Italian authorities are seizing more than €200 million ($232 million) in assets tied to late Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, including funds derived from drug trafficking and laundered across Europe and beyond, CBS News reported Thursday. 

The fortune of the Cosa Nostra boss had been amassed since the 1980s, Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, said in a statement cited by the news agency. The investigation uncovered large sums from drug trafficking that were reinvested in numerous European and non-European countries. Assets were being seized in Andorra, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Monaco, Spain and Switzerland, as well as Italy, according to the report.

The probe began with a report from Andorra flagging an Italian woman with “significant financial resources” who turned out to be married to a drug trafficker said to have close ties to Cosa Nostra and to Messina Denaro himself, the BBC reported. The lead produced threads in several other countries, according to the broadcaster.

The drug proceeds were reintroduced into the legal economy through a range of holdings, including luxury vacation resorts on Spain’s Costa del Sol, bank accounts, securities portfolios, and corporate holding companies, police said. Eight foreign companies identified in the probe were used primarily for real estate investment and asset management, and many of the 22 properties linked to Messina Denaro were luxury resorts in exclusive areas around Marbella, Benahavis, and Puerto Banus, according to the report. 

Three people have been arrested, CBS said. 

Footage released by Italian investigators showed masked officers, some in riot gear, breaking down doors and scaling walls to raid a series of luxury villas surrounded by palm-tree-lined lawns, the BBC reported. Investigators used planes, drones, and thermal scanners to detect concealed spaces and hidden cavities, according to CBS News. The BBC reported that more than 150 officers took part in the global operation and that IT specialists were also deployed to trace digital wallets and cryptocurrency.

Messina Denaro, head of Sicily’s Castelvetrano clan, was captured in Palermo in January 2023 after three decades on the run and died in prison that September at age 61, CBS said. He carried six life sentences, including for involvement in the 1992 murders of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and for deadly bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993, according to the report. One sentence was for ordering the kidnapping and strangulation of the 12-year-old son of a witness in the Falcone case, whose body was dissolved in acid.