Slovakia remains fertile ground for Italian crime

Cecilia Anesi Edoardo Anziano Simone Olivelli Eva Stefankova

Antonino Vadalà has been in prison in Reggio Calabria for a year, but only his close relatives know about it. No news in the newspapers, and in eastern Slovakia, where he lived, someone only noticed his absence for a few months. In Italy he is a name unknown to most, one of many convicted for drug trafficking. In Slovakia, however, it had made the government tremble.

In 2018 he hit the headlines for a scandal that directly concerned the country's prime minister, Robert Fico. They had a woman in common. Vadalà's business partner, Fico's assistant. A link that suggested how Slovakia's power structure seemed to have become permeable to Italian organized crime, the entrepreneurial one, the one that moves votes. The one that got rich with European agricultural funds.

The investigation in brief

The sentence that brought Antonino Vadalà to prison is final from October 2024. In Italy his name is that of one of the many convicted for drug trafficking. In Slovakia, however, it is that of an influential entrepreneur who made Robert Fico's government tremble

In the prairies of eastern Slovakia, Vadalà became rich together with Diego Rodà, another Italian entrepreneur whose daughter he married. They both breed cattle and, between 2004 and 2018, their companies obtained 67 million in European agricultural funds

In 2013, precisely because of suspected fraud in the European Union, the Slovakian police forces asked the Italian ones for information on Vadalà. The answer was that, when he returned to Calabria, the entrepreneur frequented prominent members of the local 'ndrine

In February 2018, Slovakian journalist Jan Kuciak was killed. He was writing an investigation into Diego Rodà and Antonino Vadalà. The two were arrested, but released 48 hours later and never again suspected of the murder. A few days after the arrest of Rodà and Vadalà, however, one of their relatives explained to a drug trafficker in Rome that the arrests in Slovakia had stopped a significant flow of cocaine destined for the capital

In the following years, during the trial that took him to prison, Vadalà was released from prison and returned to Slovakia. Here, IrpiMedia discovered, he met two entrepreneurs who started businesses in those same prairies. Both are linked to the 'Ndrangheta

The Slovak investigative journalism center in memory of Jan Kuciak, Icjk, and IrpiMedia, continued Kuciak's interrupted investigation, also thanks to the data contained in the Kočner Library, a database that contains the investigation file on the murder and other criminal cases in the country, passed to journalists by an anonymous source

Seven years after that scandal, in an absolutely leopard-like way, everything has changed so as not to change. IrpiMedia and the Slovakian investigative journalism center Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak (Icjk) have discovered that two other entrepreneurs, linked to the 'Ndrangheta and in contact with Vadalà in Slovakia, have started new commercial activities right on the prairies on the border with Ukraine. And both ended up in investigations into money laundering by the 'Ndrangheta.

It was the Slovakian journalist Jan Kuciak who thought that Antonino Vadalà was not a simple successful entrepreneur. He had noticed the grants from European funds obtained by his companies, the important political friendships, the connection with Prime Minister Fico's cabinet office, but also the connections in the world below, that of organized crime. However, he didn't have time to discover that Vadala was also a drug trafficker. In fact, the journalist was killed on 21 February 2018, in a murder for which the Slovakian entrepreneur Marian Kočner is on trial.

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In March 2018 Antonino Vadalà was arrested and, a few months later, extradited from Slovakia to Italy. Here, he spent four years in prison in Turin, accused of trafficking cocaine with a criminal organization close to the 'Ndrangheta. After the conviction at first instance, the Court of Cassation ordered the trial to be re-run and the defendants released from prison. From Bova Marina, his town of origin on the Ionian coast of Calabria, Vadalà returned to Slovakia. In the summer of 2022 he was spotted again in the east of the country, where he had built his fiefdom of agricultural and commercial companies, together with some relatives. Then, in October 2024, the new sentence was confirmed and Vadalà returned to prison.

Picciotteria, the investigation that convicted Vadalà

The investigation that led to the conviction of Antonino Vadalà is known as Picciotteria, conducted by the financial police of Venice. The investigation began in 2014, but only on 28 February 2018 did the judge for preliminary investigations sign the precautionary custody order for Vadalà and other suspects. On 22 October 2024 Vadalà was definitively sentenced to seven years, one month and ten days in prison for association with the aim of drug trafficking and money laundering. The next day he showed up in Reggio Calabria to be detained in the city prison until February 2028.

Vadalà had already been cited in other anti-drug investigations, but was not under investigation. In 2011 the Palermo financial police were investigating a group of Sicilian and Calabrian narcos. At the end of 2013, after the arrest of a major cocaine wholesaler, alternative suppliers began to emerge.

And here two anti-mafia investigations from Reggio Calabria and Florence also converge. One of the suppliers identified was a Slovakian telephone number, a certain "Nino" with "important economic interests in Slovakia", later identified as Antonino Vadalà. The calls went through various Slovakian numbers, believed to be "in use in Vadalà" but registered to family members, on whom the financial police of Florence asked to be able to wiretap.

From a check, one of these numbers appears to be registered to Diego Rodà, Vadalà's father-in-law. Also in Palermo, two Slovakian telephone numbers "in use by" Vadalà had been intercepted, which revealed relationships between Vadalà and "prominent exponents of Calabrian organized crime, linked to drug trafficking, and, by virtue of their own economic interests, with Italian and Slovak public administrators". It is as part of this investigation that a conversation between Vadalà and the current Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, already in power between 2012 and 2018, was allegedly intercepted.

In 2014 Vadalà also ended up under the scrutiny of the Venice financial police, in the Picciotteria investigation. In August of that year, among the guests at Vadalà's wedding there was also a prominent 'Ndrangheta member of the Morabito-Tiradrittu clan of Africo, who proposed that he go into business in Venice. There they had a partner with an import-export company. In reality he was an undercover financier, but the narcos didn't know it.

From the time the undercover operation was concluded in 2015 to the time the precautionary custody order was signed in 2018, there is no evidence that Antonino Vadalà continued his drug trafficking activity.

Today, however, there is almost no one left to investigate transnational organized crime in Slovakia. Since Robert Fico returned to power at the end of October 2023 – the prime minister had been forced to resign in 2018 after the Kuciak murder – he has practically demolished Slovakia's anti-mafia structures.

«He dismantled the anti-mafia prosecutor's office that had been set up after the killing of the journalist, sending magistrates to deal with small administrative matters, and changing many of the top brass of the investigating police. The purge also concerned anti-corruption, making Slovakia a haven for organized crime", an investigative source who must remain anonymous explains to IrpiMedia.

The European chief prosecutor, Laura Kövesi, also supported this in a recent speech to the Slovakian parliament: «There is no way to sugarcoat the reality: Slovakia has become an important transit point for flows of money from criminal activities. An important country for criminals, who invest the proceeds of VAT fraud in drug trafficking, human trafficking and arms trafficking."

Jan Kuciak, two years later

In March 2014 Antonino Vadalà was following the counting of the presidential elections in Slovakia, in which Fico was running, and in a private conversation he stated: «Let's hope (that my friend wins, ed.)». If Fico had won, he would have left the office of prime minister and become president of Slovakia.

The Palermo District Anti-Mafia Directorate had also intercepted a direct dialogue between Robert Fico and Antonino Vadalà. When, in 2019, IrpiMedia reported it, the Slovak prime minister denied having ever spoken on the phone with the Italian entrepreneur. Fico, reached again by ICJK, did not respond.

It is a well-known fact that Vadalà was very close to the leaders of Fico's party, Smer. Among these, the main contact was Viliam Jasan, parliamentarian from Smer and then secretary of the Security Council of the Slovak Republic in the Fico government, considered by Jan Kuciak to be one of Vadalà's institutional fronts in the country. Vadalà was also a business partner of a woman, Maria Troskova, who was a parliamentary assistant first to Jasan and then to Fico.

According to Vadala himself, Troskova had become Fico's assistant thanks to him, who had placed her there through "Vilo", Jasan's nickname. The statement emerges in a chat between Vadalà and Troskova contained in the investigation file of the Slovak prosecutor's office on the Kuciak murder, handed over to Occrp journalists by an anonymous source. The database, known as Kočner Library and managed by ICJK, also contains other investigations into crime in the country.

From the database, Vadalà's profile emerges as a tireless entrepreneur, always looking for new contacts and new business. In 2017 he even sent an application to the Italian secret services.

«The phenomenon of people close to the 'Ndrangheta applying for services is well known. They have key information on corrupt power, and in exchange they receive protection", an anti-mafia prosecutor who investigated Vadalà in the past explained to IrpiMedia. Vadalà also seems to have moved behind the scenes of the regional elections in Košice, the area where his business was located. In fact, in July 2017 he was in contact with a woman capable of bringing in hundreds of votes, who addressed him as "boss". «For now we have 600 (votes, ed.) confirmed, but we have only just begun!».

The Kuciak murder and the Library

Jan Kuciak, journalist for the newspaper Aktuality, and his girlfriend Martina Kusnirova were killed on 21 February 2018 in Velka Maca. The two killers were discovered and convicted. The entrepreneur Marian Kočner, whom Kuciak had dealt with in various investigations, was accused as the instigator. Kočner was acquitted in a first and second trial, and a third trial is awaiting the start. Due to Kuciak's last unfinished article, on which he was working together with Investigace, IrpiMedia and Occrp, Antonino Vadalà and his father-in-law Diego Rodà had initially ended up under the scrutiny of Slovakian investigators for the murder, only to be released almost immediately and never again involved in the trial.

In 2019, Occrp journalists were handed over by an anonymous source the entire investigation file of the Slovak prosecutor's office into the Kuciak murder, an investigation that goes far beyond the murder and exposes a system of malfeasance and corruption throughout the country. The database will be called Kočner Library, managed by Icjk, and shared with all Slovak journalists.

The village of Beša is located about fifty kilometers from the border with Ukraine, in the Košice region of eastern Slovakia. A cluster of houses surrounded by fields, where a few hundred people live.

At the beginning of 2025, the news spread in the local media that Antonino Vadalà had returned to breeding bulls in Beša. In reality, Vadalà was already in prison in Reggio Calabria. In Beša there is a former derelict agricultural cooperative, which Vadalà began renovating in 2017. Today, a cousin of his runs the farms there and rents the cooperative's stables through the Prodest company (formerly owned by the politician Viliam Jasan).

For years, Vadalà's cousin was his right-hand man in managing the farms. Also originally from Bova Marina, he is the son of a mafia defendant who until 2007 was considered the "master of the day" of the Vadalà-Talia gang, i.e. the person who finds new affiliates and is responsible for coordinating local criminal activities.

In the small village of Beša the concentration of Italian entrepreneurs is curiously high. In fact, it is also here that at the beginning of 2024 the entrepreneur Michelangelo Rodi started a goods transport company, Miro Car. In February 2025, the Brescia prosecutor's office revealed a round of false invoices worth 250 million euros: Rodi is also among those under investigation. According to wiretaps reported by the press, the ring was managed by "the head of the 'Ndrangheta in the Brescia area".

The Rhodes company is registered at a house in Beša where corporate relationships are intertwined that lead all the way to Vadalà. The house has a new roof, but the rest is abandoned. The paint has peeled off the rusty fence. Weeds have taken over the yard. The house belongs to a Slovakian woman - a candidate in the same regional elections for which Vadalà had worked hard - who was the manager of Miro Car and who, in the period in which Vadalà returned to Slovakia, registered two other companies at the house.

But there is a more direct connection between her and Vadalà. From an exchange of information between the Slovak and Italian anti-mafia authorities, which has so far remained unpublished, it emerges that, in August and October 2018, the woman visited Vadalà in prison in Turin.

However, the neighbors of Beša's house have never heard the name Rodi or Vadalà. They recognize the latter when journalists show them a photograph of him. He had asked if they were willing to sell him the house and land, "he wanted to join the two courtyards and have a parking lot for trucks", they say. «Try going to the farm at the entrance to the village, that's where we talked to him about selling the house», they advise. They are talking about the old cooperative where Vadalà's cousin raises cattle.

The road the farm faces is muddy, runs alongside a fence behind which bulls and goats graze. The crumbling walls and roof beams of the stables remain. In the rear part, the only one renovated, a small bulldozer is at work. The operator stops.

«And who would this be?», he asks when he hears the name Rhodes. Then he adds that it sounds familiar, but that it has nothing to do with the farm. The man, behind the closed gate, refers to the owner's telephone number.

Mid-sentence, he is interrupted by a call. On the other end of the receiver an agitated woman's voice. He wants to know who is on the farm and why. He must have noticed the journalists from the security camera mounted above the gate. “You have to leave,” he says peremptorily. Rhodes could not be reached for comment. The woman who met Vadalà in prison preferred not to comment.

That meeting in Košice

IrpiMedia and ICJK learned that, in mid-March 2023, Rodi and Vadalà would meet at a hotel in Košice. With them, in addition to Vadalà's cousin the breeder, there would have been another entrepreneur: Vincenzo D'Amico.

D'Amico also ended up in an investigation into the 'Ndrangheta. In 2020, he was acquitted of the charge of mafia association but convicted of having helped the Gagliostro-Parrello 'ndrina of Palmi to launder money through commercial activities. The appeal process is ongoing.

Two years after the first degree conviction, D'Amico opened a trading company in Slovakia, S.c. Perlight.Sk, in Trebišov, half an hour from Beša, one of the areas where Vadalà had done business with breeding.

D'Amico's company did not register any significant activity, declaring zero revenues in 2023. According to commercial data, however, in July 2022 Perlight received a load of 22 thousand kilos of bananas from the port of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, arriving at the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. The supplier was Makergrammy, an Ecuadorian company whose containers, in at least one case, were contaminated with cocaine.

On May 10, 2021, 51 kilos were seized at the port of Hamburg, hidden in the false bottom of a container of bananas shipped to a German company. D'amico, reached through his lawyer, did not comment.

European funds as foundations

For over a decade Antonino Vadalà and his closest relatives have been in relationships with another family, the Rodà, present in Slovakia since the 1980s but originally from Condofuri, next to Bova Marina. Vadalà settled in Slovakia at the beginning of the 2000s, welcomed by his founder Diego Rodà who offered him a job as a breeder. Since 2008 Vadalà has set up his own business. The method is simple, and he probably learned it from Rodà: businesses are started using European agricultural funds as foundations.

Both families, Vadalà and Rodà, have become rich thanks to the pastures: they raise cattle, obtain European contributions, and reinvest in new farms. The cowboys of the Slovakian prairies, however, do not convince some investigators who begin to take an interest in Diego Rodà, the farmer who moves to Ferrari.

In fact, unpublished documentation shows how in 2013 the Slovak police started investigations into Rodà, specialized "in obtaining subsidies from the European Union in the agricultural sector" and suspected of fraud, as well as "various cases of corruption connected to the provision of undue VAT refunds".

The Slovak police, via Interpol, had written to the Italian police force. Rodà, they said, was the owner of 12 companies, had "several criminal records for tax fraud", dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and "since 2004 there have been at least 14 proceedings against him, mostly concluded before the indictment". They did not exclude "a connection between Diego Rodà and foreign criminal groups". In Italy, Rodà has no criminal record.

When, via Interpol, Slovakia asked Italy for "operational control", the contact between Diego Rodà and Antonino Vadalà emerged above all. The two seemed very close, Rodà's eldest daughter, in fact, had married Vadalà in August 2014. Another line of investigation had already been moving into Vadalà since the year before. The dialogue was held between the Slovak liaison officer in Rome and the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate (DIA).

The Slovak police suspected that Vadalà had formed an 'ndrina in the country. Dia had replied that, occasionally, Vadalà returned to Bova Marina and there "he accompanied himself with leading exponents of organized crime, in particular he was contiguous to the Vadalà-Talia gangs of Bova Marina and Libri-Zindato of Reggio Calabria".

The Slovak authorities then hypothesized cases of corruption of public officials to obtain European funds for agriculture. Vadalà, they wrote, would have purchased "some agricultural cooperatives" through "non-repayable financial loans from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund", the two funds that make up the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union. For these loans, he would use properties with inflated values ​​as collateral.

Some of these companies declared their purpose to be breeding and selling cattle in Türkiye. However, the investigators wrote, "there is a suspicion that it could be a cover for drug trafficking along the Balkan route". These suspicions of the Slovak police never led to charges against Vadala.

The journalist Jan Kuciak - in his last unfinished article on which IrpiMedia had also collaborated - had written about the huge subsidies intended for the Vadalà and Rodà companies, raising questions regarding the controls on the disbursement of the funds. Only after his death did the Slovak Ministry of Agriculture make public the list of subsidies paid to the companies of the two families over almost 14 years: 67 million euros from 2004 to 2018.

Through a series of requests for access to documents, ICJK and IrpiMedia were able to calculate how many European agricultural funds have been obtained from 2019 to today by the Rodà and Vadalà companies. Antonino Vadalà left all corporate structures, and his family's companies no longer obtained Pac funds. Those of the Rodà family, however, continued to be subsidized, although to a much lesser extent than in the past, for a total of 3.4 million euros. One of the companies, registered to Rodà's wife, received a total of over 400 thousand euros in 2024.

The Slovak agency responsible for payments to farmers explained that EU funds can only be blocked if the beneficiaries are "subject to a final ruling banning them from receiving aid and support provided by EU funds". Neither Antonino Vadalà nor Diego Rodà, reached through their lawyers, responded to the questions from IrpiMedia and ICJK.

That broken channel

There is an interception that went unnoticed, but which tells what happened in the world of Italian drug trafficking after the brief arrest of the Rodà and Vadalà brothers on suspicion of involvement in the Kuciak murder, in early March 2018. Antonino Vadalà, Diego Rodà and five other relatives were released after 48 hours, and never again suspected of participation in the murder. However, this would have been enough to break the eggs in the basket of those who, in Rome, had to supply some drug dealing places.

On March 11, 2018, a man originally from Condofuri was talking to an important cocaine wholesaler in Rome. He needed to supply a group of drug dealers in the capital, ready to buy up to 15 kilos of cocaine a week. Its supply channel, however, had been abruptly cut off.

The man is a relative by marriage of the Rodà family, and was talking about one of them. “They arrested my brother-in-law… they took his brothers too, did you hear those from Slovakia there?”, he says, referring to what happened after the murder of the journalist. From the rest of the conversation, the investigators deduce that the arrest of the Rodà and Vadalà, with the attention that followed, would have been sufficient to interrupt his drug supply channel.

Released by the Slovak police because they were not believed to be involved in the Kuciak murder, they nevertheless ended up in the spotlight. "They actually arrested my brother-in-law with guns... and now they have their hands like this", explained the man, intercepted. During the flash arrest in Slovakia, in fact, the police had seized several weapons from Diego Rodà and Antonino Vadalà. A loaded revolver, two carbines, two shotguns, a Benelli semi-automatic rifle, two Beretta pistols and a Glock. An arsenal for real cowboys, which ended up in the investigation file together with tablets, computers and cell phones. A river of data flowed into the so-called Kočner Library, those 51 terabytes of judicial information that a source decided to hand over to journalists, so that the investigations into the Slovak Suburra can, in some way, continue.