TERAMO. As long as life allowed him, he always forcefully denied the accusation. “My son and I didn’t do anything” he repeated until the end and those who knew him say that this thought accompanied him until the end of his days.
The 75-year-old former city councilor Giuliano Gambacorta, who had been involved in institutions for a long time, died in January after an illness. Last year he and his 39-year-old son Valerio they had been sentenced at the end of an abbreviated trial, the first to two years and one month and the second to two years, for attempted extortion. Yesterday the Court of Appeal of L’Aquila (chaired by Aldo Manfredi) completely reformed the first degree sentence, acquitting his son Valerio for not having committed the crime and declaring that no action should be taken against the former councilor for the crimes contested because they were extinguished due to the death of the offender. The reasons will be filed by the end of August.
The appeal was presented by the lawyer Gianni Falconi, defender of both since the first degree. Father and son had ended up on trial for attempted extortion as part of an investigation in which a couple of lawyers whose car had been set on fire were the injured parties. According to the prosecutor’s accusation, that fire was claimed by one of the two suspects, the father, in a threatening phone call made pretending to be someone calling from Calabria to one of the two lawyers who was supposed to start a foreclosure procedure on behalf of one of his clients towards the other suspect. The facts date back to 2021 and the investigation was born after the complaint from the lawyers at the time engaged in an enforcement procedure, i.e. a foreclosure, on behalf of a client against Valerio Gambacorta. A seizure of just over 4 thousand euros for a credit claimed by the first towards the second. After the start of a fire that broke out in the car of one of the lawyers (for which the accusation against father and son was dropped during the preliminary investigations) the latter, according to the prosecution, received the call on his mobile phone from a man who said he was calling from Cirò Marina, a small town in Calabria. In the first instance trial the Bar Association was a civil party.
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