4/15/2023 0 Comments Russian prison mafia![]() ![]() ![]() In the meantime, "no one said anything, no one heard anything, no one spoke up," said the detective.ĭeputy chief Grassia said he was particularly concerned by three of last year's murders being committed by minors. In November, Nicola Di Rienzo, 21, lay dead for hours in a public park after being shot five times before his 17-year-old killer turned himself in. "Right now there's no mafia war, but there's a settling of accounts," said a detective who requested anonymity. There is the spot where builder Giovanni Panunzio was shot in 1992 for being the first to denounce the mafia, the abandoned farmhouse where police thwarted an ambush of a local businessman last year and the cafe whose owner died after being stabbed in the eye during a 2020 robbery. ![]() Every once in a while we find something serious, stolen cars, bodies of missing people," prosecutor Vaccaro said.ĭuring a recent drive with police through the city of Foggia, AFP saw countless reminders of the bloodshed that has terrorised the population for decades. The Gargano mafia's calling card, authorities say, is shooting victims in the face, or dumping them in caves. The skinned head of a goat with a dagger through it was left the same year for the lawyer of a disappeared mafia victim's mother. In Gargano, whose spectacular coast welcomes tourists as well as Albanian drug shipments, the mafia is particularly violent.įour years ago, a human skull was left outside a municipal building for the mayor of Monte Sant'Angelo. "When conflicts sometimes arise over the division of the illicit proceeds, there are quarrels and the battalions clash and start killing each other," said deputy police chief Mario Grassia.Įach group has its speciality, from the military-style armed robberies of freight trucks in Cerignola to the old-school tactics used in the city of Foggia, where nighttime bombings of storefronts and cars persuade hesitating shopkeepers to pay up.įarmers in San Severo like D'Auria often find their olive trees felled, their harvests torched or tractors or livestock stolen. The province of Foggia has Italy's third-highest homicide rate, and five of the 16 murders last year were mafia-related.įamily-based "battalions" from different areas often cooperate, dividing extortion money that pays associates and prisoners. The "Foggia mafia" is a catch-all label for a syndicate comprised of different groups involved in a wide array of crimes. "Whereas this is still a mafia that, to show its power over the territory, shoots and kills." "Today the mafias have evolved, so they shoot less, seeking a strategy of silence to stay unnoticed," Vaccaro said. While the other main mafias have graduated to less visible, more profitable activities, including infiltrating the legitimate economy, the Foggia mafia is still in a nascent phase. Very violent, very aggressive," said Ludovico Vaccaro, Foggia's public prosecutor. Italy's youngest mafia already has a stranglehold over the vast southeastern province, filling its coffers and cementing its control through drug trafficking, extortion, armed robberies and the theft of vehicles and livestock for ransom. Its bloody clan wars were once dismissed as farmers' feuds, but the so-called "Fourth Mafia" - after Sicily's Cosa Nostra, Calabria's 'Ndrangheta and Naples' Camorra - is finally setting off alarm bells inside the Italian state.īut it has come late. "Citizens, speak out!" implored the 57-year-old, who sees recent crackdowns by authorities as a sign the mafia can be weakened if locals overcome their fears. "If more citizens pressed charges, the local mafia could be weakened," D'Auria, who has lived under police protection since 2017, told AFP. Instead of paying up the next day, D'Auria went to the police, making him one of the few people to ever denounce Foggia's little-known mafia, Italy's long-ignored and today its most violent organised crime syndicate. ![]()
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