Sicilian mafia bosses complain on wiretaps about lack of quality recruits, reminisce about 'The Godfather'

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Mafia boss arrested in Sicily, Italy

Matteo Messina Denaro was Italy's most wanted fugitive. He had been on the run for 30 years. (Video: Reuters.)

What happened to never going against the family? 

Leaders within the Cosa Nostra, Sicily’s mafia, have reportedly complained that mob recruits aren’t what they used to be, as nearly 150 people associated with the group were arrested this week. 

"The level is low, today they arrest someone and if he becomes a turncoat they arrest another... wretched low-level," former Cosa Nostra boss Giancarlo Romano said in a wiretapped conversation last year before he was killed in a shootout, according to BBC News. 

Romano also revealed that he was nostalgic for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic "The Godfather," about a fictional mob family in New York. 

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Carabinieri officers in Sicily.? (Valeria Ferraro/Anadolu via Getty Images)

"If you watch ‘The Godfather,’ the connections he had… he was very influential because of the power that he built at a political level," Romano told his associate. 

He continued, "But us – what can we do? We’re on our knees, guys. We think we do business, but these days it’s others who do it. We used to be number one, now it’s others… we’re just gypsies."

The mobsters also seem to like actor Robert De Niro, who played Vito Corleone in "The Godfather Part II," and Spider-Man as other wiretaps revealed them as nicknames for each other, according to The Guardian. 

This week Sicilian officers conducted early morning raids, serving 183 arrest warrants on those believed to be associated with the Cosa Nostra for crimes ranging from mafia association to extortion and attempted murder. Of those, 36 were already in custody. 

While raids like this week’s have weakened the Cosa Nostra, Italian officials warn they are still a threat. 

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"The investigations that led to Tuesday’s arrests demonstrate that Cosa Nostra is alive and present and communicates with completely new communication channels," Maurizio de Lucia, chief prosecutor of Sicily’s capital of Palermo, said at a press conference, referencing the mafia’s use of encrypted apps to communicate with each other. "It is doing business and trying to rebuild its army."

Domenico La Padula, with the  Italian Carabinieri police, told The New York Times this week that the Cosa Nostra "is far from dead."

He said they have been able to survive by finding "new energy and new strength," with new recruits and 21st-century criminal ventures like online gambling. 

Palermo, Sicily's capital.? (Frank Bienewald/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The Cosa Nostra has remained "strongly tied to the rules of its founding fathers and its ancient rituals," the Carabinieri told The Times, adding that their use of encrypted devices has "limited the need for traditional meetings and gatherings to the bare minimum."

John Dickie, who wrote "Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse and Cosa Nostra, A History of the Sicilian Mafia," told The Telegraph that Italian authorities have become "fantastic" at surveilling the mafia. 

"Mafia dons have been caught boasting how good their anti-bugging devices were, at the same time that they were being bugged," he revealed.

Dickie also agreed that the Cosa Nostra appears to be "in decline." 

"You only have to read the phone taps where the bosses are saying ‘it’s not like it used to be,’" he said. "This is about the fifth time that the bosses have tried to reorganise the cupola since the early 1990s. Every time they have been thwarted. The authorities were on to them."

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He continued, "These arrests mean that Cosa Nostra has another big task to rebuild, and they show that the state is still stronger than the mafia."