BARI – Davide Francesco Rizzo, 43 years old of Sicilian origins but raised in San Girolamo, is no longer a socially dangerous man. Prison, even the harsh one, where he served a long sentence for a double mafia murder, changed him. “He has demonstrated – the judges say today – that he has carried out an authentic activity of recovery of his conduct, which allows us to consider that the social danger has ceased, so that the execution of special surveillance does not have to take place”.
Rizzo’s is a story of redemption that passes through what every expiation of the sentence should guarantee: re-education, the possibility of coming out of a cell as better people. And this is what happened to Rizzo, to whom art, painting, gave new hope, to the point of dreaming of opening a shop where he could exhibit his paintings and continue painting.
Rizzo, born in Catania, moved to Puglia as a child with his family and graduated from the art institute in Bari. Then, twenty years ago, just 23 years old at the time, he was involved, believed to be close to the Capriati clan, in the “San Girolamo massacre”. His son was just born when, after almost three years on the run, he turned himself in and spent – starting from 2010 – a few months under the 41 bis regime, hard prison, until the Bari judges ruled out that he was a mafioso, despite sentencing him to 17 years for having killed, in February 2004, two alleged members of the Strisciuglio clan of Bari, Matteo Cucumazzo and Antonio Colella. In prison, first in Biella, then in Nuoro and Sassari, he remained until February 2021, working on parcel sorting, dedicating his free time to painting. Murderer, then fugitive for love, finally painter and poet. A few years ago his paintings were also exhibited and sold in a temporary exhibition whose proceeds went, by his will, to charity, destined for the neonatal department of the hospital in Nuoro, Sardinia.
From 2021 to August 2023 Rizzo was serving his sentence with the alternative measure to detention on probation to social services. The day after the end of his sentence, the 43-year-old’s defence, the lawyer Nicola Quaranta, asked the Prevention Court to re-evaluate the assessment of social danger, deeming it “no longer current”. In fact, Rizzo was still subject to a preventive measure of special surveillance with an obligation to stay for two and a half years ordered in 2005, to which he was never subjected because he had been continuously detained for ten years. In the request the lawyer highlights, now twenty years after the last crimes committed, Rizzo “today appears to be a subject re-educated by law, that is, more aware and now free from criminogenic impulses”. Today the 43-year-old has a family and works.
The judges shared this thesis, highlighting that in prison Rizzo had “a consistently positive prison journey, with a profound critical review of his deviant conduct”. According to the Court, therefore, Rizzo is now a better person and does not deserve to be subjected to special surveillance for another 30 months.
When his lawyer first told his story a few years ago, shortly before he left prison, he spoke of Rizzo as “a fine example of revenge and change that passes through prison and manifests itself through art.” In his study he kept one of his paintings, “sent to me from prison,” he explained, “which represents a heavenly passage, perhaps the one he expects to find when he has fully paid his debt to society.” That debt is now fully paid.
