US and Italian police arrested more than 70 Mafia suspects in New York and Sicily yesterday, decapitating the second largest crime family in the US and thwarting plans by a new generation of organised crime bosses to re-establish a transatlantic axis.

Operation Old Bridge, the culmination of investigations that began five years ago, was described by police as the biggest combined effort since the "Pizza Connection" sweep of Mafia drug traffickers in the mid-1980s.