MONTERONI – The couple believed to be the leaders of the mafia association, considered a secessionist offshoot of the historic Scu Tornese clan of Monteroni, dismantled with the “Battleship” operation carried out in March 2019, have left prison: Alessandro Caracciolo, 60, and Maria Antonietta Montenegro, 53, residents of Monteroni di Lecce.
This is due to the fact that, two days ago, the Court of Appeal, at the request of defense attorney Ladislao Massari, deemed the terms of precautionary custody expired. The same decision concerned two other defendants, assisted by attorney Cosimo D’Agostino, involved in the same investigation: Salvatore Conte, 55, from Leverano, and Angelo Cosimo Calcagnile, 47, from Leverano (domiciled in Porto Cesareo).
The four defendants will therefore await as free persons the new trial ordered by the Court of Cassation, last February, when the sentence with which the Court of Appeal of Lecce had substantially confirmed the main charges recognized in the first instance was annulled.
The new judges will have, in particular, the task of determining, on the basis of the dictates indicated by the “ermines” of the sixth section (composed of the president Orlando Villoni and colleagues Giuseppina Rosaria Pacilli, Pietro Silvestri, Paolo Di Geronimo and Ombretta Di Giovine) whether the association called “Caracciolo-Montenegro” can be considered truly mafia-like or rather a “simple” organization dedicated to the trafficking and dealing of narcotics.
This had been one of the central points of the appeal presented by the lawyers Massari and Angelo Vetrugno, on behalf of the spouses, and D’Agostino, for Calcagnile, who had thus succeeded in obtaining the annulment of the sentences, of twenty years of imprisonment for the former, and of 13 years, 10 months and 20 days, for the latter.
“The sentence is flawed because it fails to prove that the object of the criminal program of the Caracciolo group was also the carrying out of activities other than drug trafficking,” the Supreme Court writes on page 41 of the sentence. “An oversized accusatory presentation, a trial with a different and greater structure than the actual evidentiary evidence; a motivation that, by valorizing single, sparse, occasional, episodic factual segments, attributes to the trial a different and greater value than the real one,” we read in a subsequent passage.
According to the assessments of the Court of Cassation, the Court of Appeal, considering the group as a mafia association autonomous from the Tornese clan, did not provide the specific elements of the crime, with the result that the mafia nature seems to have been “sewn” more on the person of Caracciolo, already convicted twice for 416 bis, than on the group: “Having been a mafioso in the past does not in itself imply the mafia nature of any subsequent criminal activity carried out by the same. Nor has it been clarified why the mafia nature of the organization could have survived in his absence”.
These will therefore be some of the aspects that the second appeal process will have to clarify.
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