“As an association representing legal gaming operators, we intend to make some clarifications regarding the statements - reported by some newspapers - by the President of the Anti-Mafia Commission of the Lombardy Region Paola Pollini, who, citing what they reported 'some (not better specified – Ed.) prosecutors like the one in Bari and the deputy prosecutor in Catania, in the south there is talk of a mafia monopoly on legal and illegal gambling'. Whoever it comes from, the statement according to which the mafia has a monopoly on legal gambling in the south is the result of a completely approximate and unfounded generalization which, at the very least, would have deserved to be supported by more detailed arguments". This is what he writes in a note Star.
“It is therefore important to point out that the legal public gaming system is permeated by a dense network of rules and procedures, aimed precisely at preventing money laundering and mafia infiltration, which have no equal in any other economic sector. Add to this the complete traceability of the money flows that gravitate in the orbit of legal gaming, the high tax burden on them, the continuous and stringent controls to which the activities are subjected, the minimum percentages of sums which must be allocated to winnings, etc., all represent circumstances that lead criminal organizations to consider the direct management of clandestine gaming more convenient. This is - continues AsTro - a fact that emerges from President Pollini's own statements in the part in which she mentions the "turnover" of illegal gaming managed by organized crime, estimated, in fact, at a figure between 20 and 30 billion of euros: a figure that gives us an idea of what size these revenues could reach if, as hoped by many (more or less sincere) "prohibitionists", the legal gaming sector were eradicated.
This does not exclude, obviously, that the mafias may be able to infiltrate the management of some activities that carry out the legal offer of gaming to use them as a cover and money laundering tool but this corresponds to what happens in many other business sectors, often at the center of investigations well known to the news (such as, for example, construction, catering, management of accommodation facilities, high finance, etc.) with respect to which, however, the prevention and repression activity by the judiciary and of law enforcement is more complicated precisely by virtue of the absence of those control tools which, instead, permeate the legal public gaming system. Here it is not a question of being "benign" but simply of stigmatizing that attempt, used instrumentally by the prohibitionist front, to instill in public opinion the artificial image according to which legal gambling and organized crime are two sides of the same coin" , concludes AsTro.
