DNAA

Italy's Anti-Mafia Directorate and the Dirty Campaign to Criminalize Migration

DNAA. Italy's national anti-mafia and counter-terrorism directorate had earned its reputation in the 1990s dismantling the Sicilian Mafia. The agency had by 2013 found a new target: migration across the central Mediterranean. Under the leadership of Franco Roberti, a veteran anti-mafia prosecutor, the DNAA pioneered a strategy that reframed irregular migration as organized transnational crime - and deployed the full arsenal of anti-mafia law to pursue it.

The policy it designed and enforced was never primarily about dismantling trafficking networks. It was about generating arrests, producing front-page mugshots, and giving European authorities a legal rationale for treating desperate people as organized criminals. The results expose a system in which the machinery of justice was turned, with full awareness, against the very people it claimed to protect.

This account draws on previously unpublished internal documents obtained by Zach Campbell and Lorenzo D'Agostino under Italy's freedom of information law, and on their investigation published in The Intercept in December 2021: Italy's Anti-Mafia Directorate and the Dirty Campaign to Criminalize Migration.

Mare Nostrum - Tragedy as Opportunity

In October 2013, two shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa killed more than 400 people. The public outcry that followed prompted the Italian government to launch Mare Nostrum - a naval rescue mission in international waters off Libya that, over the course of a single year, saved more than 150,000 lives. Roberti, just two months into his tenure as DNAA director, saw something else in those ships and submarines off the Libyan coast: an opportunity to extend Italy's judicial reach far beyond its borders.

Within five days of Mare Nostrum's launch, Roberti convened the first in a series of closed-door coordination meetings involving the highest echelons of the Italian police, navy, coast guard, and judiciary. The strategy they developed drew deliberately from anti-mafia legal doctrine: by treating Libyan smuggling networks as transnational criminal organizations, Italian prosecutors could claim jurisdiction over events occurring in international waters, board and seize vessels on the high seas, and use evidence gathered there in court. Anyone found to have played any active role during a crossing - steering the boat, holding a compass, distributing water, bailing out a leak - could be charged not merely with smuggling but with participation in a transnational criminal conspiracy. If people died below deck or drowned when a vessel capsized, the charge could be murder.

What the internal documents make clear - and what Italian officials never said publicly – is that this strategy predated the Lampedusa disaster by at least a week. Prosecutors in Catania had already drawn up the legal framework. The shipwrecks did not create the policy; they created the political will to implement it. Tragedy was the pretext. The arrests were the point.

Criminalizing Migration - Arrests Without Justice

In practice, the anti-mafia strategy never came close to achieving its stated aim of dismantling smuggling rings in Libya. The real traffickers stayed on shore. What the strategy reliably produced, year after year, was the prosecution of the migrants themselves – people who had paid for the crossing, survived it, and were then arrested upon arrival for having piloted a boat at gunpoint, held a compass under duress, or handed out water to keep fellow passengers alive.

The prosecutions, as reviewed in documents from over a dozen trials, were built on a foundation that would be remarkable in any other legal context. Witness statements – often identical, typos included – were copied and pasted across multiple police reports and attributed to different individuals. Interrogations were conducted hours after rescue, while survivors were still in shock, frequently without a translator or lawyer present. Residence permits were dangled as inducements to cooperate. When witnesses later appeared in court, they regularly contradicted or flatly denied the statements recorded in their names. Judges like Gigi Modica, one of the first to acquit so-called scafisti – boat drivers – on grounds of necessity, describes a system in which the selection of suspects from among rescued migrants was, in the words of a 2019 court ruling, almost entirely the result of mere chance. The logic of the DNAA strategy made no distinction between perpetrator and victim, because making that distinction would have made the arrests impossible.

Perhaps most damning: internal meeting minutes record a coast guard commander explaining that rescue operations had in some instances been deliberately delayed to allow the arrival of institutional ships capable of making arrests. The coast guard denies this. But the statement was made inside a closed coordination meeting, to colleagues, with no apparent expectation of contradiction. And it reveals the degree to which the imperative to prosecute had come to compete with – and, in some documented cases, override – the imperative to save lives.

NGOs in the Crosshairs - Rescue as Obstruction

After Mare Nostrum was cancelled in 2014, citing budget constraints and a lack of European cooperation, a fleet of civilian NGO vessels stepped into the void. By some estimates, these organizations came to account for more than a third of all rescues in the central Mediterranean. For the DNAA and its partners, this was not a humanitarian development to be welcomed. It was an operational problem to be solved. The NGOs refused to hand over photographs, testimony, and passenger data to police – arguing, reasonably, that turning rescued migrants into sources for criminal investigations would destroy the trust on which their work depended. For Italian prosecutors, this meant that cases were being thrown out for lack of evidence. A coast guard admiral explained to the coordination meeting the value of conducting interviews in the immediate aftermath of a rescue, when a moment of empathy had been established. When NGOs carried out the rescue, that moment belonged to them, not to the police.

The Libyan Coast Guard – Same Uniforms, Same Ships

Running in parallel with the prosecutions and the campaign against NGOs was a third pillar of European strategy: building a Libyan coast guard capable of intercepting migrants at sea and returning them to Libya – something European vessels could not legally do themselves. The project was openly discussed in the DNAA coordination meetings. So was the fact that it was almost certainly illegal, and that the men being trained were, in some cases, the same men Italian and European authorities were supposedly pursuing.

As early as 2015, meeting participants noted that militias were using the same uniforms and the same ships as the Libyan coast guard that the Italian navy was training. Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino, then in command of EU military operation Sophia, told the group in 2017 that the head of the Libyan coast guard and the Libyan defense minister – both Italian government allies – had close relationships with militia bosses. One of those figures was Abd al-Rahman Milad, known as Bija, who attended a May 2017 meeting in Sicily with Italian border police and intelligence officials aimed at reducing migration. The following month, the U.N. Security Council condemned him for leading a trafficking militia and sinking migrant boats using firearms. Coast guard officers under his command were trained by the EU between 2016 and 2018.

Roberti himself met Bija in Libya one month after the U.N. report was published. Asked about this, he told The Intercept: "We needed to have the participation of Libyan institutions. But they did nothing, because they were taking money from the traffickers." They themselves were the traffickers. Italy and the EU knew this. They proceeded anyway. In 2019, Operation Sophia withdrew all of its ships from the rescue area. The Libyan coast guard – trained, equipped, and coordinated by Europe – now intercepts the vast majority of departures and returns them to the country from which they fled. Human rights lawyers have filed six legal actions against Italy and the EU, characterizing the arrangement as refoulement by proxy: the outsourcing of illegal pushbacks to a partner with blood on its hands.

The DNAA was not merely an crucial instrument of enforcement – it is also a key to decoding EU policy itself. A policy that did not fall short of its goals, but achieved them precisely. The arrests were politically useful. The campaign against NGOs reshaped public opinion and reduced the number of civilian rescues. The Libyan coast guard now does what European law forbids European ships from doing. The real criminal networks were never dismantled – in part because some of their members were on the European payroll. What looked like failure was, on the record, success.

Zach Campbell and Lorenzo D'Agostino - The Intercept (December 2021): Italy's Anti-Mafia Directorate and the Dirty Campaign to Criminalize Migration.