LAMEZIA TERME It all happened in a few moments that morning of April 11, 1990. Those who were traveling along the provincial road SP 40 Melegnano-Binasco, in Carpiano, in fact, imagined everything except witnessing to an ‘Ndrangheta-inspired execution right before your eyes.
The cars are still queuing at that rush hour, it has just struck 9am, and it is in those moments that a car, aAlfa Romeo 33, is flanked by a large displacement red and white motorbike. On board that Honda 600 there are two people, but it will be one of them who fires at least six gunshots, a 357 magnum, aimed at the driver, before fleeing at full throttle, beyond the traffic light intersection with the SS 412. A few moments, therefore, the useful ones to end the life of Umberto Mormileeducator at the Milano Opera Prison.
The Carabinieri of the Melegnano station who arrive on site will trace his identity: they will be the ones to find Mormile inside the cockpit, lifeless, with the seat belts fastened, and bullet entry holes in the neck. Passers-by won’t be able to say much: some say they heard noises, others say a motorbike passed at high speed, but no one will provide decisive elements to the investigators. While the military had no doubts: it had to be a violent and lightning-fast action and, given the absence of shell casings, carried out using a revolver.
The killers on board the Honda could not imagine that in line, a few dozen meters from them, there was an off-duty carabiniere. In fact, he will be the one to reconnect the motorbike that had whizzed past him to the place of the murder, noting the license plate number. From the next check it emerged that the Honda 600 had actually been stolen in Milan on 16 March 1990, then she was found by another carabinieri patrol at 4.20pm on the same 11 April 1990, parked in via Buozzi in the municipality of Locate Triulzi, not very far from the place of the murder. A lady then reported that she had noticed that morning just around 9 “a young man of about 30/35 years old near the motorcycle and who then walked away and got into a light-coloured car” a Renault with two other people on board, before walking away in peace.
The procedural facts then allowed judicial measures to affirm criminal liability with sentences that have now become final and of the perpetrators of the murder of Umberto Mormile, Antonio Schettini and Antonino Cuzzola, the first identified as the killer who actually fired the revolver shots, the second as the driver of the motorbike, both the instigators and the creators: Franco Coco Trovato, Antonio Papaliaall four already convicted in 2005 and Domenico Papaliathe latter only in 2011. In March of this year and almost thirty-four years after the crime, the Milan magistrate, Marta Pollicino, imposed 7 years to the repentant Vittorio Foschini and Salvatore Pace, guilty of “making themselves available to the instigators of the murder by providing weapons and means”.
In the reasons – over 170 pages – according to the judges the reconstruction of the murder, in its planning, conception and material execution, constitutes “a fact now definitively established” there are no longer contested profiles, as well as the identification of the instigators and creators of the murder, nor the identification of the material executors, “since in relation to both aspects, as many judicial measures have been intervened, which have now become irrevocable”. Given the “historical” era in which the murderous act was committed and the incontestability connection between the same and the associative phenomenon of Ndrangheta origin and also given the “institutional” figure of the victim, being an educator at the Milan Opera prison, a plethora of investigative hypotheses have developed on this point, induced by claims of a political or terrorist nature, or by declarations of “collaborators of justice”. For judges, in fact, the sources of evidence are “multiple and multiple” and have various nature, “documentary and declarative”. And the judges recall, for example, the judicial measures, the irrevocable sentences that defined the maxi trials of the 90s, “Wall Street”, “North-South” and “Countdown”, but also the irrevocable sentences of the 2000s that they deal directly with the murder case, inflicting heavy sentences on the perpetrators and instigators. ([email protected])
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