Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the ‘Ndrangheta based in Calabria, and the Camorra of Campania set out to find ways of cheating the system.

  Dozens of betting shops, often appropriately authorised by the Italian gambling regulator Monopoli to collect bets, opened all over Italy. Authorised by Monopoli, but not necessarily licensed by them, because many used computer terminals with games on websites licensed in Malta. These shops accepted gamblers with cash, dodging the traceability requirement.

  Sometimes the criminal organisation itself operates the betting shop. The ‘gambler’ belongs to the same family. Any winnings come with a receipt from the gaming shop and therefore perfectly clean. Any losses go to the bank operated by the casino, low Maltese taxes are paid, and the now clean money is in possession of the owner of the Malta gaming license. Win or lose, they win.

  The Mafia thus become the collectors of an unstoppable flow of money which at that point is anonymous and therefore laundered of its shady or bloody origins.

  If something goes wrong, such as when the island’s regulatory authorities suspend a license, although this rarely happens, the business changes hands from one family to another; from one nominee to another; in some cases, from one criminal organisation to another: from the Calabrians to the Sicilians, or to the Neapolitans and vice versa.

  This is a powerful ‘cartel’ where the Italian Pax Mafiosa is guaranteed by a common interest in a money laundering system that is unmatched anywhere in the Mediterranean and the entire Schengen area. It is efficient and, above all, it can steady itself quickly whenever it hits a snag.

  Between 2014 and 2018, anti-Mafia district prosecutors in Sicily, Calabria, and Campania, investigated illegal online gambling controlled by the three most deeply rooted and powerful Italian Mafia organisations – the Cosa Nostra, the ’Ndrangheta, and the Camorra.

  The Mafiosi flew to Valletta and inspected the casinos. There, they mingled with the island’s opaque system of relationships that blurs the lines between the incumbents of the palaces of political power on the one hand and the ruthless local entrepreneurs who prefer to ignore or pretend not to know who their Italian customers really are and where their money really comes from.

  Some history.

  2014: Ciro Smiraglia, believed to be money-launderer-in-chief of the Camorra’s Zaza-Mazzarella clan, turned to the Fidanzati clan from Sicily’s Cosa Nostra asking for an introduction to a Maltese ‘contact’. He wanted to set up a server on the island on which to start a platform for online betting. ‘You’re on to the golden eggs,’ Gaetano Fidanzati reassures him. That’s Sicilian slang for ‘you’re on the money’.

  Court documents show Fidanzati gave Smiraglia an important Maltese name: Bastjan Dalli, brother of John Dalli, the notorious ‘Johnny Cash’.

  ‘Tell him you’re my brother and my friend,’ he recommended.

  April 2015: Vincenzo ‘Enzo’ Romeo, nephew of the legendary Catania boss of Cosa Nostra Nitto Santapaola, is on the ferry that connects the port of Pozzallo at the southern tip of Sicily to Malta in 90 minutes. He has €38,000 in cash in his suitcase and a name and address on the island to look for. He will be meeting Massimo Laganà from Messina, a guy who has left Italy to dodge an inquiry into his relations with the Casalesi crime gang of Casal Di Principe.

  In Malta he has become the point of reference at the Portomaso casino tables and a business partner in Planetwin365, one of the most well-known online gaming brands in Europe.

  Enzo Romeo needs Massimo Laganà to open gambling platforms registered in Malta to bring together the money that the Cosa Nostra clan illegally collects in the betting centres it controls between Catania and Messina.

  2016: ’Ndrangheta boss Mario Gennaro, then 42 years old, turns informant and state witness. He informed anti-Mafia prosecutors in Reggio Calabria he had been the manager and investor for the top criminals in that city, laundering money through online gaming in Malta. Gennaro testified he laundered money through a network of about 20 Maltese law firms.

  Mario Gennaro was the beneficial owner of a company shielded behind ownership in trust in another Maltese company called GVM Holdings, at the time headed by lawyer David Gonzi, son of former prime minister Lawrence Gonzi, the man who had opened the island to gaming back in 2004. The Reggio judiciary closed the case looking into David Gonzi’s conduct, citing lack of evidence. GVM appears to have ceased its activities in 2015.

  November 2017: Law enforcement officers in Florence shut down 14 gaming halls in North Italian towns used by organised crime to launder money through Malta-based Media Live Casino. Italian authorities publicly complain of the ineffectual cooperation of their Maltese counterparts.

  Between 2018 and February 2019, Sicilian prosecutors unravelled another link between Sicilian organised crime and gambling in Malta. Three Sicilian towns have a heavy Cosa Nostra presence: Partinico, Resuttana, and Mazzara del Vallo.

  The crime syndicates support Calogero ‘John’ Luppino, a bookmaker in Sicily working for Leaderbet, a brand owned by Malta-based gaming company LB Casino. The money he makes for them pays for the cost of hiding Matteo Messina Denaro, the most wanted Mafioso in Italy who took over the Cosa Nostra after the Corleonesi lost control. He has gone to ground but is still running the show.

  In February 2018 Sicilian police arrested Benedetto ‘Ninì’ Bacchi, known as the ‘King of Slot Machines’. He ran an operation of some 700 outlets generating €1 million a month which were laundered in Malta, again through GVM Holdings. The laundered money would then be recycled in construction projects.

  The responsibility to oversee all this belongs to the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA), the regulatory authority for a billion-dollar betting business. Unless suspects are arrested by overseas law enforcement and often even after that, the MGA appears oblivious to what is happening under its nose.

  The criminal element harms the rest of the industry and perfectly legitimate gaming giants that operate entirely within the law resent the influx of mafia money that poisons the industry and puts it in mortal reputational danger.

  Occasionally, a licence is revoked. It happened with Leaderbet. Media Live Casino was also shut down and in March 2018 at least five Italian gaming companies left Malta of their own accord fearing a clampdown.

  But what flows must ebb again and the Mafia finds its way back in.

  Consider, for example, the case of Anthony ‘Tony’ Axisa. He was one of the pioneers of gaming in Malta and helped draw up the initial legal framework. Up until 2006, he worked as a regulator at the MGA.

  Then he decided to put his knowledge of regulation to the service of the regulated. He left the MGA and proceeded to register dozens of online gambling companies and brands. Among these, Bet1128, which the anti-Mafia district attorney of Catanzaro said was an instrument used by organised crime to recycle its money.

  Prosecutors say the beneficial owner of Bet1128 was Francesco Martiradonna, son of Vitino ‘l’Enel’, a gentleman from Bari arrested in 2017 and accused of going into business with the feared ’Ndrangheta clan of the Arena from Capo Rizzuto. Martiradonna placed Bet1128 at the service of the Arena. L’Enel had previously been convicted of associating with the Mafia.

  Bet1128 was originally registered in the UK. It was transferred from London to Gżira in Malta in 2009 when the Bari authorities asked London police to seize the business and suspend the licence of Bet1128. The brand found haven in Malta. It was bought by Centurionbet, administered by former law enforcer Tony Axisa but held by trust companies in a Caribbean tax haven.

  What happened next is just what you would expect. Bet1128 continued to do business in the EU, but the name of Francesco Martiradonna simply vanished into thin air.

  Investigators of the Crotone economic crimes police found that his name may have vanished but Martiradonna is no less real and no less busy. In spite of his name appearing nowhere, he never stopped dealing with Bet1128. Martiradonna manages contacts in Malta. He collects cash receipts and travels to close deals with clients who n
eed a fast laundry service for their dirty cash.

  Clients such as the Arena clan from the Capo Rizzuto island use Bet1128 to fix bets and control their rate of return from the betting shops. In 2017, investigators in Catanzaro cracked open the scam and put Martiradonna in handcuffs. That’s when the Malta Gaming Authority suspended all licences issued to Centurionbet, including the now notorious Bet1128.

  The licence is suspended. But what happens to the Mafia’s money stashed and laundered through Bet1128? The Maltese authorities did not even respond to the Italians’ request for a preliminary seizure of the company’s assets. It is not an unfamiliar problem for Italian enforcement authorities. Italy equips its law enforcement agencies and its judges with specific powers governing ‘association with the Mafia’. This allows for seizure of assets even before proceedings against suspects start. There is no equivalent under Maltese law, or indeed the laws of just about anywhere else.

  The Catanzaro prosecutors already saw Bet1128 slip through their fingers when they tried and failed to catch the perpetrators when it was licensed in London. The brand had bounced to Malta. It looked like it could bounce elsewhere once again.

  Nicola Gratteri, the Catanzaro prosecutor, was furious: ‘It’s easier to work with the police in Colombia or Peru than to work with Malta.’ He was complaining to the Italian parliament’s anti-mafia commission. ‘If Malta decides not to help us out or takes six months to a year to get down to business, all our work would be useless.’

  In 2018, Malta’s attorney general Peter Grech said he’d carried out what his Catanzaro colleague asked for. A year later the Catanzaro prosecutor’s office has still not had any formal notification that this is indeed the case.

  While cross-border law enforcement creeps along at a snail’s pace, cross-border crime gallops ahead. Centurionbet is no longer at 11, Triq Tas-Sliema, Ġżira, Malta. A physical check in December 2017 showed Centurionbet had disappeared. In its place there is another gaming start-up. A former manager of Bet1128, who had worked with Martiradonna, still works at the same address but he is now working in a ‘new’ business, Ivy Net Ltd, offering cryptocurrency payments systems.

  ‘Crypto’ is Joseph Muscat’s new roll of the dice.

  Daphne did not miss the murky soup of corruption, collusion, and money-laundering that online gaming had cooked. The industry added a new toxic ingredient to the unhealthy quality of Malta’s political and entrepreneurial life. As gaming became a ‘fundamental pillar’ of Malta’s economy, the toxicity only got worse.

  From Daphne’s blog, writing on 25 June 2015:

  While his father was Acting Commissioner of Police, Daniel Zammit – who was then a police inspector with the Economic Crimes Unit and who is in the news right now on other corruption issues – was constantly seen driving about the island in a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, with foreign registration plates SU128A.

  This car belongs to a Sicilian called Francesco Airo, who operates in ‘online gaming’. I put the words ‘online gaming’ in inverted commas because internet gaming is huge in the laundering of Italian Mafia money. When Italy began to clamp down, the laundering operations began moving out and into Malta.

  The Malta-based fixer for one Naples Camorra family is Bastjan Dalli, brother of the former European Commissioner John Dalli. Last year I had published an Italian news report which details how Bastjan Dalli’s name came up in telephone conversations between two Camorra men. The conversations were tapped and recorded as part of a judicial investigation.

  Daniel Zammit’s duties in the Economic Crimes Unit included investigations into the gaming industry. And an Italian man operating in the gaming industry in Malta loaned him a €300,000 car for his personal use. But il-papà (daddy) was the Acting Commissioner of Police and il-kuġin (cousin) Manuel was the Police Minister, so let corruption rule.

  Daphne again writes on the subject on 29 April 2016, when Joseph Muscat entrusts Manuel Mallia with the ministry responsible for the gaming industry. The Panama Papers had just been published and Konrad Mizzi was forced to resign the deputy leadership of the PL which he had only held for a month:

  Using the path cleared for him by default by Muscat’s changing of the rules to accommodate his henchman Konrad Mizzi, Chris Cardona is the first to throw his hat in the ring to replace the corrupt non-contender (as Labour Deputy Leader).

  It can’t be more obvious now why Muscat asked Mizzi to give up the deputy leadership but kept him on in the cabinet (should I be worried that I can read their behaviour?): they struck a deal.

  Cardona consented to let go of part of his portfolio – the part that José Herrera (brother of Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera) looked after as his parliamentary secretary for ‘competitiveness’, which includes remote gaming and casinos – in return for Muscat making him party deputy leader. This has allowed Muscat to give Manuel Mallia what he wanted: the ministry responsible for online and land-based gaming, which has untold possibilities for a sleazebag who is ultra-familiar with the criminal underworld and who thinks nothing of saying that he keeps half-a-million in cash at home.

  The Cosa Nostra denies any wrongdoing.

  The Camorra denies any wrongdoing.

  The ’Ndrangheta denies any wrongdoing.

  It is one of the countless lists of coincidences that litter the path to Daphne’s killing that a character that features prominently elsewhere in this drama on pages about secret companies and unexplained payments, also moves in the world of online gaming. That would be Yorgen Fenech, the owner of 17 Black.

  Planetwin365 is closely embroiled with The Casino at Portomaso, a physical gambling casino owned and operated by the Tumas Group, of which Yorgen Fenech is CEO and one of the owners. That’s the online gaming service that Enzo Romeo from the Catania clan of Santapaola with the help of Massimo Laganà had infiltrated to launder money for the east Sicilian crime syndicate.

  Massimo Laganà works for both Planetwin365 and The Casino at Portomaso. Planetwin365’s ‘live casino’ is broadcast from within Yorgen Fenech’s casino as well.

  In her writings, Daphne makes no mention of Yorgen Fenech’s gaming business. It is also below the radar of Maltese public awareness. That’s until February 2019 when Swedish gaming regulators discover that out of 67 online gaming companies authorised to do business in Sweden, 51 – almost all of them – have registered offices in Malta. They also discover that four of the 51 have been banned from Norway for repeated breaches of the law. In 2017 Norway froze funds being transferred to these four companies in Malta worth more than €51 million.

  The Swedish authorities find something else. One of these four companies was L&L Europe Limited. That company is co-owned by Yorgen Fenech.

  Online gaming. Mafia money. Yorgen Fenech. There are a lot of steps here and it would be wrong to jump to conclusions, especially in the context of Daphne’s killing.

  And yet, there’s one more link between Yorgen Fenech’s casino business and the murder of October 2017.

  Alfred Degiorgio is, of course, one of the three men accused of murdering Daphne Caruana Galizia by car bomb. He’s also been charged and is being tried for money-laundering, along with his brother George Degiorgio and George’s partner, Anca Adelina Pop. In September 2018, a court heard witnesses from a number of Maltese casinos set out how much business they had done with all three. It was clear that neither George Degiorgio nor Pop were heavy gamblers. But Alfred Degiorgio had been a very successful high roller indeed, according to evidence relating to the time period up to 2013.

  And that’s a little odd because in casinos, more times than not, you lose.

  Fools Die was Mario Puzo’s favourite novel. In it Alfred Gronevelt, the boss of his fictional casino in Las Vegas, says: ‘Percentages never lie. We built all these hotels on percentages. We stay rich on the percentage. You can lose faith in everything, religion and God, women and love, good and evil, war and peace. You name it. But the percentage will always stand fast.’

  Mathematically, the made-up c
asino boss was on the money. Bob Hannum, professor of risk analysis and gaming at the University of Denver where he teaches courses in probability, statistics, risk, and the theory of gambling, has written: ‘With a few notable exceptions, the house always wins – in the long run – because of the mathematical advantage the casino enjoys over the player.’

  The court heard that Alfred Degiorgio had gambled €570,000 over the years, losing €71,000. Alfred is a very, very, very lucky gambler indeed. The court heard that he had bet €39,000 in three years at the Dragonara Casino, losing €18,000. That’s roughly slightly less than half his total stake. At Casino Malta, Alfred had gambled €34,000 and lost around €6,000. So his luck was even better there.

  At the Oracle Casino Alfred Degiorgio, had gambled over €40,000 and lost €31,000. That was where his luck was worst. But at the Portomaso casino the court heard that he gambled more than €457,000 and lost €16,000. So he managed to walk away from the casino with €440,000 of certified clean money.

  That kind of luck is incredible.

  Who owns the Portomaso casino? Yorgen Fenech, the owner of 17 Black, a shell company in Dubai, and one of the parties to the Electrogas Consortium. As Pieter Omtzigt reported for the Council of Europe, 17 Black ‘was expected to make large monthly payments to secret Panama companies owned by (Konrad) Mizzi and (Keith) Schembri’.

  One should also point that Yorgen Fenech also owns the Oracle casino where Alfred Degiorgio lost money. But the money he lost at Oracle, €31,000, is dwarfed by the sum he walked away with at the Portomaso, €444,000.

  The puzzle deepens when you know that Alfred Degiorgio was registered as unemployed and claiming benefits. How could he be on the dole and being able to risk close to a half-a-million euro in a casino, eh?

  That is not incredible. That is impossible.

  As Sherlock Holmes once said: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’