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Today, April 30, marks the 42nd anniversary of the murder of the regional secretary of the Communist Party, Pio La Torre. His confiscation law is still the most feared weapon of the mafia today.
42 years ago, on the morning of April 30, 1982. In Palermo. In Via Li Muli, near Piazza Turba. The murder of Pio La Torre and the driver Rosario Di Salvo. It was the third of the so-called “political crimes”, after Michele Reina, provincial secretary of the Christian Democrats, 9 March ’79, and Piersanti Mattarella, president of the DC Region, 6 January ’80. Then 4 months later General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was killed, 3 September ’82, in via Isidoro Carini in Palermo. Italy is world football champion and Sicily is devoured by the bloody fury of the mafia.
Today, April 30, the regional secretary of the Communist Party dies. Pio La Torre chases a solution to the moral question in politics, and his race is cut short by the bullets of Giuseppe Lucchese, Antonino Madonia, Pino Greco and Salvatore Cucuzza. It was he, La Torre, who signed the minority report to the Anti-Mafia Commission in ’76, in which he denounced the system of mafia political power prevailing in Palermo and Sicily.
Pio La Torre also took center stage against the atomic Cruise missiles at the then NATO base in Comiso. Then the law that decreed his death sentence, the confiscation of assets from mafiosi, the “Rognoni – La Torre”, still today a nightmare for mafia-style organized crime. Lucchese and Madonia are serving the life sentences imposed by the Supreme Court. Cucuzza collaborated with the magistrates and revealed the identity of the killers by reconstructing the dynamics of the ambush. At the moment, investigations into alleged instigators external to Cosa Nostra have been unsuccessful. Salvatore Cucuzza himself said that, after the La Torre crime, the killer Pino Greco, known as “Scarpuzzedda”, also in the firing group and then killed by Riina because he was “inconvenient”, complained thus: “Cosa Nostra was used but it did not benefit from the death of Pio La Torre”.
In ’95 the members of the Cosa Nostra Commission were convicted: Michele Greco, Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano, Bernardo Brusca, Francesco Madonia and Pippo Calò. The Democratic Party of the time, the PDS, became a civil party and obtained an immediately enforceable provision of 200 million lire. On the motive for the crime, the declarations of numerous collaborators of justice are in the investigation documents, including Tommaso Buscetta, Gaspare Mutolo and Antonino Calderone: La Torre was murdered for his anti-mafia commitment, which characterized his entire career and which in 1982 culminated with the proposed law on the confiscation of mafia assets. And a death sentence was passed.
Angelo Ruoppolo (Teleacras)
