Hello and thank you for downloading the more or less podcast.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.

I'm Parisia Cadeal.

Our question today is all about the Italian mafia.

Last year 200 gang members from the notorious and Rangata gang were convicted in Italy of various crimes, including drug trafficking, extortion and theft.

But it was an estimate of the economic scale of their operations that caught the eye of

loyal listener Michael Gallagher.

Recent reports on the Maxi trial of the Italian mafia, the Andrangata,

report that annual turnover as 53 billion euros,

supposedly more than Deutsche Bank and McDonald's combined.

Find it very hard to believe that an organised crime group, even one as

decentralized as the Andrangator could collectively earn this much.

So first things first. If this criminal gang did have a turnover of 53 billion euros, which

is 58 billion dollars, then that would indeed be the equivalent to the total annual

revenue of McDonald's and Deutsche Bank combined.

Well, more or less, which would make it an absolutely vast criminal undertaking.

But is that 53 billion euros estimate right?

To work this out, we got together our own posse of mafia number crunchers starting with Anna.

I'm Professor Anessergy, I am a professor of criminology at the University of Essex.

Professor Aniseurgy is an expert in the Andrangata and grew up in Calabria, the region

in Italy that they are from.

Let's start with the basics.

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