The Nebrodi godfathers raided community funds. The one concocted by the pasture mafia was a great scam: on the one hand the “Bontempo Scavo” on the other the “Batanesi”, two historical gangs of Tortorici. Last night, the court of Patti presided over by Ugo Scavuzzo sentenced 91 of the 101 accused to 600 years in prison in the trial instructed by the magistrates of the Messina prosecutor, until a few days ago directed by Maurizio de Lucia, today in Palermo.
Messina, the prosecutor asks for 1,045 years in prison for the Nebrodi bosses
The blitz of the carabinieri and the financial police, triggered in January 2020, revealed a complex system of companies put in place by the unsuspected accomplices of the bosses: most of the 151 companies were based in Tortorici, a town perched on the mountains. The nominee entrepreneurs attested to owning hundreds of land, not only in the province of Messina, but throughout the island, even beyond. They were false claims. The oldest mafia in Sicily had already invented a very modern business: the occupation of virtual pastures, with the aim of circumventing the protocol wanted by the former president of the Nebrodi Park Giuseppe Antoci to block the assignments of state-owned land to bosses and nominees . Antoci, present at the moment of reading the sentence, says: “A circle is closed and a page of history is written, a territory is freed. Since 2013 I never imagined crossing such a winding road, I never thought I had to risking my life and losing my freedom, just as I certainly never thought of contributing to creating a norm that has proved devastating for mafia organizations “.
It was the process of large numbers, celebrated in record time. In the measure that led to the blitz, the investigating judge Salvatore Mastroeni wrote words of great bitterness: he spoke of an “evident inextricability” of the Tortorici mafia. “In spite of dozens and dozens of operations and processes, here the mafia is, absurdly, a kind of social class, as such it can be countered, but it can almost not be eliminated as a category”. After the silent mafia, the evolving mafia, the “phoenix always rising”, the inestirpable mafia. But, now, however, heavy sentences have arrived. Even if the Bontempo Scavo and the Faranda are not recognized as mafia. However, the illicit system through which they operated was recognized. And the 2.0 pasture mafia in the “land of gold” has been dismantled, as the magistrates of the pool coordinated by the deputy prosecutor Vito Di Giorgio have renamed it. The working group includes the magistrates Fabrizio Monaco, Antonio Carchietti and Alessandro Lo Gerfo.
The cattle bosses with flat caps and muddy shoes had become “refined” managers, through a group of unsuspected people: owners of agricultural assistance centers, lawyers, professionals. All ready to pack files worth millions of euros.
The bosses of the pasture mafia had found an almost perfect system to avoid checks on requests for European funding: they did not indicate the Iban of their companies, so the practices were temporarily shelved. As a rule, in these cases, the liquidations took place only at a later time. And, at that point, the checks were no longer done.
The one discovered by the investigations of the Messina prosecutor’s office is a truly sensational bug: between 2010 and 2017, the European Union paid 5 million euros to 151 farms in the province of Messina in the hands of the bosses.