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He had a reputation for keeping out of trouble. At every stop, he charmed and bullied other narcos into doing his bidding, and deployed tricks of the trade to conceal shipments that made him one of Calabria’s biggest-ever traffickers. Maluferru’s father, Antonio Romeo, ran the well-connected Romeo-Staccu clan of the Ndrangheta until he was arrested in the mid-1990s and sentenced to 30 years in prison.Īfter taking the reins of his family’s trafficking operations, Maluferru became a rare connector of worlds: a man with the necessary contacts in Latin America to secure huge supplies of cocaine, and in Europe to get the drugs through key ports.Īs part of a group known in underworld circles as the “Gang of Belgium,” he sourced cocaine in Colombia and Brazil, had it shipped through the Ivory Coast, and brought it in through the docks of Northwest Europe: Antwerp, Hamburg, and Rotterdam. This cold, calculating approach to business may run in the family. Another time, according to the same criminals, Maluferru let Mexican traffickers hold one of his own brothers hostage for eight days, as collateral for a two-million-euro drug shipment. “They started shooting three, four times in the middle of the road,” one ’Ndrangheta associate was heard telling another in a bugged chat. In one incident breathlessly recalled by underworld figures in 2016, his gang had a shootout with a Mexican gang on the streets of an unnamed European city, scaring them off. In particular, police sources familiar with the trafficker say, he admired Los Zetas, the hyper-violent cartel known for beheadings, bombings, and brazen attacks on Mexican government troops.īut in real life, Maluferru and his brothers - all of whom worked with southern Italy’s ’Ndrangheta syndicate, the clan-based crime group which has grown to become the country’s most powerful in recent decades - showed no fear of Mexican narcos.

In his younger years, the Italian drug trafficker Giuseppe Romeo, known as “Maluferru,” was fascinated with Mexican narcos. Now, we examine their pipeline through Latin America and Africa, showing how the highly-connected Giuseppe Romeo moved drugs through corruption-plagued ports to Antwerp, Rotterdam, and beyond. In the first part of this OCCRP-IrpiMedia investigation, we explored how the ’Ndrangheta syndicate moved cocaine across Europe. By Cecilia Anesi, Margherita Bettoni and Giulio Rubino