Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s father dealt drugs to Mafia, says mob turncoat

It’s alleged the estranged father of Italy’s prime minister supplied a Rome kingpin via shipments on a yacht he sailed from Morocco.

Giorgia Meloni says she cut all ties with her father, Francesco, when she was 11. Picture: AFP

The estranged father of the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni was in business with the Italian mafia, a mob turncoat has alleged, further clouding the story of his murky past.

Francesco Meloni died in 2012 following a conviction for drug trafficking, having previously walked out on Giorgia Meloni and his family when she was one, and moved to the Canaries. Meloni said she cut all ties with him when she was 11.

The turncoat claimed in an interview with an investigative TV show that Francesco Meloni supplied marijuana to the notorious Naples mafia boss Michele”the Crazy One” Senese.

Following her election as prime minister in September 2022, a Spanish newspaper dug up court records showing that Meloni’s father was arrested in 1995 in Menorca and given a nine-year jail sentence after police discovered 1,500kg of marijuana on a yacht he had sailed from Morocco.

Francesco Meloni died in 2012. Picture: The Times

On Sunday, the Report show is due to broadcast an interview with the former mobster Nunzio Perrella in which he claims that Francesco Meloni regularly sailed his yacht to Italy to deliver marijuana to Senese in the early 1990s.

Perrella, who was dealing then drugs, said he met Francesco Meloni after asking Senese how he could acquire large amounts of hashish. The boss told him that Francesco Meloni was doing drug runs for him once or twice a month.

Previewing the interview, La Repubblica said Perrella only knew Francesco Meloni as Franco, but later recognised him in a photo after his estranged daughter took office.

A spokeswoman for Meloni declined to comment on the interview.

A rising star in the Naples underworld, Senese was dispatched to Rome in about 1979 to handle drug deals, building an empire of his own and earning his nickname by feigning mental illness while in jail in order to be sent to psychiatric facilities where running drug deals was easier.

Now serving 30 years for ordering the murder of a rival, Senese’s control over Rome’s drugs trade has weakened, prosecutors have said.

Meloni, 46, has said that after her father moved to the Canaries in the early 1980s she was forced to move with her mother and sister from a wealthy Rome neighbourhood to a more working-class area.

“My father did everything to ensure he wasn’t liked or respected – I would find it hard to say he was a good person,” she told an interviewer in 2018.

“I don’t like talking about him, but I will say that if an 11-year-old child decides she no longer wants to see her father and then never sees him again, it is obvious that man has done something.”

Meloni’s grandparents on her father’s side were luminaries of Italian post-war cinema and radio, including her grandmother Zoe Incrocci, who appeared in films with the screen legend Toto and dubbed the voice of a young Marilyn Monroe into Italian for the release of the All About Eve in 1950.

The Times