Italian police on Tuesday, May 14, said they had targeted 142 suspected members of the 'Ndrangheta mafia in raids, including clans involved in drug trafficking and historically based in the southern city of Cosenza.

Some 109 people were detained following the dawn raids that involved Carabinieri federal police, local forces and specialist officers from the economic crimes unit, headed by anti-mafia prosecutors from the southern coastal city of Catanzaro, police said.

Those arrested were members of the well-known Lanzino-Patitucci and Zingari family clans from Cosenza, a city in Calabria. An official from Italy's customs and financial police was also arrested during the operation. Another 20 people were placed under house arrest and 13 more were subjected to other restrictive measures.

The group is suspected of various offences, including being members of the 'Ndrangheta, "drug trafficking aggravated by mafia association" and other offences, according to police.

Vincenzo Capomolla, Catanzaro's public prosecutor, told reporters that mafia groups were "asphyxiating" Cosenza's shopkeepers and business people through extortion.

Their main activity was drug trafficking, however, sometimes using children, he added. "Drug trafficking was one of the ways the 'Ndrangheta exercised control over the territory," he said. "Only people authorised by the 'Ndrangheta could traffic drugs. "Anyone engaged in unauthorised trafficking was punished – financially and physically," he said.

The 'Ndrangheta is based in Calabria, a poor region located at the tip of southern Italy. It is one of the richest and most powerful of the country's mafia clans, thanks namely to its quasi-monopoly on the European cocaine trade. It has a presence in around 40 other countries and has a suffocating hold on Italy's local government administration and general population.

Drug smuggling submarine

Also on Tuesday, Italian police announced the seizure of a remote-controlled submarine likely intended to transport drugs as part of another international drug trafficking network.

Investigators made the unusual discovery during probes into suspects based in Turin in northern Italy, who were cultivating marijuana under the cover of managing car wash stations. "The traffickers had, amongst other things, designed and tested a small remote-controlled submarine, probably designed to transport the drugs," a statement from the Carabinieri police said. They attached a video taken during surveillance operations showing the submarine, which is just a few metres long, operating on the surface of a body of water.

The network, headed by two brothers of Albanian origin, operated between Ecuador, Belgium, France, Spain and Italy, according to the same source. The police reported seizing a total of 204 kilograms of cocaine and hashish during the course of the investigation.