U.S. officials may have deliberately relied on the Mafia to secure base sites

Evidence

Ties between the military and the Mafia may not have been simply the result of questionable oversight, but a deliberate decision. “It has even been suggested that the decision to install nuclear cruise missiles at Comiso was because the Mafia could be relied on to protect the site in return for the inevitable rake off it could extract on the hundreds of millions of dollars in construction contracts for roads, housing and so on,” the New York Times’s Flora Lewis wrote at the time. “Max Raab, the U.S. ambassador in 1983 when the site was being built, was said by aides to be philosophical about the situation, holding that the corruption was a problem for the Italian, not the U.S., government and that in any case the dollars would help stimulate the bedraggled Sicilian economy.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the argument that base contractors subcontract to criminal networks elsewhere in the book; also echoes a broader theme in base-hosting countries of willful U.S. indifference.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 371