Et was a mafia mass trial of historic proportions: on November 1, 2022, a court in the Sicilian coastal town of Patti sentenced 91 people to a total of more than 600 years in prison. The charges included misuse of EU farm aid, illegal appropriation of land, extortion, arson, fraud and forgery.
For years, the convicts had put pressure on farmers to get hold of their land through free or fictitious leases. EU funds were then cashed in without the land ever being farmed. Or the mafiosi received tips from employees of public agricultural aid centers about vacant land, for which they then applied for subsidies without title.
The task of these agricultural aid centers is actually to support applicants for EU aid and to make sure that land and farms actually exist. But the opposite was the case: they worked together with the mafia. Emanuele Galati Sardo, a former head of one of the aid centers, was therefore sentenced to six years and two months in prison. He simply waved the illegal requests through. In 2019, Sardo was even elected mayor of the 6,000-inhabitant town of Tortorici, and a year later he was placed under house arrest.
The longest sentences went to members of two Tortorici clans, one of which was found to have links to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. Gang leader Aurelio Salvatore Faranda has been sentenced to 30 years in prison. The assets of 17 companies were confiscated.
money hidden abroad
According to the indictment, between 2010 and 2017 the EU paid 5.5 million euros to 151 farms in the province of Messina that were in the hands of the Tortorici bosses. Some of this money was hidden in foreign accounts. Funding came from the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF) and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD).
Is the problem with the verdict solved now? Hardly any experts believe that, because the Italian mafia organizations are like the monster Hydra, who keeps growing new heads. Giuseppe Antoci was the state manager for the Nebrodi Regional Park, where the so-called willow mafia was up to mischief. In this function he uncovered the criminal activity. In 2016 he survived an assassination attempt on his armored vehicle. “Nine out of ten defendants were convicted – the verdicts are the state’s right answer to the mafia. But it’s not the end point,” said Antoci of the FAZ
Because the mafia cannot be defeated with one trial. The deputy prosecutor Vito di Giorgio had already reminded after the verdict that “this is only the first instance”. In the most serious cases, there will be an appeal. “The Mafia has the best lawyers because they pay them a lot of money. The state in Italy, on the other hand, is poor,” reports mafia expert Rosario Cunsolo. The former sales representative and insurance broker is the founder of an anti-mafia association in Sicily, which encourages business people to file complaints if they are being blackmailed. “Where there is money, there will also be the mafia,” says Cunsolo matter-of-factly.
191 billion euros flow
And there is a lot of money: Italy is the largest recipient of the European recovery fund – 191 billion euros will flow between 2021 and 2026. Nicola Gratteri, the chief public prosecutor of Catanzaro, was very clear in a recent interview: “The funds go to communities and local authorities, who do not have the administrative and bureaucratic structures to withstand the pressures of the mafia.” For the man from the regional capital of Calabria, who has been fighting the mafia for forty years, “it is obvious that the clans want to be part of it want to appropriate funds from Europe”.