They had stolen vehicles used on construction sites for a value of 200 thousand euros, and then, after having duly rigged and counterfeited them so as to make them unrecognizable, they had resold them. Nine people appeared before the judge for the preliminary hearing in Cremona, the result of theCarabinieri operation completed in February 2022 which had led to three arrests (now all freed) and six reports on release. The accusations: theft of work vehicles, money laundering and self-launderinghaving prepared false accompanying documents and having altered identification plates and chassis numbers in order to “clean” them and resell them.
The sentence today: two summary sentences with sentences ranging between two and three years, a plea agreement of two years and seven months, two sentences of no place to proceed, one acquittal and three indictments. Among the lawyers who requested and obtained acquittal, also Llawyer Michele Barrilà: “my client”, explained the lawyer, “is a mediator who intervened between the seller and the unaware buyer, without having had any awareness of the illicit origin of the means, and we demonstrated this to the judge”.
A long and complex operation, the one carried out by the Carabinieri with the coordination of the prosecutor’s office, so much so that the digital file is made up of 20,000 investigative documents.
Those who ended up in handcuffs were a 52-year-old resident in the province of Cremona, a 39-year-old resident in the province of Mantua and a 62-year-old resident in the province of Rome. An investigative activity that started from the complaint presented by an entrepreneur from Cremona who in July 2020 had suffered the theft of an excavator on his construction site. From the examination of the footage from the surveillance cameras in the area it was possible to verify that that night two men had arrived at the site of the theft on board two vehicles, a car and a truck, and after having entered the work area they had brought an excavator came out and they loaded it onto the heavy vehicle and then drove away.
The subsequent investigations, also carried out on the openings present on the roads of the province, had made it possible to verify that the two vehicles driven by the thieves had headed towards the province of Brescia and it had been possible to detect their license plates, which had allowed the material perpetrators to be identified of the crime.
The excavator had ended up inside a warehouse in the province of Brescia where its identification data had been modified and documents falsified, in order to “clean” it. Subsequently the work vehicle was sold in the province of Rome, to then be transported across the Alps and put up for sale again through an import/export company attributable to one of the arrested people.
From France the vehicle had returned to Italy, repurchased by two Brescians who had delivered it, on consignment, to a specialized company in the sector in the province of Piacenza. The original owner, following the main specialized online sales platforms, having learned of a vehicle very similar to the one stolen from him, had contacted the Cremona police who had verified the correspondence with the one stolen in July 2020.
One of the three arrested had at his disposal an area in the province of Bergamo where various work vehicles were in storage, including an excavator and a Bobcat, which were stolen in Orzinuovi and Dello respectively in September and October 2020. Also in this case, to conceal their illicit origins, they had been altered identification plates and falsified registration documents. The two vehicles were seized and at the end of the investigations returned to the victims of the theft.
The other defendants, in various capacities, had provided a significant contribution to the carrying out of the transport and concealment of the stolen vehicles, through various steps, including the preparation of transport documents and the alteration of the chassis numbers in order to profit from the subsequent sale. Some of them also had the availability of sheds in which to hide the vehicles and carry out the operations of replacing and altering license plates and chassis numbers.
During the searches carried out, a Caterpillar skid steer loader complete with sweeping bucket was found in the province of Mantua, worth over 40,000 euros, which was found stolen in mid-January in Cremona from a company in the province of Brescia that was carrying out asphalting work. , while in the other places searched, numerous false declarations of conformity relating to the vehicles, various keys to operating machines, as well as specific equipment suitable for carrying out the operations of removing identification plates and altering chassis numbers were found.
The investigations had also made it possible to find i Bank transactions relating to vehicle payments made by unsuspecting buyers.
Sara Pizzorni
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