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CRIME

Meet the Italian prosecutor set for ‘historic’ anti-mafia court battle

After years of investigation, mountains of evidence and hundreds of suspects, Italy's plucky anti-mafia prosecutor Nicola Gratteri is gearing up for a "historic" court battle against the country's powerful 'Ndrangheta clan.

Meet the Italian prosecutor set for 'historic' anti-mafia court battle
Nicola Gratteri. Photo: AFP

The first salvos in a court battle were fired Friday as a preliminary hearing against 'Ndrangheta members opened in the Italian capital, in a case not seen since the days of the “Maxiprocesso” trial against the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in the mid-1980s.

Gratteri, 62, who has spent three decades under close police protection, is hoping to send more than 450 suspected clan members to jail for belonging to a criminal gang that allegedly built its fortunes and sinister reputation on extortion, money laundering, kidnapping, drug trafficking and so-called vendettas.

MUST READ: Meet the ’Ndrangheta: It's time to bust some myths about the Calabrian mafia

“It's a war,” Gratteri told AFP shortly after the preliminary hearing concluded in Rome in the case against Italy's only mafia group with tentacles on every continent.

“We are talking about violence, about death,” added the prosecutor, based in the southern Italian town and 'Ndrangheta stronghold of Catanzaro, where he lives with constant death threats.

Describing the case as “historic”, Gratteri believed it to be the most important in Italy's battle against mobsters since the “Maxi” trial, which eventually saw hundreds of Cosa Nostra members convicted.

 

Those hearings however were marred by violence including a mafia hit on its best-known judge and prosecuting magistrate Giovanni Falcone, murdered with his wife and three police officers in 1992.

When formalities conclude in Rome and a fortified courthouse in built in Calabria, the hearings are due to move to Italy's southern region where no less than 600 lawyers and 200 civil parties will be present.

'Tonnes of cocaine'

Hundreds of 'Ndrangheta crime bosses, underbosses and “soldiers” were arrested in December in one of the biggest police raids against the crime syndicate in years.

The swoop extended as far as Germany, Bulgaria and Switzerland and netted a former MP and the head of the Calabrian mayors' association among others.

Charges range from usury to murder, often aggravated by Italy's Article 416-bis criminal code against taking part in mafia-type associations.

For many years perceived to be the poorer cousin to better-known mob groups such as the Cosa Nostra and Napoli's Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta has since surpassed them to become Italy's most powerful crime organisation.

With its name stemming from unknown origins, but said to have been derived from Greek meaning to exalt virility and courage, the 'Ndrangheta today is a modern and feared crime gang.

Mafia boss Salvatore Coluccio during his arrest in 2009. Photo: AFP

It controls part of the international cocaine trafficking network with footholds in New York, Colombia and Brazil, has infiltrated the construction industry, runs European-based funds and even funeral contracts, now boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The 'Ndrangheta is much feared for its ferocity and its cruelty. Yet at the same time it's very modern — and ready to flood Europe's markets with tonnes of cocaine,” the grizzled prosecutor said.

According to Italian justice figures, there are some 20,000 'Ndrangheta members globally, running a business that generates an annual turnover of more than 50 billion euros ($59 billion).

'Mirror of society'

The upcoming trial against the 'Ndrangheta appears to have been a severe blow, yet it could not be compared to the Palermo-based Maxi trial which opened in 1986, criminologist Anna Sergi said.

“During the Cosa Nostra Maxi trial they brought down the heads of all the major families, in this operation it is not the case,” according to Sergi, an associate professor at the University of Essex.

“Some major people… will go on trial but I would not go and say that this will have the same significance, should they all be jailed,” Sergi told AFP.

 

Made famous by Hollywood, the mafia first showed up in Sicily about 150 years ago and has since firmly been established through Italy.

Through the years it has diversified, modernised and become highly sophisticated.

But at the same time law enforcement hasd also made leaps thanks to international cooperation, sharing digital files and new technology such as thermal cameras, drones and cyber surveillance — and the commitment of prosecutors like Gratteri.

However law enforcement has never completely managed to cut down the hydra in a country where complicity can be found “at all levels of state administration,” Sergi said.

“The mafias are not external bodies to our otherwise well-functioning society, they are the mirror of our functioning,” added Gratteri, quoting the late judge Falcone.

“Italy is unable to admit it, it makes an enemy of it, forgetting that it (the mafia) is part of who we are,” he said.

“In each of us there is a little 'Ndranghetist',” said Gratteri.

SEE ALSO: Italy's 'Ndrangheta on all continents and still growing

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CRIME

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

Amanda Knox was again found guilty of slander on Wednesday, in a retrial in Italy related to her infamous jailing and later acquittal for the 2007 murder of her British roommate.

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

The American cried in court in Florence as she was sentenced to three years already served for having accused, during police questioning, an innocent bar owner of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.

“I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure,” Knox told the judges.

“I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

She was 20 when she and her Italian then-boyfriend were arrested for the brutal killing of fellow student Kercher at the girls’ shared home in Perugia.

READ ALSO: ‘I hope to clear my name’: Amanda Knox back in Italy for slander retrial

The murder began a long legal saga where the pair was found guilty, acquitted, found guilty again and finally cleared of all charges in 2015.

But Knox still had a related conviction for slander, for blaming the murder on a local bar owner during initial questioning by police.

In October, Italy’s highest court threw out that conviction on appeal and ordered a retrial, which began earlier this year in Florence in Knox’s absence.

The night she was interrogated was “the worst night of my life… I was in shock, exhausted”, she said on Wednesday.

“The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language which I hardly knew, without an official translator or a lawyer”.

“I didn’t know who the killer was… They refused to believe me”, she said.

‘Something so horrible’

Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood inside the roommates’ cottage in November 2007. Her throat had been slit and she had suffered multiple stab wounds.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who then spent almost two weeks behind bars before being released without charge.

Knox was convicted of slandering him in 2011 and sentenced to three years already served.

But she said she was yelled at and slapped during the police investigation – claims that prompted a separate charge of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

Amanda Knox arriving in court in Florence, on June 5th, 2024. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

The police had found a message on Knox’s phone they said was proof she and Lumumba were plotting.

“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my mind had blocked it out,” Knox said on Wednesday. “One of the officers cuffed me round the head and said ‘remember, remember!’,” she said.

“In the end… I was forced to submit. I was too exhausted and confused to resist.”

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation.

That ruling, which found her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”, was cited by Italy’s top court last year when it ordered the retrial.

‘Monster of Perugia’

Knox said last October that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Lumumba “was my friend”.

But Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, described how Knox’s accusation changed his life.

“When he was accused by Amanda he became universally considered the monster of Perugia,” he told reporters outside court.

Knox was hugged by her husband in court – the same one where she was reconvicted of murder in 2014 – as reporters looked on.

Her murder trial attracted global interest, much of it salacious, focusing on prosecutors’ claims that Kercher died as part of a sex game gone wrong.

But Italy’s highest court, when it acquitted Knox and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito once and for all, said there had been “major flaws” in the police investigation.

One person remains convicted of Kercher’s murder — Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was linked to the scene by DNA evidence.

He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later reduced on appeal to 16 years.

Guede was released early in November 2021.

Now 36 and with two young children, Knox is a journalist, author and campaigner for criminal justice reform.

She first returned to Italy five years ago to address a conference on wrongful convictions, appearing on a panel entitled “Trial By Media”.

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