Massimo Carminati was a one-eyed gangster who extorted money from Rome’s municipality until it couldn’t afford the Olympics

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By Kyle Swenson
The takedown went smoothly. Dash cam footage from the Italian Special Operation Squad shows police vehicles cutting off the gray car on a thin ribbon of country road. The car’s one-eyed driver puts his head out the open window and ducks back inside when he sees men with pistols and semiautomatic guns bolting forward. Then Massimo Carminati – an underworld boss so powerful he called himself the “Last King of Rome,” a career-criminal who had already lost one eye in a gun battle with police – puts up his hands and surrenders.
The December 2014 arrest was the first step in a massive sting aimed at public corruption in Rome’s municipal machinery. Eventually, 46 criminals, business people and politicians were charged in a scheme to reroute public funds away from civic projects into private pockets, including housing developments meant for recent immigrants fleeing the Middle East.
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Extortion, fraud, theft and money-laundering were all among charges leveled against the defendants, who were dubbed the “Mafia Capitale” in the press.
And this week, after a 20-month trial, guilty verdicts were handed to the majority of the individuals involved, Italy’s The Local reports, including the bossman, Carminati.

But the trial was still somewhat of a win for defendants. While Judge Rosanna Ianniello said the accused were guilty of corruption, she did not buy the state’s case that the men were a “mafia association.”
The distinction is key in Italy, where the word “mafia” not only carries heavy cultural baggage but can supersize a punitive outcome. “The sentence is stiff, but the whole trial revolved around the question, ‘was it mafia or not?’” Carminati’s lawyer, Ippolita Naso, told reporters. “Mafia Capitale does not exist.”
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Mafia don or not, Carminati had a devastating impact on the municipal coffers of the Italian capital, a city so cash-strapped last year its council voted to pull out of contention for the 2024 Olympic Games. In a sign of the scandal’s civic weight, Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi was in the courtroom Thursday for the verdict.
“We are paying the price every day,” she told reporters later, referring to the fact that her city now struggles to fix roads or repair buses. “We now need to stitch the wound back together by taking the path of legality – no easy task. We need to keep our eyes peeled at all times.”
The situation Raggi is referring to is a political crisis that can be tracked back directly to years of unfettered graft and corruption.”It is an extremely difficult situation,” Giovanni Orsina, a contemporary history professor at LUISS University in Rome, explained to the Guardian last year. “The city is on its knees. The public services don’t work – notably rubbish collection and public transport – and the lobbies of those services are so strong that it would take a very powerful political force to fix them.”
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Carminati’s colorful bad man career stretches back decades and has reportedly taken on legendary proportions in the Italian underworld. Born in 1958, he initially operated on the blurred margin between neo-fascist groups and criminal gangs, according to
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