Luigi Finizio He left his house days ago in Roma. Never comeback. Around half past seven in the evening, two men approached the fuel station in which he was refueling in the Roman quarter of the quadraro. One got off the motorcycle and opened fire. It was the last thing Finizio saw before he died. His life ended right there, on a partly cloudy Monday in mid-March. But this is not the only alarming fact. The time of day, along with the Finizio murder joins other murders recently occurred in difficult neighborhoods of the Italian capital, have raised the worst fears about what seems a real murder wave.
The brazenness with which many of these crimes were carried out, together with the fact that Rome had not experienced such a reality for at least a decade, also the alarms have gone off. Another episode has been that of Marco Canaliwith a judicial record, riddled with bullets in February while he was sleeping at home, in the Roman neighborhood of Tufello. And yet another case, this same Monday: that of a 54-year-old man, also with multiple criminal records, whom the police found already dead after, dying, he called them to inform them that he had been shot at his apartment in the Torpignattara area. Crimes that some investigators believe may have a link, and are worrying.
In the case of Finizio, it is particularly evident; It is because the dead man was not exactly a nobody, but had a link with the Senese, one of the best known Camorra clans, the Naples mafia, through a cousin of his, romantically linked to the family of a ringleader. Furthermore, he has also been impressed with how the murder was carried out. To end Finizio’s life, his assassins, who were hooded, it took just ten seconds. “There is no doubt that it was the work of some professional hitmen“, confirmed, for his part, a police source consulted by this newspaper.
land of conquest
The modalities of the crimes have led to the opening of investigations of which public opinion does not know much for now, although the local press is paying great attention. The newspaper ‘Il Corriere della Sera’ even made a calculation: in the last six months alone, there have been around twenty homicides in the Italian capital, crimes in addition to others 15 episodes of people gunshot wounds or violent injuries. An unusual x-ray for Rome that has made the fear of a war between clans.
Colonel of the Carabinieri Mario Conio, director of the DIA (the Italian anti-mafia police) operational center in Rome, partly minimizes with these readings that he considers “more the result of journalistic conjecture than anything else”, although he acknowledges that “yes, something is moving” inside of the roman crime fabric. “Rome remains land of conquest for large and small criminals, since no group completely predominates over the others,” he argues.
However, Conio remembers that last year a localea grassroots cell in the dark hierarchy of the Ndrangheta, the most dangerous mafia in Italy, born in the southern region of Calabria. “The trial for these events is expected to begin in the coming weeks,” Conio told EL PERIÓDICO, explaining that the Ndrangheta cell had begun to operate in recent years.
unbraided bands
various operations of Italian law enforcement against criminal groups and other foreigners (most notably Albanians, many of whom are in charge of retailing narcotics) operating in Rome, as well as operatives that have beaten up police chiefs native band of the Casamonicas, could also have provoked changes within balances of power of Roman crime. In particular, some wonder if so many arrests created a power vacuum that is leading the lower-ranking bands to push to conquer spaces.
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Alfonso Sabella, prosecutor and former councilor of the Rome city council, said it already in February. “The old mafia bosseswho controlled the city, have been arrested or are weaker. There is a power vacuum,” said Sabella. Alessia Marani, a crime chronicler specialist for the newspaper ‘Il Messaggero’, affirms that the hypothesis of a new struggle for power cannot be ruled out, although the investigators have yet to establish whether the episodes are interrelated.
Still, “the feeling is that there is more drugs and more weapons in the streets, as well as certain money hungry, as if they wanted to cash“, says Marani. An example of this, according to Marani, is another phenomenon considered unusual in Rome: the increase in kidnappings violent of people (or their relatives) to settle accounts or collect drug debts, which “is undoubtedly a new phenomenon.