Online gambling: an agreement to combat money laundering
Memorandum of Understanding between the Messina Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Guardia di Finanza and the Customs and Monopolies Agency. Public Prosecutor D’Amato: ‘The Mafia poses a threat in a strategic area’
Key points
- The game’s statistics
- The disparity in incomes
- The dynamism of the mafias in the Strait
- The Prosecutor and the Mafia threat
What lies behind the agreement on online gambling signed on Monday 3 August between the Messina Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Guardia di Finanza and the Customs and Monopolies Agency? First and foremost, there are figures and theories surrounding an area of growing investigative interest.
The game’s statistics
The latest analysis of gambling places the city on the Strait amongst the top in Italia for per capita spending on betting platforms, online casinos and digital lotteries. It ranks eighth, according to the latest edition of the “Black Book of Gambling” (published by Federconsumatori and CGIL): €4,488 per person in 2025, compared with a national average of around €3,000 and €2,365 spent online alone. In a projection covering both legal and illegal gambling, the province shoots to first place. Narrowing the focus to individual municipalities, that of Patti, – incidentally the birthplace of the wheeler-dealer Michele Sindona, the mastermind behind the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano – ranks first in the whole country, with expenditure of around 7,000 euros per person, amongst towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.
The disparity in incomes
So far, so good, against a backdrop of steady growth in gambling, particularly in the South. But the figures for the Messina area take on a whole new significance when viewed alongside the population’s incomes. Low earnings, high spending on online gambling. This disparity fuels a suspicion that has now become a line of investigation: the suspicion that, through online gambling channels too, local mafia families are laundering the ever-increasing proceeds from drug dealing. No longer merely in transit between Scilla and Charybdis towards the Italian mainland and beyond. Instead, it is destined to remain here, sold on the streets, delivered by drones even to prisons, alongside weapons, as was recently discovered.
The dynamism of the mafias of the Strait
To quote an investigator, this is a phase of ‘great dynamism’: mafia families operating in an area between Sicily and Calabria – ‘underestimated at central government level’, as many point out – which have long benefited from the shadow cast by the intense focus on the Palermo-based Cosa Nostra. But this is a time of major investment in public works in this province and of debate surrounding the prospects for the Strait Bridge. Thus, the agreement on online gambling – the implementation of a framework protocol drawn up at central government level between the Guardia di Finanza and the Customs Agency – not only enables ‘the development of risk analyses tailored to the local context and strengthens — through the exchange of information and checks — efforts to prevent and combat offences’, as they state in a joint statement, but also takes on added significance.
The Prosecutor and the Mafia Threat
“One of the investigative strands currently underway, which follows the flow of money,” reflects Antonio D’Amato, the Public Prosecutor of Messina, in an interview with *Il Sole 24 Ore*, “is part of the fight against a mafia which, in this area and at this precise moment in history, poses a threat that is more serious than ever. This is to protect the community, a healthy economy and the development of a region that is strategic for the country.”
