Palermo, the boss returns to freedom and reorganizes the clan: 9 arrests. The alarm of the central director of crime: "The bosses do not stop". And no one denounces the lace
by Salvo Palazzolo

Pietro Tumminia at the top of the Altarello family after serving twelve years. Another mafioso arrested today, Felisiano Tognetti, had even received a permit. Prefect Messina: "Detention alone is not enough to sever the link between the condemned man and the organization"

JULY 19, 2022
UPDATED AT07:52
2 MINUTES OF READING
Prison is not a problem for the mafia. The most authoritative godparents of Palermo serve their sentences in silence and then return to the command of the clans. This is what happened to Pietro Tumminia , head of the family from Altarello, a neighborhood on the south-eastern outskirts of the city: he spent twelve years in prison, in December 2020 he returned to freedom, and on the same day he resumed his place at inside the Cosa Nostra. With the consent of the entire crime family. Another mafioso, Felisiano Tognetti , had even received a permit: when he arrived in Palermo, he too had worked hard to relaunch Tumminia's projects.

It did not escape the policemen of the mobile squad headed by Marco Basile , who arrested 9 members of the reorganized clan last night. At the top of the list are Tumminia and Tognetti. The investigation coordinated by the deputy prosecutor Paolo Guido , the coordinator of the district anti-mafia Directorate, and by the substitutes Giovanni Antoci and Dario Scaletta discovered that Tumminia and her accomplices had returned to impose the lace massively on the traders in the area: the interceptions have rebuilt about ten extortion episodes. “None of the victims reported - explains the central anti-crime director of the police, prefect Francesco Messina, who is in Palermo today with the police chief Lamberto Giannini to commemorate Paolo Borsellino and the five police officers killed thirty years ago - a silence that must make us reflect. Lace is no longer considered as an imposition, but as payment for a service offered by the criminal organization. Maybe, to have a monopoly on the sale of a specific product ".

The collapse of complaints seems to have become a constant in the latest anti-mafia investigations: in Brancaccio, there are even forty traders who have ended up under investigation for aiding and abetting, because they persisted in denying extortion despite the evidence of wiretapping. Now, in the latest raid, an unsuspected craftsman even ends up under house arrest accused of having been a collector of lace. This is Paolo Gulotta , a well-known carpenter in Palermo.


"The return of the godparents"
"The worrying figure is the revival of the mafia released from prison". The prefect Messina recalls that even the head of the district of La Noce, which includes the Altarello family, had returned to a crime after a long period of imprisonment. This is Carmelo Giancarlo Seidita , he was rearrested at the end of May by the mobile squad.

"The detention alone seems not to have been effective in severing the link between the convict and the mafia organization," says the central anti-crime director. "Prison detention for the duration of the sentence did not allow the recovery of the condemned, nor his re-education, so much so that once the suspects regained their freedom, they resumed pursuing the interests of the Mafia families to which they belong". An observation that leads to a consequence: "There is a sort of specialty of the Mafia prisoner that necessarily ends up legitimizing a peculiar detention treatment against him". An issue that affects the debate on life imprisonment. Investigations say granting permits to bosses could have devastating effects:

The reorganization
The released prisoners are now the new heads of the mafia families of Palermo. And they aim straight at the reorganization of the Cosa Nostra through two businesses above all: drug trafficking and online betting. The godparents need to feed the assistance fund for the many inmates. But they also point to new business in the legal economy. Tumminia had invested in a large parking lot, which is now seized. And she was also aiming for something else. The lace racket served him not so much for the money he could get, but for the control of the territory: the silence, or rather, the proximity of the traders, was the real success of which the mafia were proud. Thirty years after the Falcone and Borsellino massacres.