The financiers of the Provincial Command of Reggio Calabria, with the operational support of the Central Investigation Service on the Organised Crime and with the collaboration of Europol and of the Central Directorate for Anti-Drug Services, have given execution of an order ordering pre-trial detention in imprisonment against two officials of the Customs Agency and of the Monopolies in service at the Customs Office of Gioia Tauro and the house arrest of an employee of a shipping company that would be involved in a international drug trafficking aggravated by the to facilitate the 'Ndrangheta. The measures were ordered by the investigating judge at the Court of First Instance of Reggio Calabria, at the request of the local Public Prosecutor's Office of the Repubblica - District Anti-Mafia Directorate.

A total of seven subjects are being investigated by the DDA Reggio Calabria, including a third customs officer who had already been Stopped in the course of a separate and converging operation carried out in October 2022 by the same department.

The Guardia di Finanza explained that the officials would part of a criminal association, now disjointed, formed by the manager of a freight forwarding company, dockers and representatives of the main 'Ndrangheta gangs operating in the area of the "plain of Gioia Tauro". Customs officers on duty in key points of the control device, such as the scanner and visual scanning by opening containers, would have allowed the exit from the port of very large quantities of cocaine by altering the results of inspections, or the failure to detect anomalies in the controlled loads.

Among the documents found by the financiers there are also precise instructions, provided by customs officials, on how the narcos South Americans should have placed the cocaine cakes within the cover loads, in order to reduce the the possibility that these could be detected in the course of routine checks. Where the cargo had been However, if they were discovered, the customs officers themselves would have proceeded to provide the organization with the relevant seizure reports in order to to justify the loss of the narcotic, thus avoiding the payment of the agreed amount. In addition, one of the customs officials He would have taken care to warn his associates about any operations conducted by the Fiamme Gialle with the intention of avoiding the arrest.

The investigations, also conducted with the collaboration of of the Customs and Monopolies Agency, have made it possible to reconstruct the involvement of these customs officers in five drug imports, carried out between June 2020 and October 2022, for more than three tons of cocaine, of which 2.7 intercepted by financiers and seized.