Mafia Control of Olive Oil the Topic of '60 Minutes' Report

Summary

The CBS News seg­ment on ​’60 Minutes’ exposed mafia involve­ment in Italian agri­cul­ture, par­tic­u­larly in the olive oil trade, lead­ing to sus­pi­cions about the authen­tic­ity of the ​“Made in Italy” brand. The report fea­tured inter­views with Italian inves­ti­ga­tor Sergio Tirro and author Tom Mueller, who high­lighted the preva­lence of food crime in Italy, with up to 80% of olive oil labeled as ​“extra vir­gin” poten­tially being coun­ter­feit.

The CBS News mag­a­zine ​‘60 Minutes’ aired a seg­ment on mafia involve­ment in Italian agri­cul­ture tonight, intro­duc­ing mil­lions of view­ers to the shady under­world of the olive oil trade and cast­ing a fresh pall of sus­pi­cion over the ​“Made in Italy” brand.

“Mafia copies of fine olive oil, wine and cheese have fueled an explo­sion of food crime in Italy,” said CBS News cor­re­spon­dent, Bill Whitaker.

In addi­tion to a con­ver­sa­tion with Italian inves­ti­ga­tor Sergio Tirro, whose team of 60 trained tasters are able to detect coun­ter­feit olive oils ​“at first sip,” the report fea­tured an inter­view with Tom Mueller, the author of the Extra Virginity exposé.

​“You in many cases are get­ting lower grade olive oil that has been blended with some good extra vir­gin olive oil…you’re some­times get­ting deodor­ized oil,” Mueller said. ​“They blend it with some oil that has some char­ac­ter to give it a lit­tle color, a lit­tle flavor…and they sell that as extra vir­gin. It’s ille­gal — it hap­pens all the time.”

Before an esti­mated 12 mil­lion view­ers who had just watched the Denver Broncos defeat the San Diego Chargers in a close late-sea­son foot­ball game, Tirro demon­strated how easy it is to coun­ter­feit extra vir­gin olive oil.

Taking a vial of col­or­less, odor­less sun­flower oil, he added a few drops of chloro­phyll. ​“It becomes the color of olive oil,” Tirro said. It’s as sim­ple as that.

Sicilian olive oil pro­ducer, Nicola Clemenza, is lead­ing a 200-farmer upris­ing against mafia con­trol in the region.

“On the day I started the con­sor­tium, they burned my car, they burned down part of my home and I was inside with my wife and my daugh­ter,” Clemenza said.

Mueller said mafia con­trol per­vades the food sup­ply in Italy, and described its impact on olive oil in the bleak­est terms: ​“It’s very dif­fi­cult to say in any given case with olive oil exactly how many drops in a given bot­tle actu­ally have Mafia blood on them.“
See Also:Listen to an Interview with Tom Mueller on the On Olive Oil Podcast
When Whitaker asked how much of the olive oil labeled ​“extra vir­gin” that reaches Americans is really not extra vir­gin, Mueller responded, ​“75% to 80%, eas­ily.”

CBS News shipped 3 bot­tles of olive oil found in an unnamed American super­mar­ket to Tirro’s tast­ing panel: Only one was found to be extra vir­gin.

“They described one as lam­pante — the low­est qual­ity olive oil. That brand hap­pens to be one of the best-sell­ing in America,” Whitaker said.

The top-sell­ing brand in the United States is Bertolli, which is the sub­ject of a high-pro­file fraud inves­ti­ga­tion and mul­ti­ple class action law­suits.

See the ​’60 Minutes’ seg­ment here.

• 60 Minutes / CBS News