Italian Police Make 11 Mafia Arrests, but Miss the Big Cheese

Al Capone was brought down because of tax evasion. Some of Sicily’s top mobsters have now been brought down by a pungent combination of sheep and cheese.

The alleged 11 henchmen of Matteo Messina Denaro, the fugitive leader of Sicily’s notorious mafia, were arrested after Italian authorities cracked a code written about animals and dairy products.

Vito Gondola, a 77-year-old sheep herder whose phone conversations were traced by Italian investigators, would reportedly call other mafia members to let them know he’d hidden a message on a small piece of paper under a rock in the field where his animals grazed.

Among his coded phrases were “I’ve put the ricotta cheese aside for you, will you come by later?” and “the sheep need shearing … the shears need sharpening.”

His associates would then come to collect the written notes from Gondola’s fields, which Italian police were able to track using hidden microphones and cameras.

And it turned out the messages don’t seem to be about cheese or wool at all.

Gondola was one of 11 men arrested Monday that authorities describe as the people closest to Denaro, the gang’s chief (or its big cheese, as it were), who has been on the run since 1993.

Denaro, who is thought to be responsible for a large number of gang-related deaths, has depended on an intricate network of accomplices to keep the gangster organization alive from afar. But some calls recorded by investigators hint that he has less control over the organization than his predecessors did.

The mobster has maintained a low profile since he went into hiding, but he’s understood by Italian authorities to be the successor of Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, godfathers of the group, both of whom were given life sentences for their complicity in murders and corruption affiliated with the notorious gang.

Although the Sicilian mafia was once considered the most powerful organized criminal organization in all of Italy, it has lost a lot of its prominence over the past two decades as many of its core members grew older or were arrested by Italian authorities. Several of the men arrested Monday were older than 70, although Denaro is a comparatively youthful 53.

And sadly, this isn’t the first time innocent cheese found itself at the center of an Italian mafia scandal.

In 2012, Giuseppe Mandara, who once called himself the “Armani of Mozzarella,” was arrested for misleading consumers to spend more on his cheese, and for his alleged involvement with the Neapolitan mafia. At the time of his arrest, authorities seized more than $100 million of his assets, which they claimed were linked to the buffalo mozzarella business that contributed to the cheese king’s fortune.

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