The €200 million worth in assets belonging to late mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro have been seized, Italy’s financial police said in statement. The fully fledged criminal drug empire, born in the 1980s, laundered money through tax havens across half the world.
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The massive seizure, coordinated by the Palermo District Anti-Mafia Directorate and carried out by finance police from the provincial command in the Sicilian capital, has frozen bank accounts, companies and assets scattered across several countries.
The operation, which also involved foreign law enforcement agencies, led to the arrest of three people.
The central figure is Giacomo Tamburello, 66, a seemingly ordinary former clothing shop owner from Campobello di Mazara, the same town where the last hideout of the Cosa Nostra boss was found.
In reality, according to investigators, Tamburello – who entered the business in his early twenties – was a “first-rank narco”, the man tasked “with handling without limits the illicit profits generated by drug-trafficking activities”, prosecutors write.
His ex-wife, Maria Antonina Bruno, and their son Luca were also arrested.
From Campobello to London: the Tamburello family business
The Tamburello family’s story is marked by a dramatic rise in criminal activity. Giacomo has not reported any legal income since 1985, when he owned and ran a clothing shop.
From then on, when banking officials queried the torrents of cash he was depositing before plowing them into shares, securities, businesses and property, he claimed he had inherited large sums or struck luck with real-estate investments. The same script was used by his wife.
However, a major turning point in the management of the family fortune came with his son Luca. A graduate in international banking and finance, with work experience in London for giants such as Morgan Stanley, he acquired the skills and contacts to support his father and move dirty money through the channels of global finance, hiding funds behind offshore companies and frontmen.
The Tamburello clan’s portfolio
The seizure map highlights the scale of the network, spanning Andorra, Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Lebanon, Monaco and several locations in Spain, including Malaga and Marbella.
Frozen assets include multi-million-euro bank accounts, investment funds, ultra-luxury resorts and a galaxy of companies such as Lujo Family Office, Smiley Bubbles and Cinzano Ltd (the latter registered in the Cayman Islands in 2011).
Investigators intercepted Luca Tamburello in October 2025 as he unwittingly revealed that he had just “risked everything” to buy the lavish “Villa Natacha” in Marbella, putting up 3 million euros in cash, to which two partners added a further 300,000 euros.
That same year, he was planning to take up residency in Dubai to reduce his tax bill and to move 12 kilos of gold from Luxembourg to Monaco.
This complex operation had been carefully planned with a banking adviser in Monaco, who had selected Bemo Bank in Luxembourg and secured the Tamburello family a profit of 2 million euros.
“The tone of the exchange, the range of options considered and the awareness of costs and security implications,” the prosecutors write, “showed that the transfer did not stem from a simple operational need but formed part of a broader process of reorganizing the family assets within jurisdictions chosen for the secrecy of their banking systems.”
How did the pact with Matteo Messina Denaro work?
The names have emerged of two new state witnesses who have explained how the family operated alongside the former Sicilian boss: Vincenzo Spezia, son of Nunzio, the former head of the Campobello mafia family, whose role in the clan he inherited, and Giuseppe Bruno, who has been cooperating since 2025 from Brazil, where he is in prison.
Utterly loyal to the former fugitive, Spezia boasts a formidable criminal record. After years on the run in Venezuela, he was arrested in 2003, extradited to Italy in 2007 and later convicted of mafia association and murder.
The former boss told prosecutors that the Tamburellos were shipping tonnes of hashish from Morocco to Spain and then distributing it across Italy from a base in Brescia.
“Tamburello and his brother opened a few ice-cream parlors on the Costa del Sol, but they also dealt in hashish, tonnes and tonnes of hashish. They made billions,” Spezia told prosecutors.
On every shipment, Matteo Messina Denaro demanded a clear-cut 10% kickback.
“The Tamburellos always handed the money over to Matteo Messina Denaro, otherwise he would have had them killed. I know that he was given 10% of every drug load arriving from Morocco,” he stated in his deposition.
The witness describes what was essentially a business partnership between the godfather and the narco, who handled international drug-trafficking routes also in the interests of the mafia organization.
“Spezia revealed how Tamburello’s bond of loyalty with Messina Denaro,” the prosecutors write, “allowed him to manage without limits the illicit profits generated by drug-trafficking activities.”
“Authorized by the undisputed head of Cosa Nostra to strike major drug purchase and sale deals, he would hand the former fugitive a share of the profits under that illicit pact.”
It was instead Giuseppe Bruno who told magistrates about the role played by the Messina Denaro family in importing hashish from Morocco and about the drug deals with Spain.
The link between the two was so close that in 2016 hidden microphones recorded Tamburello talking about money that urgently had to be sent to someone due to undergo surgery. Investigators later established that at exactly that time the then-fugitive Messina Denaro was undergoing an operation for an inguinal hernia.
The fatal mistake made in Andorra
What brought this house of cards crashing down was an alert raised by a bank in the Principality of Andorra. Staff had become suspicious about unusual movements on the multi-million-euro accounts of Maria Antonina Bruno.
From that alarm bell, prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia and his deputy Vito Di Giorgio began to unravel a web stretching halfway around the globe.
The Andorran funds were, according to investigators, linked to criminal activities in the drug trade.
For Italy’s National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, this is about far more than just money.
“It is an operation of huge strategic importance,” Melillo told a press conference in Palermo.
“Stripping away this wealth means pushing ahead with the process of dismantling that is essential if we are to prevent the emergence of a new structure capable once again of projecting Cosa Nostra’s power to intimidate and exert influence on a global scale.”