Here are some important names in the drug world, Calabria and Campania are the traditional regions from which drugs arrive in Sicily, but in Palermo someone had decided to invest in a new route.

Palermo, the mafia boss changes and drug wholesalers change
The choice fell on a historical surname

by Riccardo Lo Verso
MARCH 23, 2023, 8PM

PALERMO - The handover between the old and the new mafia boss of Bagheria marked the change of drug suppliers. Onofrio Catalano, to whom they contested the criminal management marked by debts, in 2020 handed over the baton of command to Massimiliano Ficano.

This is how the magistrates of the district anti-mafia directorate and the carabinieri of the investigative unit of the carabinieri of the provincial command of Palermo reconstructed in the blitz that today brought 17 people to prison.

Catalano, during the forced absence of the regent of the district of Bagheria, the prisoner Giuseppe Scaduto, bought drugs in Palermo. His suppliers would have been Daniele Cardinale and Francesco Paolo Catalano. The latter, in particular, has always been linked to the Porta Nuova mafia.

Catalano and his right-hand man, Giuseppe Cannata, would have submitted to the will of Ficano. The choice for the new suppliers would have fallen on Stefano Marino, a man of the Roccella mafia family, and one of the best known names for drug trafficking in Palermo.

The new precautionary custody order signed by the judge for preliminary investigations Antonella Consiglio reaches him in prison, where he is already detained in the context of another investigation which cost him a heavy sentence.

Marino also spent a period on the run. He hadn't been found at home on the night of February 7, 2008 when agents from the Flying Squad, the Central Operations Service and the FBI arrested more than sixty people. Those were the days of the 'Old Bridge' operation.

The new mafia had reactivated the "old bridge" with the bosses who emigrated to the States. Marino was accused of having managed numerous extortions and maintained contact with prominent members of mafia families from different districts. They arrested him the following summer. He was a fugitive, but at sea with his wife and children. The agents of the organized crime section tracked him down in a villa in Altavilla Milicia. Once he finished serving his sentence, Stefano Marino went into business in the funeral services sector.

Catalano told his wife that he had gone "to get the thing", together with his "partner": "... this is a house that I took over with my partner ... in the sense that he anticipates and we share what I earn".