With crime in northern Italy, and in Emilia-Romagna in particular, “everything has happened, even more than what happened in the lands traditionally suited to joining the mafia power system”, in southern Italy. And, above all, it is a process that is still in full swing today. The use of the European banking system, in fact, has now “become a necessity for organized crime: we go to Europe because there are no controls, already at a regulatory level. There is an outsourcing” in the action of the mafias, therefore he returns to initial point Paci, which “can no longer be limited to the southern regions. On the contrary”. And the answer to all this “cannot be the dismantling of wiretaps and interdictions”. Thus warns Calogero Gaetano Paci, chief prosecutor for a couple of years in Reggio Emilia after having worked in Reggio Calabria, with various investigations into the clans of the Gioia Tauro plain. Paci talks about it animating ‘Nothing is finished. Nothing!’, an anti-mafia meeting on stage yesterday in the Cineteca in Bologna. The title is borrowed from the declarations of Antonio Valerio, collaborator of justice in the Aemilia trial, and the proceedings take stock of the second report edited by the Law association (Legality and rights at work) of the CGIL Emilia-Romagna, two years after the conclusion by Aemilia.
Among the other numbers of the report, reviewed by the Alma Mater teacher Stefania Pellegrini, it is highlighted for example that in 2022 in Emilia-Romagna almost nine billion euros were spent on ‘legal’ gambling, or that in 2023 the The Bank of Italy recorded an increase in reports of suspicious transactions of 5% (there were 821 each month, with the Modena area black in Emilia-Romagna and among the worst at a national level). But Paci resumes, adding between Aemilia’s folds: “I had never seen press campaigns orchestrated on TV with ‘bazookate’ shots against the Prefecture or those politicians, a few of them, who tried to keep anti-mafia attention high. This is demonstrated by the convictions of people who used their journalistic, media role to produce systematic counter-information campaigns. It is unique, there is little that can be done”, the prosecutor shakes his head even today. And all this “happened – adds Paci – without anyone deploying the famous antibodies, which Emilia and the north also have. We cannot afford the luxury of arriving there in another 10 years, perhaps, and asking ourselves ‘why not we noticed it before. We must therefore call into play all the institutional subjects” in the case, “because they have the duty to do so, but also social ones, and tell them that they must know what is happening and that the investigations document”.
Today, tax fraud, the prosecutor is alarmed, has become the mechanism through which organized crime renounces the violent methods that characterized its past, towards the extorted companies, and transfers the burden of extortion to the State “making people happy everyone: the extortionist and the extortionist. It is a serial mechanism, now, established in Emilia even before Aemilia” started with the arrests of January 2015. This mechanism, Paci then confirms, “still continues and these things must be said: not they must remain only in the magistrates’ chambers, but society must take responsibility for them”. During investigations, including recent ones, “I constantly come across companies that systematically do not produce any goods or services, but only deal with false invoicing, which are purchased in packages of 50 or 100 thousand euros and more, from national companies, even important ones with well-known brands.
