Anti-mafia closed due to “unavailability”, the investigation into the mafia in Bari can wait. It is yet another affront by the Apulian governor Michele Emiliano to the parliamentary body for the control of organized crime chaired by Chiara Colosimo (Fdi) who has been trying to hear him for days to explain the genesis of his statements (never fully denied) about the mayor of Bari Antonio Decaro , candidate for the European elections grappling with the possible dissolution of his municipality due to the mafia – which would make him ineligible in Brussels – after the administration of the municipal company Amtab due to infiltration.
Emiliano had been summoned for today but did not show up, officially because he was involved in the State-Regions Conference, saying that he prefers to be heard “from 10 to 30 May” and in any case after the tug of war in the Region with his majority has been concluded. It won’t be very easy, even hearing his predecessor Nichi Vendola cry out for vengeance and cry only for “his” councillor, sacrificed for a political calculation, certainly not for a region screwed on itself after the hypothesis of placing Bari under the commissionership for the infiltrations discovered by the investigations into the municipal company Amtab, which has become the employment office for bosses for the Prosecutor’s Office and who knows what else.
Colosimo’s criticism hurts: «I note that you simply intend to choose the date of your hearing compatibly with your political needs». Even in the center-left, the alibi of “unavailability” due to a vote of confidence in its council for a magistrate on leave is unacceptable. «The State-Regions conference is not a political liturgy, but it is an institutional duty», says the governor, reluctant to snap to attention as he did to resolve the political bagatelles of his majority imposed by Giuseppe Conte and Elly Schlein. Anyone who expected to understand the answers on his relationships with the mayor Antonio Decaro and with the mafia families with whom he claims – not from today – to have had discussions will have to wait longer.
Yet it was he who thundered from the stage, at the end of March after the rumors of Bari’s commissionership: «One day Decaro tells me that he had been threatened with a gun due to the ZTL in old Bari, I took him, the two of us went to the house of the sister of Antonio Capriati, the neighborhood boss: this engineer is my councilor and has to work. If he needs assistance I will entrust him to you.” The mayor of Bari had denied the circumstance (“Michele remembers badly”), videos from 2022 had appeared with Emiliano repeating the same story in front of an impassive Decaro, Il Giornale published a photo portraying him with another Capriati. Meanwhile, Emiliano had taken back part of the story, and when someone asked him why he didn’t go to the magistrates to report it, he replied “the Prosecutor’s Office, in my opinion, couldn’t have done absolutely anything”. Why? Almost two months have passed and yet Emiliano doesn’t have time to explain himself to the Anti-Mafia, trampling on institutional etiquette and accusing the commission itself of “political exploitation”. The Fi group leader in the Senate Maurizio Gasparri is a river in flood: «But does Emiliano think that the Anti-Mafia commission is like the house of the sister of the Bari mafioso where he went when he decided? Things are not like that.” Meanwhile, until May 10th he got away with it. But whether then the shaky majority of him resisted or not will be irrelevant.
As a politician and as an anti-mafia prosecutor on leave, in front of his citizens, the governor has given up confidence on his own.
