Hundreds found guilty in historic Italian mafia trial

 

 

 


Verdict significant blow to ‘Ndrangheta mafia which monopolizes European cocaine trade

Nov 20, 2023. Posted by  Balkan Periscope - Hellas

Lamezia Terme.

An Italian court on Monday convicted and sentenced around 200 mobsters and their white-collar helpers, the culmination of a historic, nearly three-year trial against Calabria’s notorious ‘Ndrangheta mafia. 

For over an hour and a half, the president of the court in southern Vibo Valentia, Brigida Cavasino, read out the names of the guilty and their sentences, which ranged from 30 years to a few months, as defendants incarcerated in prisons across the country watched via videolink.

 

Prosecutors had asked for guilty verdicts against 322 accused mafia members operating in the Calabrian province and their white-collar collaborators, requesting 30 years for a dozen of the ‘Ndrangheta’s most seasoned decision-makers. About 200 were convicted and sentenced on Monday, although only four top members received this maximum penalty. The remainder were either formally or effectively acquitted.

 

One of the trial’s most high-profile defendants, 70-year-old former parliamentarian and defense lawyer Giancarlo Pittelli, accused of being a fixer for the mafia, received 11 years, short of the 17 years prosecutors requested. A few dozen family members sat in the back of the vast, narrow courtroom, squinting at the television screens for a glimpse of their loved ones, and occasionally crying out with joy over a light sentence. The verdicts — which can be appealed twice — capped Italy’s largest mafia trial in decades and mark the most significant blow to date against one of the world’s most powerful organized crime syndicates.

 

Stranglehold over territory

 

The ‘Ndrangheta has moved beyond its roots in the poor southern Italian region of Calabria to exercise near-monopoly on the European cocaine trade and is now found in more than 40 countries worldwide. Since the trial began in January 2021, the court has heard thousands of hours of testimony, including from more than 50 former mafia operatives turned state witnesses.

 

They and others have detailed countless examples of the ‘Ndrangheta’s brutality and its stranglehold over the local population. They include carrying out violent ambushes, shaking down business owners, rigging public tenders, stockpiling weapons, collecting votes or passing kickbacks to the powerful.

 

The accused were members or affiliates of the top ‘Ndrangheta “clan” in Vibo Valentia, one of the region’s many economically depressed rural areas where the mafia has suffocated the local economy, infiltrated public institutions and terrorized its people for decades. The territory’s undisputed boss, Luigi “The Supreme” Mancuso, 69, was cut from the defendants list last year to be tried separately.

 

‘We don’t want you’

 

Hundreds of lawyers and a few dozen members of the media attended the sentencing Monday in the heavily secured courtroom bunker in the Calabrian city of Lamezia Terme. Also present was Rocco Mangiardi, 67, a local businessman and one of the first to denounce the ‘Ndrangheta for extortion before a judge in 2009.

 

Mangiardi, who has lived under police escort ever since, lamented the low turnout for the trial’s most important moment. “This courtroom should be filled with citizens,” he told AFP. “To show the judges that we’re on their side and then to tell the mafiosi with their presence ‘We don’t want you.’”

 

The ‘Ndrangheta of Vibo Valentia — whose members have nicknames straight out of Hollywood like “The Wolf”, “Fatty”, “Sweetie” and “Lamb Thigh” — were entrenched in the local economy, feared by business owners and farmers, and protected by white-collar professionals and politicians.

 

Informants — a relatively rare phenomenon within the ‘Ndrangheta due to blood ties between members — recounted how weapons were hidden in cemetery chapels and ambulances used to transport drugs, and municipal water supplies diverted to marijuana crops. Those who opposed the mafia found dead puppies, dolphins or goat heads dumped on their doorsteps, sledgehammers taken to store fronts or cars torched. Less lucky were those beaten or fired at — or those whose bodies were never found.

AFP