More than 100 reputed Mafia gangsters were arrested in New York and Sicily yesterday in the biggest transatlantic crackdown on Cosa Nostra for 20 years. The operation was designed to prevent the renewal of historic ties between Sicilian and US crime families.

Italian anti-Mafia police said that the main targets were “the heirs of historic Sicilian and American Dons” from the Gambino, Di Maggio, Mannino and Inzerillo families.

Thirty were captured in Palermo and 87 in the New York area – including the entire alleged leadership of the Gambino clan – in a joint FBI-Italian operation codenamed Old Bridge. Charges included drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion, gambling, racketeering and seven murders over a three-decade period.

Pietro Grasso, the Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor, said that the arrests were part of the biggest joint US-Italian operation against the Mafia for 20 years. Rafaele Grassi, a senior Italian police investigator working in New York, told The Times that the round-up had prevented the renewal of historic Mafia ties between Sicily and America.

“We cut the link between Palermo and New York before they could start again on illicit trafficking,” he said.

The operation focused on New York’s Gambino crime family formerly headed by the “Teflon Don” John Gotti and the related Inzerillo clan in Italy.

Italian police said that the Mafia families targeted had moved to fill the gap caused by the arrest of Godfathers from clans in the Corleone area, which dominated Cosa Nostra unchallenged after winning the brutal mob wars of the 1980s in which 1,000 died.

When Toto Riina, then Godfather, was arrested in 1993 he was succeeded by a fellow member of the Corleone clan, Bernardo Provenzano. Provenzano, however, was tracked down to a hideout just outside Corleone two years ago and arrested. His successor, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, was also arrested last autumn near Palermo.

AntiMafia experts said this series of coups had left the way open for other clans once “exiled” to the US to try and take control of an increasingly leaderless Mafia structure.

Police said that members of the Gambino, Inzerillo and other Mafia families, who fled to the United States during the internal Mafia wars of the 1980s to escape death at the hands of the dominant Corleonesi, had returned recently to Palermo to reconquer their old territory.

Among the alleged mafiosi arrested in New York was Francesco Paolo Augusto Calì, also known as “Franky Boy”, a member of the Gambino clan who is said to have acted as the “American ambassador of Cosa Nostra to Sicily”.

Italian reports said the FBI had had two informers in the Gambino clan, named as Frank Fappiano and Michael Di Leonardo. In Palermo the alleged dons arrested included Filippo Casamento and Giovanni Inzerillo, a building entrepreneur and son of Totuccio Inzerillo, a notorious Mafia boss.

Police allege that Giovanni Inzerillo became a Mafia boss at a Cosa Nostra summit held in August 2003 in Torretta, a village about 20km from Palermo. The meeting was called to discuss the “grand return to power” by nonCorleonesi clans. It was attended by fifteen alleged mafiosi including Giovanni’s cousin, Giuseppe Inzerillo and his uncles Giovanni Angelo Mannino and Calogero Mannino.

Reports said the plotters had had some inkling that their attempt to regain control of Cosa Nostra in the leadership vacuum might fail or be betrayed to the authorities. Giovanni and Giuseppe Inzerillo were secretly recorded during a visit to their uncle Francesco Inzerillo in a Turin prison in which he warned them to “get out of Europe, not just Italy . . . You just can’t stay here any more, there’s no future”. He suggested they move to South America.

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