New deep background/history lead?

The Pizza Connection Trial stands as the longest criminal jury trial in the federal courts in U.S. history.[1] The trial began on September 30, 1985 and ended with convictions of all but one of the 22 defendants on March 2, 1987.

The trial centered on a Mafia-run enterprise that distributed vast quantities of heroin and cocaine in the United States, and then laundered the cash before sending it back to the suppliers in Sicily. The U.S. defendants utilized a number of independently owned pizza parlors as fronts for narcotics sales and collections – hence the name “Pizza Connection”. Evidence at the trial proved that the enterprise shipped no less than $1.6 billion of heroin to the U.S. between 1975 and April 1984. Arrests of scores of conspirators were coordinated in the U.S., Italy, Switzerland and Spain on April 9, 1984, following the capture of Gaetano Badalamenti and several family members the previous day in Madrid, Spain. Badalamenti was the former boss of the Sicilian Mafia, and a key supplier of heroin and cocaine to the U.S. Mafia distributors.

The arrests were carried out by U.S. authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Customs Service and the New York City Police Department, who worked in extremely close cooperation with the Italian National Police and prosecutors, as well as the Swiss authorities. The arrests followed a two-year investigation carried out by U.S. and Italian authorities who shared highly sensitive information and agreed to coordinate their efforts to strike the U.S./Italian mafia-narcotics business. ... After trial, all but one of the defendants were convicted, and, except for one low-level defendant, those verdicts were affirmed on appeal. During the course of the investigation and trial, the U.S. and Italy entered into new Treaties on Extradition and Mutual Legal Assistance that enabled law-enforcement authorities from both countries to actively cooperate and share information. Those treaties and the “Pizza” case became models that the U.S. has since used to attack organized crime and narcotics trafficking on a global basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Connection_Trial

An interesting (though hardly surprising) detail about this case that brings it a step or two closer to Comet Ping Ping:

Giuseppe Vitale was husband to Badalamenti’s niece, who ran a pizza parlor in Paris, Ill., about 25 miles south of Danville near the Indiana border. Salvatore Evola, a construction worker from Temperance, Mich., was also husband to another of Badalamenti’s nieces. The defendants were described by federal authorities as “go-betweens” for Badalamenti’s drug smuggling and money-laundering operation. Alfano was described by authorities as Badalamenti’s primary Midwest contact for the operation, which Badalamenti ran from pay phones in Rio de Janeiro.

Badalamenti called Alfano at a pay phone outside the Pineway Liquor Mart in Oregon, Ill., or at Alfano’s restaurant, where they exchanged coded messages that detailed telephone numbers and quantities of heroin and cocaine.

Coded references spoken in Sicilian included drug synonyms: salted sardines, pants, shirts, suits, cotton, acrylic and a telephone number code, “TERMINUSA,” in which “T” represented the number one, “E” represented the number two, etc.

http://rockrivertimes.com/1993/07/01/pizza-connection-legacy-examined/

So there's that. Now flash-forward thirty years, to 2014, via International Business Times:

Pizza Ciro, a picturesque restaurant in the heart of Italy’s capital . . . had been in business for more than a decade before it was seized by Italian authorities last month, along with 26 other restaurants and cafés in the heart of Rome. In a major sweep against the Mafia, police arrested 90 people and seized assets worth 250 million euros, including pizzerias allegedly owned by a crime syndicate that used them to launder proceeds from drug dealing, extortion and loan-sharking. ...

The Reach Of The Octopus

"The raid on pizzerias unveiled an emblematic alliance between a well-established family of business owners in Rome and one of Naples’ most powerful Camorra families," Prestipino, who leads the investigation as Rome’s deputy chief prosecutor, said in an interview. The size of the Mafia presence in Rome is difficult to assess, according to Prestipino, but "for sure, there is so much wealth in Rome that is indirectly linked to criminal groups,” he said.

According to Sabrina Alfonsi, the president of Rome's central district, "nearly 70 percent of restaurants and bars in downtown Rome are thought to be in the hands of organized crime." Figures from LUISS University in Rome put the turnover for Mafia groups from their Rome operations at more than one billion euros, or $1.35 billion, a year.

... People may not even realize that they are ordering their pizza from the mob, whose extensive reach is exemplified by the euphemism many Italians use to describe it: la piovra, the giant octopus, whose tentacles reach far and wide. ... Anti-Mafia prosecutors are focusing on the many shops and commercial activities in the city whose ownership has changed very rapidly. Many of the new buyers, mostly from southern Italy, are quick to replace staff and suppliers with people coming from their own areas. Then they hire relatives, or crime-family affiliates, who often are made to appear as legitimate owners of the business.

Fancy Mafiosi Go Abroad

In sharp contrast with the violent crimes they commit in southern Italy, **mafiosi in Rome are very careful to avoid clamor, so as not to draw attention from the authorities. Some criminal organizations are said to have agreed to a non-aggression pact in order to avoid public attention. Departing from traditional money-laundering strategies, they no longer invests in smoky bars, cheap hotels or run-down strip clubs in the suburbs, good for stocking cash rather than generating it. Today, the mafiosi increasingly choose prestigious locations and fashionable restaurants they expect to generate a profit. **

**Prosecutors found the Continis indirectly owned pizzerias located right in front of the Senate, or even tauntingly close to the headquarters of the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor’s Office. One could be forgiven for having no idea who’s really behind those places; many didn’t, even among the rich and famous who ate there and whose pictures still grace the doorway at Pizza Ciro. Among them are actresses, soccer players, even former prime minister Mario Monti and the celebrated anti-Mafia prosecutor Antonio Ingroia. ** ... But unwittingly helping the Mafia launder its money doesn't necessarily have to happen in Italy. Mafia groups are among the most powerful and connected to other similar organizations globally. A report in 2012 from Confesercenti, an Italian business lobby, estimated that the main Mafia groups had a yearly turnover of 140 billion euros ($190 billion), almost one tenth of the size of the entire Italian economy, with cash reserves of 65 billion euros and assets all over the world. ... But tourists sitting in Rome’s Mafia-linked restaurants don’t know any of this. They have no clue that the cheese on top of their margherita pie may have come from a dairy farm controlled by the Camorra, or that the young man serving them may really be a crime-family enforcer moonlighting as a fake waiter. And they don’t know that the lyrics of the Neapolitan folk song blasting from the speakers at Ciro sound like a perfect, sadly ironic image of many Italians’ unwillingness to face the hard truth that organized crime is buying up their country: “Let's forget the past! We're from Naples!"

http://www.ibtimes.com/want-some-mafia-your-pizza-how-mob-taking-over-romes-restaurants-1555674

Also:

Dubious German media reports have stated that around 30 percent of German pizza restaurants are mafia controlled. (The number is closer to 3 percent, restaurateurs say.) Seventeen Duisberg restaurant owners have issued an anti-mafia statement in order to reassure customers, but the ‘Ndrangheta has certainly not helped their fellow Italians with blunt statements such as this one:

"The Germans must realize that where there is pizza, there’s the Mafia.”

http://foreignpolicy.com/2007/08/23/where-there-is-pizza-theres-the-mafia/

Mafia known links to child-trafficking (surprisingly little on this at first search): http://www.articlesfactory.com/articles/social-issues/how-us-gangs-and-mafia-are-contributing-to-child-trafficking.html

(Continued in comments)