CNN
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The discovery of a severed horse’s head and a cow housed with its bloody dead calf on top has shaken a Sicilian town, with authorities treating the incident as a mafia threat.

The dead animals were discovered on the property of a construction contractor in the town of Altofonte, near Palermo, police told CNN.

The gruesome scene recalled The film “The Godfather” from 1972 in which a character wakes up to find the decapitated head of a horse in his bed.

The contractor, who cannot be named to protect him during the ongoing investigation, told police he had not received any threats prior to the discovery of the dead cattle, which were kept on an adjacent property.

The construction and garbage industries remain the two most prominent mafia-linked business sectors in Sicily, according to a recent report by the Anti-Mafia Directorate.

The contractor often carried out construction work for the local municipality, which has worked hard to deny mafia-linked companies winning tenders, but he had told police he had not been approached by any group demanding money or favors.

A police spokesperson told CNN the incident is being treated as a mob scare tactic.

The horrific incident may be related to the recent release of 20 mafia members from local prisons, whose sentences have expired and who may be out for revenge, according to the head of the anti-mafia directorate, Maurizio de Lucia.

Earlier in September, he had warned that the released criminals would almost certainly take revenge.

Altofonte mayor Angela De Lucia said she was “devastated” when she heard the news. “I cannot understand such barbarism,” she told local media.

“This action seems to take us back to the Middle Ages.”

The use of dead animals, more often dogs than horses, takes precedence on the southern Italian island.

It’s a tactic used by the infamous Sicilian crime syndicate Cosa Nostra for decades. Several similar incidents of severed animal heads have been reported by local businessmen in Sicily: in 2023, a severed pig’s head was found hanging in the local police station while a local business contractor found the severed head of one of his goats on his garden gate.

Organized crime in Sicily has been a problem since the 19th century when Cosa Nostra was first identified. The violence reached a peak in 1992 when two anti-mafia judges, Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, were assassinated in separate roadside bombs.

More recently, Cosa Nostra, working in collaboration with the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta syndicate, has turned away from violence and focused more on white-collar crime, infiltrating local government and industries such as construction and sanitation.

But extortion and demands for protection money or “pizzo” remain a staple of these groups.

In a 2023 criminal case, 31 people were convicted of aiding local mobsters by lying about paying protection money to the group, which served to protect them, according to the judge’s sentencing documents.

In 2023 Matteo Messina Denaro, a Sicilian Cosa Nostra mob boss who had been on the run for 30 years while seeking cancer treatment in Palermo, was captured, underscoring the level of complicity that continues to protect and enable criminal enterprises.