Italy Tentacles of the Octopus

The Mafia brings Europe's worst drug epidemic home

In the Sicilian countryside, helicopters clattered overhead in the early- morning dark as Italian police swooped in to raid a luxurious villa. In the streets of Palermo, Milan, Naples, up and down Italy last week, hundreds of narcotics investigators fanned out to collar scores of reputed Mafia drug traffickers. And across the Atlantic, U.S. FBI agents rounded up still more suspects in eight cities. A trail that began in Buffalo and Philadelphia three years ago had led the two countries to crack open a powerful transatlantic drug ring accused of flooding the U.S. with Italian heroin smuggled in wine bottles, tomato...

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