Napoli Group members arrested over a fake €300 note and a paper trail leading to the Italian underworld
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Version 0 of 1. After being flooded with Teutonic imports in the past decade, Italy has finally managed to export something to Germany: the €300 note. The bogus money – no such note has ever been introduced – was accepted by a naïve German business. It came to the attention of police on the trail of counterfeiters who are believed to have dumped half a billion fake euros on the continent since the creation of the single currency 15 years ago. Italian police busted the criminal gang responsible for the dodgy €300 bills and other, more plausible, counterfeit money in a series of nationwide arrests on Wednesday. Carabinieri officers held 56 people, mostly in and around Naples, who are suspected of being part of the “Napoli Group”– the notorious counterfeiting crime group thought to be responsible for making and distributing 90 per cent of the world’s fake money. Investigators said the Napoli Group had achieved “complete control of the international market through the distribution of significant amounts of fake money in Italy and all over the world”. Prosecutors began investigating the source of the bills at the start of 2012 (Getty Images) Arrests linked to suspected counterfeiting were also made in Genova, Turin, Palermo and Avellino. Naples prosecutors began investigating the source of fake bills at the start of 2012, with the support of EU law enforcement agency Europol and the European Anti-Fraud Office. They were able to piece together how the group gained control of the international market in counterfeit euros. Criminals distributed significant quantities in Italy and all over the world. France, Spain, Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria were the countries most affected. The syndicate developed a sophisticated system for printing, storing and distributing the fake money. Operators spoke in code on the phone – “gnocchi” (potato dumplings) meant coins and “L’Americano” meant dollars. However, the magistrates leading the investigation have ruled out the involvement of the Naples mafia organisation, the Camorra. The Napoli Group has been described as “the arch-enemy of the European Central Bank” (Getty Images) During two years of investigations, police said they had seized only a small fraction of the fake money to have entered circulation – 5,500 counterfeit banknotes and coins worth a total of about €1m. Soren Pedersen, a spokesman for Europol, said: “We concentrated our investigations on Italy and on Naples, in particular, because we saw that this is where much of the counterfeit money was coming from. But this is a Europe-wide problem. These criminals depend on the rest of the continent to distribute and use the fake money.” The discovery of the €300 note in Germany was widely reported by the Italian press, although Mr Pedersen told The Independent he could not confirm the stories. But European officials described the Napoli Group as “the arch-enemy of the European Central Bank”. Italian police discovered a secret printing press in the centre of Naples that produced millions of notes. They also found a laboratory which made fake stamps and scratchcards in nearby Arzano. One and two euro coins were manufactured in Gallicano, near Rome. Domenica Guardato, one of the people placed under house arrest in connection with the counterfeiting operation, had already been questioned by police. She was part of a separate investigation after the death of her six-year-old child, who died after falling from a sixth-floor balcony in June. |