Convicts, Cons, Cosa Nostra

drawing by Suzanne Dunaway

In Italy as in Tony Soprano’s New Jersey, the garbage business is traditionally in the hands of the Mob.  

The ubiquity of organized crime is no surprise when it comes to Italy's South, cradle of the Mafia and its regional offshots. Nobody’s shocked to hear that the Calabrian ‘Ndrangeta runs hospital kitchens and has the corner on artificial limbs. It’s par for the course if Goodfella funeral directors wander the hospital wards in Naples with impunity in search of imminent cadavers to snatch, or if Sicilian regional administrators let public hospitals deteriorate so their Mafioso friends can build private ones. But when we read reports of Mafia-owned businesses getting the contracts to build and renovate hospitals in previously off-limits northern cities like Verona, Savona, and Milan, I for one find it frankly amazing.

Convicted Mafia bosses are always getting assigned to house arrest instead of prison on the grounds of ill-health. Failing which, they arrange transfers from jail to cushy private hospitals on trumped-up medical excuses. One easy trick is to buy off a surgeon to perform a biopsy and then switch the histological slides, so the pathologist will diagnose a healthy boss as having cancer. In my favorite case the gentleman had been passing himself off as a kidney dialysis patient. When a suspicious judge sent around an inspector to check with his own eyes that the near-death lab specimens came, indeed, from the man of honor, cooperative doctors rigged up a bag containing the blood of a real dialysis patient on the boss’s back and ran a catheter down through the sleeve of his hospital gown. That way a nurse who was in on the scam could by a little sleight of hand draw a diseased blood sample, in front of the inspector’s eyes, from the plastic tube instead of the vein. 

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