Italian police said on Wednesday they had broken up a complex money laundering operation and an illegal metal recycling business that had enabled criminals to transfer huge amounts of illicit cash between Italy and China. The three-year investigation, coordinated by the anti-mafia prosecutor’s office in the northeastern city of Trieste, showed the enormous lengths gangs were having to go to in order to clean ill-gotten gains, police said. The case unveiled a network of firms that between 2013 and 2021 sold around 150,000 tonnes of scrap metal, including copper, brass, and aluminium, that came from various sources, circumventing environmental norms and evading taxes on deals estimated to be worth some 300 million euros ($363 million). To make the metal appear legitimate for the end users, companies in the Czech Republic and Slovenia produced falsified documents to show the material had been acquired in China. To make the documentation more authentic, …