The Italian police and courts meted out some justice to Mafiosi and enablers this week. 27 were sentenced to over 200 years in jail, and one of Italy’s most wanted fugitives was arrested at a party.
Carabinieri police gave Gaetano Angrisano, one of Italy’s 100 most dangerous fugitives, a nasty surprise late on Wednesday when they arrested him at his two-year-old son’s birthday party.
The 31-year-old is a high-ranking figure in the Vanella Grassi clan of Naples’ Camorra mafia. He has to serve a 10-year prison term for criminal association for drug trafficking.
Angrisano was handcuffed by police while celebrating his son’s birthday in his stronghold of Scampia, a crime-ridden area of the southern city. Over 250 Carabinieri officers were involved in the operation.
27 mafiosi jailed for over 200 years
A Palermo preliminary hearings judge on Thursday sentenced some 27 mafiosi and enablers to over 200 years in jail. Their crime was aiding the 30-year flight from justice of late superboss Matteo Messina Denaro.
The convicted belonged to clans in Messina Denaro’s refuge Campobello di Mazara, and also two other nearby towns, Marsala e Mazara del Vallo.
Messina Denaro died in a hospital in L’Aquila in September aged 62 after a battle with cancer. The last godfather of the Sicilian mafia’s long spell on the run ended when he was caught in a Palermo cancer clinic on January 16.
Messina Denaro had been convicted for his involvement in dozens of murders, including the 1992 Cosa Nostra bombings that killed anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
In addition to the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, he was convicted of the killing of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a mobster-turned-State witness who was strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996, and bombings at art and religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10 people and hurt 40 more in 1993.
