Of Matthew Castagna
I learned to appreciate the usefulness and complexity of investigative journalism in 2014, so not that long ago. Over the years I have understood many things. Above all, I understood how certain dynamics work in Italy. Among many, I saw, read and understood how on the one hand there is a’ facade anti-mafia, hypocritical and false, perhaps more collusive than others, who speculates on an alleged underworld for sleazy profit and power games. On the other hand, I have met people who love justice and with great determination, courage, seriousness undertake hard work, difficult and full of obstacles that taught me that organized crime is a cancer on civil society, but that next to it, even worse is the mafia mentality, with mafia methods, in a climate of silence on the part of those who, ultimately, eat at the same table.
Of Paolo Coltro
For years, Veneto has left the field open to the 'Ndrangheta, mafia and camorra. But without the help of local arms and brains the tumor would not have been able to take root
There are, yes. 'Ndraghetists, Camorra members, mafiosi of Sicilian families have always looked at the Veneto locomotive of Italy, which even during the crisis had an economy that was anything but dead. And now that dynamism starts again, becomes land of choice for the entanglements of criminal and above all economic malfeasance. After invading Lombardy, Piedmont, partly Emilia Romagna, the mafias are aiming, and not from today, on Veneto: a new entry to conquer. The telephone interceptions bear witness to this: «we have Padua in our hands», «here is the Bengodi», emerged in the long investigative work of the Padua Dia which led to the sixteen fresh arrests of the operation “Cut flower”.
It's a story that has distant roots. It begins in 80s, when dozens of mafiosi come shipped in forced residence, away from home yes, but in the Veneto. At the time, there were protests from mayors and populations. In '93 in Codognè (Treviso) the arrival of the "black widow of the Camorra" Anna Mazza provoked the resignation of the mayor and the uprising of the town: they burned the balcony of her house, they moved her. Over the years, addiction: In the 2012 it turns out that the boss Antonino Duca was in Cadoneghe only because he dies there, and lived with his son. Today the mayors of Veneto they prefer to reject immigrants, while more than one hundred mafiosi have residence in their villages.
It's just a distant cause, not decisive but important. The real driving force behind the mafia settlement is economic fabric: there is money, there are businesses. Where there is money, it sells drug, and it is the first exquisitely criminal step, direct delinquency. In recent years Verona has been transformed into the capital of drug dealing, the loads of cocaine arrived and perhaps arrive at the port of Marghera. The co-presence of 'Ndrangheta, mafia and camorra does not cause clashes and bloody fights, there is room for everyone. I Calabriansthey manage almost in monopoly drug trafficking, the others have house specialties: generally scams for the Camorra, economic infiltration for the mafiosi. The alarm bells were already ringing in the early 2000s.
In those years, every now and then someone gets arrested, but they seem like episodes. Daniela Bettera and Lara Peviani write at the end of 2012 on the website "paginauno": «in the first semester report 2011 of the Dia, the deputy prosecutor of Reggio Calabria Roberto Pennisi explains that in a large part of Veneto, “for currently unexplained reasons”, he practically left free field to organizations of a different type from the Calabrian one". The words of the national anti-mafia prosecutor therefore appear jarring Pietro Grassopronounce the 18 last December during a debate on the mafia organized in Padua by the Nuova Frontiera association: «Veneto – he says – is under the attack of the Camorra, more than the Sicilian mafia or the Calabrian 'ndrangheta, but the region has been able to show “antibodies”: dubious situations are immediately reported here, the Camorra or the Mafia struggle to take root. In the North East there is a civic ground and social system which has so far avoided the rooting of small, big bosses".
Too optimistic, Pietro Grasso: The “Aspide” case broke out in those days, the organization headed by Mario Crisci that makes it clear what the mafiosi do: through thewear bring them to their knees companies in crisis, they appropriate it with violent systems but covered by an apparent legality, with the factual contribution of notaries, lawyers, accountants. They were 120 companies that have fallen into the criminal network, epicenter Padua. Always in 2012 who wins the contract for the Dueville carabinieri barracks? The Iannazzos of Lamezia Terme. The official mantra that in Veneto the mafias "are not rooted" and "are not structured" it dies hard, traces of it can even be found in the latest available report (fine 2016) of the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate at Parliament. Furthermore, Dia works well and specializes: unmasks suspicious investments and collusions with the local professional class.
The mafias are already at the second step: il recycling of dirty money. They buy businesses, “clean” commercial establishments (also a laundry room), bars and pizzerias, bakeries, shares of companies in which they sit next to the Venetians. There are other sides of "legal" infiltration: The procurement and above all i subcontracts. Here we build and make things roads and highways. Il earth movement it is the entrance door, the transportation of waste another business, almost always illegal. There are those who remember that the harmful materials that ended up under the glittering southern Valdastico arrived on trucks leaving from Catanzaro. Real estate deals involve the participation of the Venetians: land sales, society, relations with administrations for building permits. Contacts with politics emerge, perhaps sporadic but significant: said Marco Giorlo, former sports councilor in Verona: «The Calabrians are a voting machine». Those were the times when the deputy mayor Vito Giacino (then convicted of extortion), sat at Moreno Nicolis' table, steel entrepreneur, together with the mayor Flavio Tosi and Antonio Gualtieri, exponent of the Calabrian clan of the Grande Aracri. A dinner accompanied by Tosi's lawsuit against Report, however archived.
The mix between mafias and legal affairs can also be seen from the number of interdictiveanti-mafia decided by the prefectures. The prefect Salvatore Mulas in Verona signs it twelve in a year and a half, including the one at Nico.Fer in Nicolis. Laura Lega in Treviso five last year alone. In Venice Domenico Cuttaia corners Antonio De Martino, originally from Lamezia Terme, with its Top Management manager of the beaches of Excelsior and Des Bains at the Lido, and owner of eight other companies.
In the last year and a half there has been one continuous drip of arrests in the various Venetian provinces and a large number of suspects, also indigenous. Investigations, arrests, interdictive: all biopsies on a body that is feared attacked by tumor. Why, as Dia writes, «the Venetian offshoots of criminal associations take the form of investment and money management terminals». This is demonstrated by involvement of the director of the Vigonza branch of the former Banca Popolare di Vicenza. Which, moreover, is only one piece of a much larger mosaic.
Without stable relationships con i local professionals, the mafiosi of the upper levels (procurement, investments, society) they would little road, above all they would be more identifiable. Venetian arms and brains are the ponte between illegality and the much desired (pretend) legality. The debate on "weak legality" would be long, which seems to have a new territory of choice in the Veneto. Let's stop, for now, to what the French magistrate Jean de Maillard wrote: «the real problem does not lie in a supposed growth of illegality to the detriment of legality, but in a growing impossibility to distinguish the two areas».
Source: https://www.vvox.it/2018/01/25/banchetto-veneto-delle-mafie-la-nostra-complicita/