*This is an AI-generated image purely for illustration purposes*.

PHILIPSBURG — Did the Italian mafia gain a foothold in St. Maarten? For the answer to that question, we have to go back more than fifty years and to a study performed by Toine Spapens, a professor of criminology at Tilburg university. Writing about mafia infiltration in the (former) Netherlands Antilles and especially in Sint Maarten, Papens concluded: “it started in the early seventies when the Sicilian businessman Rosario Spadaro bought a hotel and developed it into a casino.”

The study states that there was a link between Spadaro and the Italian-American Cellini family. The Cellinis took part in the illegal gambling operations of Meyer Lansky, who built a reputation as the accountant of the American mob. One of the Cellinis co-owned the casino Spadaro had bought but when the government refused to give him an operating license, Spadaro bought him out and continued to gradually acquire a substantial number of properties and businesses on the island.

Meyer Lansky died on January 15, 1983, in Miami, Florida. During his criminal career he worked together with Lucky Luciano and he was instrumental to the establishment of the National Crime Syndicate in the States.

In the meantime, Spadaro developed warm contacts with local politicians and entered into a joint venture at the end of the eighties for the expansion of the airport and the construction of a cruise terminal at the harbor in St. Maarten.

What happened? Jack Blum, an attorney specialized in money laundering compliance and financial crimes visited St. Maarten after a businessman asked him to help a group of local entrepreneurs who wanted to get Democratic Party icon Claude Wathey out of office, “because he and his family were completely corrupt (….) and was ruining business.”

This appears from a transcript of the Corruption Diaries, a publication of Blum’s Tax Justice Network. In an interview with Naomi Fowler, Blum said that he had discovered that Spadaro had a casino in Nigeria and also one in St. Maarten. When Blum visited the casinos on the island, he discovered something strange: “There was nobody there,” he told Fowler. “The lights were on and the staff was there, but nobody was gambling.”

Blum concluded that the twelve casinos were fronts for handling dirty money that they deposited in bank accounts as gambling winnings.

He also visited the airport and there he saw another strange phenomenon. At the time of his visit, Blum estimated the population to be around 20,000. But at the airport he noticed the presence of three armored trucks. “Instead of going to the casinos they were going to the airport. “They would meet incoming American Airlines flights from San Juan. Duffel bags would go into the armored cars who would take them to the local branch of Barclays Bank. “That was going to be the way they laundered that money and allow them to say that it was legitimate.”

Then Blum noticed, just before elections were held, the government’s announcement of a plan to rebuild the airport. Claude Wathey established a committee to handle this project. On board was his son Al, who, according to Blum, negotiated with a “previously unknown Sicilian construction company.” Those negotiations were peculiar, because the committee told the Sicilians that their price was not high enough. “Instead of negotiating down, they were negotiating up.”

Indeed, later it appeared that the real cost for the airport project was $35 million, but that parties in the end settled for a price of $41.2 million. Similar shenanigans went on with the cruise terminal project where the price was inflated with $17.5 million.

Blum made quite some noise about the money laundering, both in the Netherlands and with the local prosecutor’s office, and managed to get some of the damage undone.

Local prosecutors accused Spadaro of being the middleman for construction companies linked to the mafia and local politicians. “He established himself in St. Maarten to direct a money laundering operation for the mafia.” According to one report, the money laundering capacity through Spadaro’s Maho Beach Hotel was at one moment $100 million per year.

In 1990, senior editor at United Press International Frederick Winship wrote that Great Bay Beach Hotel had become the second Caribbean home of Club Perillo, a travel package operator. Renovation of the hotel cost $15 million and its owner was “Italian millionaire Rosario Spadaro, the so-called Donald Trump of St Maarten.” Winship added that Spadaro was also behind the development of the Royal Islander Club and that he was the first to introduce timeshare accommodations.

Spadaro was not the only Italian to pick St. Maarten as the base for his operations. No wonder; mafia infiltration flourishes and has disruptive effect when economies are weak and authorities lack integrity. This is most likely why, towards the end of the seventies, Gaetano Corallo, who owned several casinos in Italy, opened one in St. Maarten as well.

Corallo did not stay under the radar very long. In 1983 Italian prosecutors suspected that he was working for the Cosa Nostra’s Santapaola clan. He fled to Florida where he was ultimately arrested and extradited to Italy in 1989. He left the management of the Atlantis Casino in Cupecoy to his son, Francesco.

The latter acquired over the years several casinos in several countries and he also became the largest operator of electronic gaming machines in Italy.

Francesco also came under the magnifying glass of the justice system. He allegedly financed the election campaign of Gerrit Schotte, the first prime minister of Curacao, in exchange for an important public function (at the Central bank of Curacao and St Maarten). That function however, never materialized.

Like Spadaro, Corallo also developed relationships with local politicians. In St. Maarten he made no difference between political parties: “I give to all of them,” he once said.

However, the justice system could not get enough of Corallo, who arrived in St. Maarten at the age of 17 and had never been convicted for any crime. But when the Italian prosecutors labeled him as a member of the mafia and accused him of large-scale tax evasion, money laundering and bribery, he was arrested in December 2016 and held in custody at the police station in Philipsburg, awaiting his extradition to Italy.

The Corallo-case became really awkward upon his extradition. The Italians released him when he arrived in the country and a confident Corallo said that prosecutors would never call the case against him. And indeed, they didn’t. Still, Italian prosecutors could not help themselves and stated: “We cannot assess whether Corallo was under the control of Sicilian masters or that he was operating on his own.”

All of the above suggests that there is at least a semblance of mafia-activity in St. Maarten. It is tempting to think that such nefarious criminality would get the attention of local law enforcement but we found nothing to indicate that this has been the case.

On the contrary, a 2024 report from the Law Enforcement Council emphasizes youth criminality and integrity as serious problems. Not a word about the mafia in that report.

An Interpol report describes that St. Maarten has a busy international airport, large cruise ship facilities, a thriving marine trade as well as a popular tourism industry. These multicultural global characteristics, the report states, create potential markets for global organized crime groups.

A report from the local police force that analyses crime in St. Maarten noties that the island functions as a transit point for the cocaine trade and for the local trade in marijuana. Again, not a word about trouble with the Italian mafia.

Publisher’s Note: Email us via info@stmaartennews.com or whatsapp +17215880800 to get a free copy of the INSIDER Report entitled “Italian Mafia in St. Maarten and Curaçao: From Tourist Boom to Corruption Scandals“.

Italian Mafia in St. Maarten and Curaçao: From Tourist Boom to Corruption Scandals

Discover the hidden history of how the Italian mafia infiltrated St. Maarten and Curaçao—building empires through casinos, hotel projects, political bribery, and multi-million-dollar laundering operations. This explosive, in-depth investigation traces the decades-long influence of mafia-linked figures on the islands’ politics and economy.

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