BARI – The alleged mafia political exchange vote that would have allowed Maria Carmen Lorusso to be elected to the Bari City Council on 26 May 2019 ends up on trial. The Bari DDA requested and obtained immediate judgment for 124 people. Among them there are also Giacomo Olivieri, husband of the now former councillor, together with entrepreneurs, leaders and associates of the main mafia clans of the city, such as the bosses Savinuccio Parisi and Eugenio Palermiti. The investigation on February 26 led to the arrest of over 130 people, 124 of whom are still detained. For them, less than three months after the precautionary measures, at the request of prosecutors Fabio Buquicchio, Marco D’Agostino and Federico Perrone Capano, the investigating judge set the start of the trial before the Second Criminal Section for July 2 (except for requests for rites alternatives).
And so everything that the Anti-Mafia has discovered in years of investigations, collected in tens of thousands of judicial documents including information, photographs, wiretaps, accounting documents, will end up before a panel of judges. A new maxi trial of the Bari mafia which brings together the outcome of two different investigations: one on the typical affairs of organized crime, the other on the alleged infiltration of the clans into the institutions and economy of the city. A modern mafia capable of penetrating the political fabric and doing business with the business world, getting its hands on a piece of the city. A mafia capable of rigging elections, of influencing the outcome of football matches, of controlling the coffee business, of channeling hiring in the municipal transport company, Amtab, which from that day was subjected to judicial administration.
The Parisi-Palermiti clan – the Flying Squad investigators have reconstructed – would have managed to infiltrate “in all imaginable sectors” of the economic and social life of the city, finding the connivance of entrepreneurs and politicians (such as the former regional councilor Olivieri and the wife, elected on the «Di Rella mayor» list with the center-right and then passed into the majority).
The investigation, renamed “Internal Code”, exposed the affairs of the Japigia clan in the aftermath of the mafia war of spring 2017: extortion, weapons, drugs, but also rigged judicial auctions, scams on false accidents, extortion on sports competitions . In this dark cross-section of city life, affiliation rites are also described, phenomena of mafia folklore such as fireworks on the occasion of releases from prison, songs in the square evoking the release of the clan leader, the control of the territory which is expressed in the relationship daily with people, who turn to the clan to get back a stolen car, to recover a loan, for concert tickets, for a job, to settle trade union disputes.
Scrolling through the list of defendants you will find the names…
