An Italian court on Monday convicted more than 200 mobsters and their white-collar helpers, the culmination of a historic, nearly three-year trial against Calabria’s notorious ’Ndrangheta mafia.
For more than an hour and a half, Brigida Cavasino, president of the court in southern Vibo Valentia, steadily 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 nation watched via videolink.
Prosecutors had asked for sentences totaling nearly 5,000 years for 322 accused mafia members operating in the Calabrian province of Vibo Valentia and their collaborators who have exercised a virtual stranglehold over the local population.
Photo: AFP
However, after a trial that lasted two years and nine months, the court doled out under half that total time, about 2,150 years collectively, with the convictions of 207 defendants. That included four seasoned members of the ’Ndrangheta each sentenced to three decades in jail.
The three-judge panel acquitted 131 defendants, including one whom prosecutors said controlled mafia activities within the prison and another accused of helping commandeer a public road and adjoining private land to use for grazing sheep.
Underscoring the ’Ndrangheta’s close ties with the powerful, one of the trial’s most high-profile defendants was 70-year-old former parliamentarian and defense lawyer Giancarlo Pittelli, accused of being a fixer for the mafia. He received 11 years, short of the 17 years prosecutors had 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 in prison, 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, despite Monday’s acquittals, mark the most significant blow to date against one of the world’s most powerful organized crime syndicates.
Giuseppe Borrello, the local representative for anti-mafia association Libera, said the verdicts showed that prosecutors’ efforts were working, even if they fell short for all suspects.
“The road is still long, but it’s been charted out, that’s the most important thing,” Borrello said.
“The strong message it [the collective verdict] sends is that the sense of impunity that has very often been felt in our territory is gone,” he said.
The ’Ndrangheta has flourished beyond its roots in the poor region of Calabria, at the toe of Italy’s boot, to exercise a 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, detailing countless examples of the ’Ndrangheta’s brutality and its iron grip on the territory.
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