BARI – The case of the mafia funeral procession that crossed the city with a “bow” under the prison a year ago ends up before the judges. The Bari DDA has requested the indictment of ten of the approximately one hundred motorcyclists who that day “escorted” the coffin of their 27-year-old friend Christian Di Gioia, who had died in a road accident a few days earlier, from Japigia to the Libertà cemetery.
The ten defendants, all believed to be members of the Bari crime group, are charged with road blocking with the aggravating circumstances of the mafia. The preliminary hearing will begin on July 10th and the Municipality of Bari will ask to join the civil action.
The accident dates back to the night of 22 June 2023. Di Gioia died after crashing his motorbike on the San Pio bridge in Japigia. It was just after 2.30am when the 27-year-old, fleeing at high speed perhaps to escape an inspection, apparently lost control of the vehicle. While the Prosecutor’s Office investigated the accident and the threats to the police (the first investigations revealed they were unrelated to the accident), friends and relatives said their final goodbyes to the 27-year-old. After the funeral, on the morning of June 24, dozens of roaring motorbikes escorted and accompanied the hearse carrying the coffin, stopping – against traffic – even in front of the prison.
The prosecutor of the DDA Fabio Buquicchio reconstructed three consecutive roadblocks from via Caldarola to the monumental cemetery of Libertà, stopping and stopping in symbolic places, including the house of the boss Eugenio Palermiti and the prison, where the father-in-law of the young victim was locked up.
A procession that according to the Bari investigators was mafia-related, because the more than one hundred motorcycles in that unauthorized procession would have “forced, with the threat of their imposing presence”, even in the wrong direction, “the drivers of vehicles in transit to stop or reverse”, “evoking the typical strength of mafia action, flaunting in an evident and provocative manner a conduct suitable for exercising on the passive subjects (the State for the demonstration of defiance carried out at the prison with applause towards the inmates, the unaware motorists for the roadblocks, as well as the entire Bari community forced to endure the discomfort) that particular coercion and consequent intimidation, typical of mafia groups” and, in this specific case, “of the Parisi-Palermiti clan predominant in the Japigia neighborhood”. Not only that. With that behavior, they would have “indirectly provided support of credibility to the clan, concretely demonstrating the power to control the territory and publicly violate the laws of the State”.
Ten of them (all subjected in recent months to the precautionary measure of the obligation to remain at home) now risk trial. In the provision with which the Municipality decided to join the civil action, assisted by the lawyer Giuseppe Buquicchio, it is explained that «the criminal conduct attributed to the defendants has determined a climate of insecurity and mistrust in the institutions, by the citizens and the community as a whole, with damage to the institutional sphere of the civic administration, an entity that, by law and by statute, represents the local community and takes care of its interests, acting as a system at the service of the citizens, according to the principles of transparency, impartiality and good performance of the public administration, the violation of which entails patrimonial and non-patrimonial damage. Since it intends to affirm its will to prosecute any criminal activity capable of affecting the interests of the entire community of which the Municipality is an exponential body and therefore to prevent the emergence and rooting in its territory of criminal activities that cause serious harm (also on a strictly patrimonial level) both in terms of the image of the city and of its tourist development and of the productive activities connected to it, it appears necessary for the Municipality of Bari to constitute itself as a civil party in the process”.
