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CRIME

Mafia turncoat’s true story gets star turn at Cannes

A film telling the incredible story of the Sicilian mafia's most famous informer has wowed Cannes, but its Italian director lamented that such astonishing courage has failed to deal the mob a fatal blow.

Mafia turncoat's true story gets star turn at Cannes
Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino, film director Marco Bellocchio and Brazilian actress Maria Fernanda Candido at a photocall for the film "The Traitor (Il Traditore)" at the 72nd edition of the Cann

“The Traitor”, which drew stars including Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom to its red carpet premiere, tells a tale of death-defying resistance against some of the world's most powerful crime bosses.

Tommaso Buscetta was the first major Sicilian mafia boss to break the traditional “omerta” code of silence and to turn state's evidence.

Despite the mafia murdering 20 of his relatives, including his wife, brother and two of his sons, Buscetta continued to give evidence against his former comrades.

The film by veteran director Marco Bellocchio charts the charismatic Buscetta's path to redemption, and paints him as a pivotal if deeply flawed historic figure.

READ ALSO: Actor from mafia film Piranhas stabbed in Naples

“He's not a hero of course, he's just a very courageous person. He wants to save himself and the life of his family at the same time,” Bellocchio said.

“He's full of nostalgia for a type of mafia he grew up in and that christened him in a sense. He's not a revolutionary… of the type that wants to change the world, like Fidel Castro or Che Guevara.”

Bellocchio said he sought to avoid the Hollywood cliches of the mob in bringing the Cosa Nostra to life.

“We've all seen the Godfather movies and the risk we took was to try and do something different, he said.

“We wanted to follow our own path and didn't want to be afraid of doing or not doing what had already been done.”

'A little bit afraid'

Buscetta's damaging testimony led to the conviction in 1986 of 475 mafiosi and gave US and Italian law enforcement officials invaluable insight into the running of the Cosa Nostra.

It also resulted in devastating mafia revenge attacks on his family.

And it forced Buscetta to undergo several plastic surgery operations to change his appearance and to move to the United States in 1985 under FBI protection.

Actor Pierfrancesco Favino, whose portrayal of Buscetta drew critics' praise, said he was a paradoxical figure with his own code of honour.

“What I found most difficult is that he is an assassin — he's a character that I can't forgive,” he said. 
“But he's quite a romantic which I am too,” with a deep love for his wife and children. 

“I thought about these things very deeply rooted in me and sometimes this made me a little bit afraid when I went home at night.”

In 1995, Buscetta gave evidence against former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti in the latter's trial for alleged complicity in the murder of an investigative journalist. Andreotti was acquitted four years later.

READ ALSO: Europe underestimates 'cancer' of Italian mafia: experts

But after Buscetta's defection, several hundred mafiosi turned state informers in return for a new identity, protection for themselves and their families, and financial help.

His confessions allowed authorities to destabilise the mafia in the 1980 and 1990s, also touching off anti-mob demonstrations in Palermo, Bellocchio noted.

The film depicts how Buscetta revealed to judge Giovanni Falcone the makeup of the “Cupola”, the secret mafia executive in charge of running the international drug trade in the 1980s.

He also exposed the key role in that executive of Toto Riina, the feared “boss of bosses” who orchestrated a brutal murder campaign including the assassination of Falcone himself.

Buscetta eventually died aged 71, not of an assassin's bullet but of cancer in the US in 2000, where he was under a witness protection programme. He was surrounded by the surviving members of his family.

Bellocchio admitted that Buscetta's impact, while powerful, had only been temporary.

“The mafia wasn't completely destroyed — it was only a partial defeat,” he said.

Increasingly violent organised crime outfits pose the biggest threat to European security, outstripping terrorism and illegal migration, the EU police agency Europol said last month.

The Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Calabrian 'Ndrangheta and Neapolitan Camorra are still the largest crime groups on the continent.

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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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