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MAFIA

Mob boss sparks fury with 100th birthday bash

A lavish dinner, fireworks and special guests flown in from America: this is how the world’s oldest mafia boss celebrated turning 100 in his Sicilian town near Palermo, much to the fury of the mayor.

Published: 12 January 2016 09:26 CET
Mob boss sparks fury with 100th birthday bash
Ex-mafia boss Procopio Di Maggio threw the 100th birthday bash in his Sicilian town of Cinisi. Photo: BSJ/Wikimedia

Procopio Di Maggio, who was a mafia boss under Cosa Nostra’s notorious leader, Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, and is the only one of the Riina clan still at liberty, spared no expense when it came to becoming a centenarian on January 6th.

The ex-boss, who survived two assassination attempts, invited friends and family to a sumptuous dinner in one of Cinisi’s most elegant banquet halls, before treating them all to a fireworks' display, much to the anger of Mayor Giangiacomo Palazzolo, La Repubblica reported.

Di Maggio, dubbed by the newspaper as “the world's oldest mafia boss” and described as still being “sprightly” despite his age, also spent the day receiving greetings from residents who turned up at his home to wish him happy birthday.

What drove the fury even more was that the celebration took place in the birth town of Giuseppe “Peppino” Impastato, who despite being born into a mafia family grew up to be a political activist who opposed the criminal organization. He was murdered by the mafia in 1978.

Other than the shame the birthday bash brought to the town, Palazzolo had another reason to be upset: Di Maggio had flouted a firework ban, imposed by several towns and cities across Italy over the festive period to limit air pollution.

“Today, Di Maggio is harmless, but this story bothers me and I will take action,” the mayor vowed after images and videos of the celebration spread across Facebook, garnering hundreds of ‘likes’.

“He is a mafioso, but the town is not.”

The fireworks could also be seen as far away as Palermo’s Falcone–Borsellino Airport, named in memory of the slain anti-mafia judges Giovanne Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Some of the display was captured by journalists from La Repubblica in the video below:

 
Despite one fan writing on Facebook “another 100 years”, the outrage on social media has been flooding in other the last few hours.

“The day after we mourned a great loss to the music world, we return to the living,” another Facebook commenter wrote.

“The State is not there for Gianluca Calì, the Sicilian businessman whose only crime was opposing the mafia. Neither is it there for his wife, two children and staff at his company. Meanwhile, we have a six-minute firework display to celebrate the 100th birthday of “Godfather” Procopio Di Maggio in Cinisi, the town where Giuseppe Impastato shouted ‘the mafia is a pile of s***’. This town has not forgotten Peppino, but the State obviously has.”

Di Maggio was among the hundreds of mafiosi who stood trial in the famous Maxi Trial against the Sicilian mafia in the mid-1980s, but was cleared of ordering a dozen murders.

His birthday celebration comes after a lavish funeral held for a Rome mafia boss, complete with gilded horse-drawn carriage and roses thrown from a helicopter overhead, sparked controversy last August.

Read more: Outcry as mafia boss given lavish send-off

MAFIA

‘We mustn’t bow to violence’: Italy’s Covid-hit businesses battle to resist mafia

Mafia hunters warns that the pressure on Italian businesses will only increase as the economic fall-out from Covid-19 and a national lockdown bites.

Published: 23 October 2020 09:57 CEST
'We mustn't bow to violence': Italy's Covid-hit businesses battle to resist mafia
Italian businesses are more vulnerable than ever to mafia infiltration amid the Covid-19 emergency. File photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

Italian entrepreneur Gabriele Menotti Lippolis can still hear the threat ringing in his ears: “Pay up, or we'll slit you from gullet to gizzard.”

He has had to fight off extortion attempts not once, but twice. Speaking about it openly is “not easy”, he told AFP, but increasingly urgent, as the mafia feasts on companies weakened by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I was approached and told to cough up a certain sum,” said Lippolis, who runs an events company, as well as owning restaurants and one of the biggest beach clubs in the southern region of Puglia.

“I didn't say no immediately,” he said about the 2017 incident. “I went to the police station half an hour later to file a complaint.

“They were very difficult moments. I thought of my family, of my colleagues…. The threats were clear,” he added.

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Italy has a long history of extortion by its mafias, from the Cosa Nostra in Sicily to the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Campania, with rackets run from the country's southern beaches to its bustling northern cities.

Lippolis, 43, insists that the only thing to do in such situations is to report it. His aggressor was arrested.

“We mustn't bow to violence or threats, but make people understand that the state is the strongest. Only together will we beat the mafias,” he said.

He is not the only one rebelling: a revolt by shopkeepers in Palermo in Sicily against demands for “pizzo” protection money lead to 20 arrests last week.

But mafia hunters warn that the pressure on businesses will only increase as the economic fall-out from the virus — and nationwide lockdown — is fully felt.

“The lockdown has left many companies in difficulty and brought some to their knees,” said Enzo Ciconte, the author of numerous books on Italian organised crime.

“The mafia try to take advantage of that to infiltrate [businesses]. One of their strategies is to lend money; when it is not returned, they take over the companies,” he said.

Often the rates offered to business owners on the verge of bankruptcy — who are unable to get the necessary bank loans — are exorbitant, sometimes topping 500 percent. The pressure to repay gradually increases, with phone calls or visits.

Once the business owner is cornered, “the mafia may leave him or her in place, but the profits go into their pockets. It's a good technique because it makes police investigations more complicated,” Ciconte said.

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Cosa Nostra may be Italy's most famous mafia, thanks to films like The Godfather series, but its efforts to infiltrate the rich, industrial north pale into comparison with its fellow organised crime groups.

The influence of the Sicilian mob waned following a fierce crackdown by the authorities after the 1992 bombings that killed top anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Ciconte said.

Conversely, the wealthy 'Ndrangheta is all powerful in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont, having settled there in the 1950s. It also has a large presence in Veneto and Lazio, along with the Camorra, he added.

Infiltrating a company can be an easy way to launder huge amounts of dirty money from drugs or prostitution.

But it can also prove a cash cow. Experts have warned the mob will be quick to not only infiltrate but also create new companies to benefit from the billions of euros soon to be available under the EU recovery plan.

“The history of organised crime has taught us that whenever there are large flows of money, there is a risk of infiltration,” Marco Valentini, who is Naples' prefect or security chief, told AFP.

“We are certain that there will be attempts, and we are implementing all preventive measures to ward them off.”


Police in Ostia, a hub for the Rome mafia. Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP

Valentini said fraud investigators look closely at who is on company boards — and how that make-up may change — as well as whether there are ties to known crime families or suspicious transfers of holdings or headquarters.

Like his counterparts across the country, this year he is making extensive use of “anti-mafia bans”, administrative measures that blacklist companies from bidding for public contracts.

Italian prefects have issued more than 1,600 such bans since the start of the year, the interior ministry said, some 25 percent compared to 2019, according to the Repubblica daily.

Two southern regions — Campania and Calabria — account for half of them, but the north is also affected, with over 200 slapped on businesses in Emilia-Romagna.

“The most affected sectors are the catering industry — restaurants, pizzerias, bars — and construction and the health sectors,” Valentini said.

Anyone being approached by someone suspicious “must have the courage to report them”, he urged.

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Lippolis, who is also head of the Confindustria organisation for young entrepreneurs in Puglia, knows from personal experience how hard it is to find that courage.

“Historically, business owners have been proud creatures, with difficulty confiding in people when problems arise. But that's changing,” he said.

Southern Italy may sometimes have a bad reputation, but he refuses to see it as a “no-man's land” where the mob has free rein, insisting instead that it has “enormous potential” for investments in the region.

Italy may have entrepreneurs ready to speak out and world-class mob hunters on high alert for the risks of increased mafia activity due to the pandemic — but do others?

“I am very concerned that other European countries underestimate the risks, and have not put in place preventive measures,” Ciconte said.

“If an Italian company infiltrated by the mafia moves to work in France or Germany, it's the Italian mafia that emerges stronger.”

By AFP's Céline Cornu

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