The first Court of Appeal acquitted Vincenzo Enrico Augusto “Enzo” Ercolano of the charge of mafia association, and sentenced him, re-determining the sentence, to eleven years and nine months of imprisonment for extortion and fictitious registration of assets.
The sentence was issued, with the assent of the General Prosecutor’s Office, after the Court of Cassation had annulled with postponement the second degree sentence of 5 May 2018, which had sentenced the son of the deceased mafia boss to 12 years and nine months in prison Pippo and brother of the boss Aldo, assisted by the lawyer Valeria Rizzo.
The new Court of Appeal also redetermined the sentence imposed on Michele Guardo, defended by the lawyer Sergio Ziccone, which goes from seven years to five years and eleven months of imprisonment. A sentence that he has therefore already served. The judges also ordered the revocation of the confiscation of assets against Cosima Palma Ercolano, sister of “Enzo”, who had already left the trial with a ruling of no place to proceed due to the statute of limitations. The Court of Appeal will file the reasons within the next 90 days.
The trial was based on the Caronte operation of the Carabinieri del Ros, coordinated by the DDA of Catania, which resulted, on 20 November 2014, in the arrest of 23 people on charges of mafia association. The investigation also made use of wiretaps carried out during a particularly delicate historical phase for Cosa Nostra Etna, that is, at the end of 2009, when a mafia war was about to explode between the Santapaola-Ercolano family and the Carateddi cartel. Furthermore, those intercepted would have exalted the figure of that ‘symbol’, identified in Benedetto ‘Nitò Santapaola, who at the top of the still existing Etna mafia hierarchy, was part of ‘history and certainly could not be supplanted by the new bosses.
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