Mafia where is the hospital

The body of his son was barely cold when the grieving father was threatened by men from the funeral company. Inside the mortuary of an austere hospital in Lamezia Terme, a city in southern Italy, the dead were not left in peace. The men from the funeral company somehow knew which patients had passed away even before their own families did.

If relatives considered picking a different funeral company to take away their loved one, the men would soon ensure they changed their minds. Medical staff were powerless to intervene. Today they control a large part of cocaine importation into Europe, as well as arms smuggling, extortion and cross-border money laundering. By corrupting local officials, organised criminals have been able to make vast profits from contracts given to their own front companies, establishing monopolies on services ranging from delivering patients in faulty ambulances to transporting blood to taking away the dead.

An investigation by the Financial Times has established how the trail of money from these crimes washed into the financial centres of London and Milan. Over the past five years, profits gained from the misery of patients in Calabrian hospitals were packaged up into debt instruments using the kind of financial engineering typically favoured by hedge funds and investment banks.

Hundreds of millions of euros of these bonds, many containing dubious invoices signed off by parts of the health system later found to have been infiltrated by organised crime, were sold to international investors ranging from Italian private banks to a pension fund in South Korea.

Calabria is not only the poorest region in Italy, but one of the most deprived in the EU. A decade — and three Italian recessions — later the local economy has got worse, with the region consistently ranking in last place nationally in almost every category.

Unemployment has increased from By the mids, however, a huge opportunity opened up before them. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra had been devastated by a sustained anti-Mafia campaign by the Italian state. The Calabrians seized on the chance to take over their relationships with Latin-American drug cartels. This has made them more resistant than other organised criminal groups to state penetration of their operations. This increasing financial sophistication is coupled with a brutal approach to internal discipline.

Those who are judged to have discredited the name of their family are at risk of being murdered by their own relatives. In , the daughter of one criminal family died in agony after drinking hydrochloric acid. Her father, mother and brother were jailed for abuse after prosecutors failed to prove the more serious charge of forcing her to drink it as punishment for speaking to the police.

It crushes the region. We are always getting poorer, but this is what they want. The weaker we are, the less likely we are to resist. Inside our minds. Anti-Mafia investigators say it is common for multiple families to pool their resources into criminal joint ventures, especially those focused on cross-border shipments of cocaine worth hundreds of millions of euros. It is through ruthless control over the economic activity inside their home territory that these families have created a base from which to rapidly expand their criminal activity abroad, reinvesting profits from extortion into highly lucrative drug trafficking and other criminal ventures.

Anyone in their region who openly opposes the clans risks not only their own life, but also being blacklisted publicly. Saffioti lives under police protection to this day. When he won a contract in France, his trucks were torched again. The majority simply adapt to the system. Nicola Gratteri, 61, was born in Calabria and has lived there almost his entire life, but the public prosecutor barely knows what the area around him looks like today.

Most days, he eats alone and works late into the evening. Another girl in his class was the daughter of a famous crime boss. One of his childhood friends later joined a clan. Decades after they played together as youths, Gratteri ended up prosecuting him in court. Yet he lives out each day in the knowledge that death is stalking him. Police have foiled multiple attempts on his life. In , they discovered a cache of weapons, including Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers and plastic explosives, which they believed were intended to murder him and his bodyguards.

I try to avoid dangerous situations, but recently it has become even more difficult. Healthcare has been a red flag in Calabria for generations. The gangsters disguised as the entrepreneurial Putrino Group, which managed the businesses from until Investigators found that the ambulances had broken brakes, lights, transmissions and clutches and lacked essential life-saving equipment. Even the ambulance personnel hired through the mafia companies were unqualified.

The Ndranghetisti forced nurses and doctors to remain silent, in essence controlling the hospital with a reign of terror. They had the keys to various departments, had access to the drug storage unit, and used the hospital computers to access sensitive patient data.

The former manager of the Catanzaro province health agency, Giuseppe Perri; its former administrative director, Giuseppe Pugliese; and the former head of the emergency service, Eliseo Ciccone, were also arrested for alleged abuse of office. If you run out of health, you are unable to do some activities. If you are out of health, you can buy health in the shop for fair prices. You can also receive free health from some questions in the Nightclub or as prize in boss fights.