PRATO, Italy — The long-running China Truck trial targeting alleged Chinese crime gangs accused of controlling Europe’s fast-fashion trucking routes has stalled again in Italy’s main textile district. Senior magistrates now suspect deliberate sabotage — from lost evidence to vanished interpreters — is undermining the case and forcing a broader anti-mafia response, Dec. 11, 2025.
Stalled China Truck trial triggers internal probe
For years, the China Truck trial has lurched from delay to delay, but recent setbacks have sharpened suspicions. Court documents disappeared, the latest court-appointed interpreter quietly flew back to China, and her transcripts were deemed “incomprehensible and unusable,” prompting Prato Chief Prosecutor Luca Tescaroli to open an internal investigation into possible interference.
What began as a bid to dismantle an alleged network of 58 suspects — accused of using trucking firms and warehouses around Prato to dominate garment logistics across Europe — has instead become a case study in how complex, cross-border crime can overwhelm a local court. Seven years after the China Truck investigation was formally closed in 2018, not a single defendant or witness has been heard in open court.
Already in 2023, glitches now seen as warning signs were surfacing: a ledger listing tapped phone calls vanished during the digital transfer between prosecutors and judges, one of several mishaps chronicled in a 2023 Decode39 report that first raised alarms in Rome about the stalled China Truck trial. That same summer, Italian daily Il Foglio described the maxi-case as “derailed” after yet another postponement blamed on missing files and a failure to secure interpreters.
From Prato’s coat-hanger wars to Europe’s fashion supply chain
The China Truck trial stems from a 2010 double killing, when two Chinese men were hacked to death with machetes amid a turf war between rival Zhejiang and Fujian gangs. Investigators say that violence marked the start of a decade-long struggle to control trucking, warehousing and even humble coat-hanger production for thousands of Chinese-owned factories clustered around Prato, now billed as Europe’s largest textile hub.
As the China Truck trial has stalled, violence tied to the same business feuds has spread well beyond Tuscany. A recent Reuters investigation detailed at least 16 arson and bomb attacks since 2024 in Italy, France and Spain, part of what prosecutors call the “coat-hanger wars” over contracts worth millions in the fast-fashion supply chain, according to its latest investigation.
In April, alleged China Truck enforcer Zhang Dayong and his partner were shot dead outside their home in Rome in what police describe as a mafia-style hit linked to the same battle for transport and counterfeit-goods routes, underscoring how figures tied to the China Truck trial remain at the center of Europe-wide score-settling.
Long before today’s crisis, reporters and investigators had mapped out the economic power behind the case. A 2023 ProPublica investigation traced the roots of the China Truck operation to Prato’s boom in Chinese-owned workshops and described how alleged “boss of bosses” Zhang Naizhong built a Europe-wide extortion, gambling and smuggling empire, while moving money and influence back to China, in what the report cast as a mutually useful relationship between underworld networks and political actors.
China Truck trial becomes test for Italy’s anti-mafia toolbox
Prosecutors are now pressing judges in the China Truck trial to recognise the accused gangs as mafia-style organisations under Italian law — a label that would unlock powerful tools, from asset seizures to tougher sentences, routinely used against Cosa Nostra and other home-grown syndicates. Yet national anti-mafia prosecutor Barbara Sargenti has publicly questioned whether that threshold can be met without inside witnesses or deeper cooperation from Chinese authorities, which she says remains “very difficult.”
Tescaroli has warned that “the suspicion is that there is interference from the Chinese community and Chinese authorities in this matter,” even as he stresses that many Chinese workers in Prato are victims of exploitation, tax fraud and unsafe factories as much as they are part of any criminal system. His office has set up specialised teams and is pushing for more translators and forensic accountants, hoping to prevent the China Truck trial from collapsing on procedural grounds.
With a new pair of interpreters now appointed and the next hearing in the China Truck trial scheduled for May 15, prosecutors say the case has become more than a local feud. Its outcome will signal whether Europe’s fashion capital can confront a transnational criminal economy that has learned to exploit loopholes in labour law, cross-border trucking and judicial bureaucracy faster than the state can plug them.
