28 mobsters arrested after Mafia boss's girlfriend turns police informer

Arrested: Gaspare Parisi, whose girlfriend Monica Vitale has given police information about his alleged Mafia dealings
Italian police today arrested 28 Mafia mobsters after the girlfriend of a Godfather turned informer.
Monica Vitale, the partner of boss Gaspare Parisi, spilt the beans on the activities of her lover and his associates because she could no longer stand his life of crime and is now in hiding with round-the-clock protection.
With Monica's priceless information officers carried out a 15-month surveillance operation on the gangsters - using listening devices and hidden cameras - finally moving in to make the arrests early this morning in a massive dawn swoop codenamed Pedro.
The men were held in a series of raids in Palermo, Sicily, the Mafia's island stronghold - and during the operation it also emerged that one arrested mobster, Calogero Lo Presti, had been extorting money from a TV crew who were making a crime series on the Mafia.
Lo Presti and his associates had managed to infiltrate the set of popular TV show Squadra Antimafia (Anti-Mafia Squad), which revolves around a group of brave police officers fighting corruption and organised crime in Palermo.
'She has told everything she knows to a team of detectives and prosecutors and now as a result she is under police protection, as she is a key witness'

He had managed to secure lucrative contracts with the show for catering and transport and he was recorded boasting to one friend: 'If they carry on paying and using the services we provide they will have no problems on the set.'
Video footage released by police in Palermo showed armed officers climbing over fences to launch raids on the villas and houses of those arrested, and in other footage those held were seen having a series of meetings to discuss criminal activity.
Miss Vitale, who told police she was used to collect extortion payments from designer boutiques in Palermo, also revealed that she had overheard a murder being discussed by mobsters during her time with Parisi.

Murdered: Miss Vitale told police she had overheard talk of the murder of former MP Enzo Fragala, who was beaten to death last year
She told police how lawyer and former MP Enzo Fragala was beaten to death in Palermo in February 2010 on the orders of boss Tommasso Di Giovanni after he 'failed to show respect to the wife of another mobster who had been arrested'.
Di Giovanni was among the 28 people held in the police operation. One mobster suffered a fractured leg as he tried to escape police capture by jumping from a staircase. He was under armed guard in hospital.
A police spokesman in Palermo said: 'This was a very successful operation against Mafia activity in the city and led to 28 people being arrested. It came at the end of 15 months of surveillance and much of the information came from Monica Vitale.
'She has told everything she knows to a team of detectives and prosecutors and now as a result she is under police protection, as she is a key witness.'
He added that those arrested had been held on charges of Mafia association, extortion, drug trafficking and robbery.
Police named the staircase-jumping Mafia boss as Nicola Milano.
Father-and-son mobsters Giovanni and Fabrizio Toscano tried to escape in their pyjamas from a police night raid but were caught.
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