Italian police said Thursday they had arrested 19 suspected members of a Nigerian mob, including the leaders of a clan which forged alliances with other mafias and violently punished any who rebelled.
In an operation dubbed “Burning Flame”, coordinated by police in Bologna and Turin, over 300 officers carried out arrests and searches in nine cities across northern Italy, from Bergamo to Modena, Parma and Ravenna.
A two-year probe — aided significantly by a man on the inside who fed details to investigators — “has allowed us to destroy much of what, within the Nigerian community, is known as the ‘Maphite’ cult,” police said in a statement.
It said the acronym stood for Maximum Academic Performance Highly Intellectuals Train Executioner.
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“Among those arrested were those who held a leading role within the criminal organization.
“Those who decided on the new initiations, who ran the prostitution rings, who dominated by force the other criminal organisations, who ran the drug trade in the city squares,” it said.
Police said the Nigerian mob used “urban guerrilla warfare which continued for days at a time” to maintain territorial control.
The ‘cult’ was just one of a series of foreign organised crime groups which had adopted Italian mafia codes, police said.
While they have much in common, they are independently structured and “in strong rivalry with each other”, it added.
‘Green bible’
Maphite was founded back in the 1980s — along with other Nigerian gangs such as the Black Axe and the Vikings — before developing into a full-blown organised crime group in the 1990s, police said.