists of about 50 Clans with approximately 2,000 Core members and specializes in smuggling cigarettes, drugs, arms, and people.
Very few SCU members have been identified in the United States, however there are some links to individuals in Illinois, Florida and possibly New York. The Sacra Corona Unita is also involved in money laundering, extortion and political corruption and collects payoffs from other criminal groups for landing rights on the southeast coast of Italy. This territory is a natural gateway for smuggling to and from post-Communist countries like Croatia, Yugoslavia, and Albania.
With the decreasing importance of the Adriatic corridor as a smuggling canal (thanks to the normalization of the Balkans area) and a series of successful police and judicial operations against it in recent years the Sacra Corona Unita has been considered, if not actually defeated, reduced to a fraction of its former power, which peaked around the mid-1990s. There is evidence that this group originated from the 'Ndrangheta but it is not know if this was a splinter group or a indirect formation with help from clans of the 'Ndrangheta.
Local Rivals
The internal difficulties of the SCU aided the birth of antagonistic criminal groups such as:
- Remo Lecce Libera: formed by some leading criminal figures from Lecce, who claim to be independent from any criminal group other than the 'Ndrangheta. The term Remo indicates Remo Morello, a criminal from the Salento area, killed by criminals from the Campania region because he opposed any external interference;
- Nuova Famiglia Salentina: formed in 1986 by De Matteis Pantaleo, from Lecce and stemming from the Famiglia Salentina Libera born in the early 1980s as an autonomous criminal movement in the Salento area with no links with extra-regional Mafia expressions
- Rosa dei Venti: formed in 1990 by De Tommasi in the Lecce prison, following an internal division in the SCU.
Read more about this topic: Organized Crime In Italy