Police have found links between the Irish Republican Army and a powerful branch of the Italian mafia, according to disclosures in Italian court this week.
The court hearing dealt with a recent bust of the infamous ‘Ndrangheta clan. Police arrested 20 ‘clan operatives and seized over $584 million in the culmination of a five-year investigation into a massive money laundering scheme. That scheme saw ‘Ndrangheta operatives laundering drug money through the purchase and sale of luxury properties on the Calabrian coast, according to Italian media.
The Italians weren’t working alone. IRA member and convicted terrorist Henry Fitzsimons stands accused of having invested in the same properties in concert with the mafiosos. Fitzsimons faces an Italian warrant, but he has yet to be arrested, according to media reports.
Police and judicial investigators say the ‘Ndrangheta mafia clan makes billions of euros a year from drug trafficking, the arms trade and other criminal activities, but an Italian police statement said the real estate operation was representative of “a new ‘Ndrangheta entrepreneurship,” according to Italian newspaper Repubblica. “(There is) a new way of carrying out Mafia activities,” the statement said, “where there is no shooting or killing, but where affiliation derives only from one matrix: money.
"What emerges from the investigation is an international and modern ‘Ndrangheta, with a complex structure and a colonising and expansionist philosophy," the statement continued.
This is not the first time members of the Irish Republican Army have participated in cross-border organized crime collaborations. The IRA – also known as “the Provisionals” – did business in the past with Colombian narco-terrorist group FARC, according to a 2011 report by theUnited States’ Committee on International Relations. That report named at least 15 IRA members who traveled back and forth to Colombia for around three years, and said the IRA had been paid $2 million in drug money to train FARC members.
