Construction works for Milano Cortina have been a lightning rod for suspected infiltration by organised crime, but anti-mafia groups have adopted an approach that will help future hosts

Early on the morning of 8 October, the Provincial Command of the Carabinieri in Belluno put out a press release announcing three arrests, in the culmination of a year-long investigation they called “Operation Reset”. Two of the three were brothers, were both known members of the notorious SS Lazio Ultras, the Irriducibili, it was stated in the release, and had boasted of having personal ties to former boss Fabrizio Piscitelli, who was murdered in 2019. The crimes the brothers had been arrested on suspicion of had not been committed in Rome, but 400 miles north, in the small alpine ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, high in the Dolomites, and home, for the next three weeks, to the Winter Olympics.

The brothers are still awaiting trial, but the local public prosecutor’s office has alleged that they were running an operation in three phases. The first was taking control of the drug distribution network in Cortina, the second was to take control of three local nightclubs, and the third was to extort the local council into awarding the construction contracts for the works being done for the Games. Among the evidence the prosecutor says it possesses is a note on one of the brothers’ phones saying: “We want the cemetery area for the garages, the former pastry shop, the slip road and the new ring road, the construction of the tourist village.”