Cosa Nostra is seeking to buy mine-laying drones from the black market created by the war in Ukraine, Palermo chief prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said on July 28, ANSA reported.

The claim moves Sicilian organised crime's arms procurement from the residual Balkan stockpiles left by the Yugoslav wars to the live trade generated by a current conflict, and from small arms to munition-carrying drones. De Lucia told the parliamentary Antimafia Commission that the intelligence came from state witnesses, and that the organisation was attempting to rebuild what he called a quality arsenal, in the Palermo area and in other territories.

He said there were signals of purchases of drones capable of carrying and dropping mines, describing them as "weapons we are not prepared to defend ourselves against".

Firearms recovered so far have arrived through Salento in Puglia but originate in the Balkans, specifically the former Yugoslavia, he said.

De Lucia devoted much of the hearing to prison control. Mafia members are supplied with mobile phones within hours of entering custody, a situation he said applied across all penal institutions. The 41-bis hard regime for convicted bosses works, he said, but those entering high or medium security without boss status are immediately given handsets, allowing Cosa Nostra to continue issuing orders.

That has two consequences, he said. Pre-trial detention offers little protection, and the credibility of the state is weakened among those it asks to co-operate, including extortion victims, who struggle to see the point of reporting when the person they denounced can order reprisals from a cell.

Investigators recovered 297 mobile phones intended for inmates at Palermo's Pagliarelli and Ucciardone prisons alone between 2025 and the first half of 2026, with hundreds more across Sicily. Those figures cover only intercepted devices.

De Lucia called for more prison officers and said signal jamming was not practicable, particularly in urban areas. Functioning high and medium security regimes would allow the number of prisoners held under 41-bis to be reduced, he said.

He told the commission that Cosa Nostra currently has no single leadership, operating instead through organised dialogue between its district groupings, and that Sicilian clans are running new international drug trafficking routes.

On Matteo Messina Denaro, who spent 30 years as a fugitive before his capture, de Lucia said investigations had produced 18 arrests of people who sheltered him, some now definitively convicted. He described the late boss as belonging to a generation with an unusually developed approach to outside networks and to accumulating and redistributing capital. A recent operation conducted with seven foreign states seized €200mn in assets linked to him. De Lucia asked for part of the hearing to be held in closed session.

The appearance followed a public dispute over his comments on Italian prisons, after Justice Minister Carlo Nordio said the prosecutor had lost control. Democratic Party deputy Giuseppe Provenzano opened the session by expressing solidarity with him.