Mafia Tried to Buy Lazio Soccer Club; Four Arrested

Italian police arrested four suspects and are seeking three others on suspicion of trying to buy Rome soccer club SS Lazio SpA on behalf of the mafia clan featured in Roberto Saviano’s book “Gomorrah.”

Alleged collaborators with the Camorra clan based in Casal di Principe, outside Naples, “even used violence to try to force SS Lazio’s controlling shareholder to sell its stake” between 2004 and 2006, Finance Police said today in an e-mailed statement. Cash acquired through “acts of violence and intimidation, through mafia activity” was to be “laundered through the well-known soccer club,” police said.

Italy’s organized crime groups have billions of euros to launder every year. The three main crime syndicates had combined net income of 70 billion euros ($100 billion) last year, producing a 54 percent profit margin, according to Rome-based research institute Eurispes. Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company, had a profit of about half that at $45.2 billion.

With Lazio, “there was a real attempt by organized crime to take over a listed company,” Guido Gentile, a lawyer who represents both SS Lazio and its president, Claudio Lotito, said in a phone interview.

Lotito and his wife both received death threats by phone and in writing, and small bombs were detonated twice at the president’s office, Gentile said. “What is now emerging is what the company has sustained all along, and the company is happy it’s coming to light,” he said.

‘La Dolce Vita’

The case follows the seizure last month of restaurants, bars and luxury cars in Rome that were allegedly owned by the Calabrian mafia. The assets, worth more than 200 million euros, included Cafe de Paris, famous for appearing in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film “La Dolce Vita.”

Under the Lazio scheme scuttled by prosecutors and police, money earned by the mob would have been transferred from Italy to banks in Germany, Switzerland and Hungary, then shifted back to a lender in Rome for the purchase of a controlling stake in the soccer team, police said.

Giorgio Chinaglia, a former Lazio striker and club president currently living in the U.S., is among those police have warrants to arrest, said Captain Emilio Palermo, a police spokesman.

Chinaglia, 62, used to be one of Lazio’s top players, scoring 21 goals in the 1971-72 season to help the team return to the top division.

“We’re looking for him,” Palermo said in an interview.

Extortion, Market Manipulation

This is the second time arrests have been made in relation to the charges at Lazio. In October 2006, police sought 10 people accused of extortion and market manipulation, not for mafia money laundering. The accused were released after a court dismissed the charges.

At a press briefing at the time, Italy’s Finance Police said that Lotito had been the target of threats “aimed at pressuring him into selling the company.” Lotito owns 65 percent of the club, according to stock regulator Consob’s Web site.

The same accused were arrested again today after an appeal to a higher court and after linking the charges to organized crime. A request to extradite Chinaglia was sent to the U.S. based on the previous arrest warrant, Palermo said.

Chinaglia had been accused in the previous arrest warrant of giving false information to the market in 2006. He had said he was mediating to help a “Hungarian company” buy the team.

At the time, Chinaglia, who was in New York, told Italian news channel Sky TG24 that he merely did his job and “did nothing wrong.” Chinaglia couldn’t be immediately reached for a comment.

Source: bloomberg

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