FOR an inkling of how hard it is for Italian authorities to identify Mafia activity, consider how mobsters disguise the pizzo, or protection payments, they extort. The owner of a business may find that customers have been scared off by a menacing stranger. Within days a mysterious man visits. He may request a regular donation for a poor family, or ask a business to switch to a new supplier. Owners put two and two together, says Daniele Marannano, an anti-Mafia activist in Palermo: “There’s no need for further explanations.”
Such concealment is more common than in decades past, when payments were often collected monthly in cash. That has made it harder to spot extortion by analysing a business’s books, says Antonio Basilicata of the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate (DIA) in Rome. But software developed by Crime&tech, a firm in Milan, can still help identify companies with probable Mafia links by crunching…
