Mafia going green
What is going on? No more Colombian white? Turkish brown? As one official put it: “Sicily is blessed with sun and wind, but it is also cursed by the Mafia.” That Sicilian wind is useful because it can generate wind energy; for the mafia we still haven’t found a use (although you could argue it creates some jobs for us who fight it).
But although Sicily built large windmill farms to generate wind energy the turbines stand still. Anti Mafia magistrates are now looking into this business to see if organized crime found a new way to enter the mainstream business world.
The local “lord of the winds” is mentioned in a 530-page court document refered to by the Financial Times that resulted in the arrests in February of eight people – local officials, businessmen and an alleged Mafia boss all accused of corruption in a wind farm project. Local Mafia allegedly bribed city officials in Mazara del Vallo so the town would invest in wind farms to produce energy. The project, worth hundreds of millions of euros (dollars), was first devised in 2003 and later uncovered by an investigation that included wiretaps, police said in a statement.
Investigators discovered that luxury cars and thousands of euros in bribes were given to politicians to ensure that a Mafia-backed company won the lucrative public contract. The suspects also illegally accessed the municipality’s safe to copy the proposal of a rival company, which was later excluded from the bidding. The infiltration of construction and other public works contracts in Sicily has long been a source of income for Cosa Nostra.
Better believe it: granting a lot of government money for a particular type of project is an offer they just can’t refuse…. They will gladly come and get it, no matter how or what, or even create it. What’s next?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/feddb08c-38cd-11de-8cfe-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/01/mafia-wind-farm-operation_n_170825.html
