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Sensational twist at the end of the Auction Process Ok. At the end of a 23-hour council chamber, the judging panel of the Court of Assizes of the Avellino court presided over by judge Roberto Melon felt it necessary to “rewrite” the history of the trial: according to the magistrates, the Forte and Aprile families, together with Nicola GaldieriCarlo Of the RussianDamian Genoese, Benjamin Paganor, Gianluca Formisanoe Antonio Baron (the latter two with a smaller role than the others) had given birth to one autonomous Camorra-style criminal association that dealt exclusively with judicial auctions, and therefore independent of the Nuovo Clan Partenio.
A substantial change, because after reading the order the judges sent the trial documents back to the Prosecutor’s Office, which on the basis of this new reading of the facts will have to start a new trial, reformulating the charges.
For these reasons, the precautionary custody requirements, which were combined with the previous contested crime hypotheses, no longer exist and for this reason the judges released Armando Aprile, Livia Forte, Gianluca Formisano, Antonio Barone, Damiano Genovese and Beniamino Pagano and set them free. (Galdieri and Dello Russo remain in prison for the precautionary measures of the main strand of the trial against the Nuovo Clan Partenio, the one on usury and extortion).
Below is lawyer Gaetano’s comment Aufierodefender of Nicola Galdieri and Carlo Dello Russo:
“Last night the “Auctions ok” process concluded. I think it is time to make some necessary clarifications, also because the first immediate declarations do not seem to me to have made a great contribution to clarity.
The truth is that the accusatory hypothesis was sensationally rejected and deemed unproven.
The meaning (and summary) of the court order is this: after more than 80 hearings and after a 2 and a half year debate the prosecutor did not prove the association he contested, the defendants were not participants or promoters of the alleged association called Nuovo Clan Partenio which was judged in the context of the other trial .
The court expressly said that everything that was proven in the other trial was also not proven in this trial.
And in this trial, according to yesterday’s order, the existence of another association was proven which had as its exclusive criminal activity the disruption of auctions and extortion of an environmental nature connected to the same disturbed executive procedures.
And, therefore, it is necessary to redo (better, do) a new trial which will eventually have to ascertain whether in fact in December 2018 and for a few months until June 2019 a different associative structure operated in Avellino, parallel and in any case different from the one already the subject of the sentence which had Galdieri Nicola and Dello Russo Carlo as its “common” members.
It is clear that the new trial, excluding the accusatory hypothesis formulated until yesterday and for which several defendants were detained for 3 and a half years (as if nothing had happened, I might add), will have to evaluate whether an association mafia-style dedicated exclusively to the management of judicial auctions not in a monopoly regime as imaginatively contested in the trial concluded yesterday but to the management of 13 judicial auctions out of a total of approximately hundreds of executive procedures regularly concluded in the same historical period.
It is clear that it will be a trial that will have a completely different theme of evidence, because it is one thing to say that a pre-existing mafia organization which according to the prosecution also committed other crimes and which had control of the territory was at a certain point also interested in of judicial auctions (and it was the accusation formulated in the trial but severely rejected by the Avellino court), but it is a completely different thing to maintain and prove that for a few months (no more than 6) a new mafia cell was formed which was interested in judicial auctions, as it will be more difficult to prove the existence of all the elements of a mafia association as contemplated by the art. 416 bis and as developed by jurisprudence.
Furthermore, yesterday’s order which effectively concluded the “Aste ok” trial and which could open the doors to another trial for mafia association is difficult to reconcile (indeed, in fact it is not compatible at all) with the sentence which concluded the first degree of the trial of the so-called Nuovo Clan Partenio, because in that sentence, which is being examined by the Court of Appeal of Naples, it is written, contrary to what was held in last night’s order, that that considered association was interested in a certain point also of judicial auctions, while the order that yesterday buried the accusatory hypothesis said that it was not the alleged Nuovo Clan Partenio that was interested in auctions but a new association created almost ad hoc for the auctions and which would have operated for approximately and only 6 months.
NoI don’t know if yesterday was a success for the defense or a good statement by the defenders, but it was certainly a resounding and resounding rejection of the accusatory hypothesis (and, allow me, we did not witness demonstrations of jubilation and satisfied pats on the back of the prosecutor present in the courtroom as arguably happened last July 11th at the reading of the sentence sentencing the Nuovo Clan Partenio): what is certain and incontestable is that the defendants return free after 3 and a half years and that they should not have gone to prison for that type of accusation, much less remained there for so long (and not forgetting that one defendant, Forte Modestino, died in prison there, innocent according to the yesterday’s order at least with respect to the accusations as erroneously formulated according to the court and the outcome of a long hearing).
We will await the possible new trial with extreme confidence.”
