By Edith Honan
The three-year joint investigation sought to prevent organized crime in New York and Sicily from reuniting their drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations, officials in both countries said.
A U.S. grand jury indicted 62 suspects with charges including murder, extortion, loan-sharking, gambling, cocaine and marijuana distribution, money laundering, bribing labour officials and embezzling union funds, U.S. and New York state officials said.
The U.S. investigation focused on the Gambino family once run by the late John Gotti. The indictment charges one Gambino family soldier, Charles Carneglia, with at least five murders dating to 1976.
More than 300 Italian police were mobilized, mostly in Sicily, in an operation code-named "Old Bridge," arresting 19 suspects and filing new allegations against four others already detained for separate crimes.
"There was an attempt to rekindle ties between Cosa Nostra in Palermo and New York because the Sicilian Mafia wanted to get back into drug trafficking in a big way," top anti-Mafia prosecutor Francesco Messineo told reporters in Rome.
Among those arrested were suspects linked to Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who was arrested on November 5 in Sicily. He had become the new "boss of bosses" after the arrest in 2006 of Bernardo Provenzano, who had been on the run for 43 years.
In what appeared to be a separate operation in Naples, police arrested a suspected leading figure of that southern city's criminal underworld on Thursday.
(Writing by Daniel Trotta; Additional reporting by Massimiliano Di Giorgio in Rome, Wladimir Pantaleone in Palermo and Laura Viggiani in Naples, editing by Vicki Allen)
