Sister Anna Donelli, a respected nurse from northern Italy, was recently arrested under suspicion of having colluded with a powerful clan of the ‘Ndragheta mafia family.

The arrest of 57-year-old Anna Donelli, a respected nun and recent recipient of the Golden Panettone, an annual Milanese civic award, for her volunteer work in prisons and in the troubled outskirts of cities like Milan, Rome and Brescia, came as a shock for the whole of Italy. On Thursday, Sister Anna and 24 other people were arrested following an investigation into the activities of the ‘Ndragheta in Brescia, with authorities claiming they had strong reasons to believe the nun had been working with the mafia crime family for a long time. As part of her work in several prisons where ‘Ndragheta members were being held, the nun is suspected of facilitating communication between prisoners and the clan’s leaders and solving conflicts and disputes between inmates.

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A convicted Italian mafia member who has been on the run for almost two decades was recently arrested after being spotted by chance on Google Maps in a small Spanish town.

Gioacchino Gammino, a convicted murderer listed among Italy’s most wanted gangsters, had been on the run for nearly 20 years when he was arrested in Galapagar, a town near Madrid, last month. He had escaped Rome’s Rebibbia jail in 2002 and in 2003 he had been sentenced to life in prison for a murder committed years earlier. A European arrest warrant was issued in 2014, and authorities had managed to track Gammino to Spain, but it was a Google Maps screenshot of two men chatting outside a fruit and vegetable shop that helped police confirm his exact location and make the arrest.

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Mafia members in the Italian city of Naples have reportedly threatened ambulance crews to stop using sirens as, the noise is too similar to that of police sirens, and interferes with “business”.

Ambulance drivers and first responders in Naples have recently started asking for police escorts, after numerous reports of armed mafia crews threatening and even assaulting ambulances, over their use of sirens and light signals. Apparently, these emergency signals used by ambulances are very bad for business, as they disturb drug-pushers and scare away customers, both of which often mistake them for police. Such cases have been reported for years, but the problems has intensified recently, due to the Covid-19 crisis.

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