Seven years and eleven months because at the head of a sort of Specter of hospitality that has profited from migrants to sweep votes. This is the request for condemnation that the public prosecutor of Locri, Michael Permunian, advanced for the former mayor of Riace, Mimmo Lucano, at the end of a long indictment that recounted that model that has become a symbol of integration all over the world as a criminal association. He is not in the courtroom, his lawyers represent him, Giuliano Pisapia e Andrea Daqua. But there are those who inform and update it hour after hour. He knows what’s going on in the courtroom. “It is difficult” he limits himself to saying, while a few tens of kilometers away his “welcoming village” which has become a model even outside Italy and Europe becomes a “criminal system”.
A thesis that from the beginning the prosecutor carried out, despite the harsh reprimand of the judge for the preliminary investigations who, even in authorizing the house arrest for Lucano, at the time still mayor of the village, branded the accusation of criminal association as baseless. Almost three years and a long debate later, the magistrates of Locri insist, despite the many no distributed over time by Lucano, to the candidacy proposals arrived from small and large formations of the left and the limited number of mandates at the helm of a municipality required by law.
The Riace model – this is the thesis at the heart of the indictment – would only serve to transform the projects into a “postificio” for friends and relatives of friends, all potential holders of votes. That the country does not come to count two thousand inhabitants, all related to each other, does not matter. The hiring of local people – which has always been publicly a source of pride and main argument to explain how hospitality can serve to revive a country eroded by emigration and depopulation – in the reconstruction of the accusation becomes a criminal project to perpetrate itself in power. “The wiretapping demonstrates the patronage system built by Lucano, master of a system that guaranteed an important inflow of money. In Lucano – – said the prosecutor during his speech – the resident people turned to obtain employment within the associations, all regardless of an assessment of skills in the field of immigration. The consideration for the recruitment would have turned into electoral support for the political team attributable to the mayor “. And the laboratories – continued Permunian – were just a red herring. They worked for personalities and tourists”.
A system – the prosecutor acknowledged – that was not functional to enrichment. Lucano – it was clear during the indictment – he never put a penny in his pocket, but for the Locri prosecutor that model was functional to a political advantage. Hence – according to the magistrates – the forcing of reports and projects. “This is not a process for the noble and real purpose of hospitality – argued the chief prosecutor of Locri at the opening of the indictment, Luigi D’Alessio – What prompted this investigation was the awareness of acting in the opposite way in favoring reception. The investigation concerned the mismanagement of the reception projects and the real offended parties were the immigrants, given that the latter were given the crumbs of the funding provided by the State “. The same who have largely chosen to remain in Riace, despite the sudden closure – abusive and irregular, established the TAR – of the projects.
“Some accusations are completely made up. The profile they drew does not match mine. They want me to pass for what I am not, for me politics is an ideal. I just believed in an ideal. Every step I took had these. reasons, for the redemption of the people who arrive in Riace “comments the former mayor, disheartened. “At first they accused me of making millions of euros disappear, then – he says – the theorem of the Prosecutor’s Office changed because the trial showed that it was not true and so they fell back on non-existent political motivations”. Or rather, light years away from that ideal of integration and welcome that Lucano has never hesitated to use as a program and flag and that now it will be up to his lawyers to return to live in the courtroom.
“We believe that the data that emerged from the preliminary hearing received by the public prosecution diverges, and by a great deal, from what we have received – say the lawyers Daqua and Pisapia – therefore, we do not share the arguments and conclusions of the public prosecution that we will contest – they promise – on the basis of what emerged, including documents, during the trial “.
.