Mafia Coffee Courthouse: Investigators in a tiny city in southern Italy claim to have uncovered a criminal network that reached as far as a café within the courthouse.
Mafia affiliation, murder, and extortion were among the 31 charges brought against the group of people detained last week in the southern Italian city of Potenza.
The most unbelievable accusation, however, was found in count number 19: that the suspects ran a café within the courtroom.
When Mafia Coffee Courthouse?
The courtroom café, which the police now claim was run by a formidable gang of mafia, served cappuccinos and eggplant Parmesan to prosecutors and detectives developing criminal cases every day for more than three years.
The head prosecutor of Potenza, Francesco Curcio, said, “They were at our house.”
According to court records, the clan, headed by a local family, used the café as a cover to “possibly launder money and establish a base within the most significant justice court in the area to obtain information.”
When the head of the family’s right-hand man was detained on drug trafficking charges, the staff of the café was seen, according to prosecutors and court records, bowing to him and comforting one another via hidden cameras that investigators had set.
Concerns that criminal groups are expanding and becoming more brazen have grown as a result of the findings in Potenza, the regional capital of Basilicata’s southern area. At a press conference, Mr. Curcio said, “The anti-Mafia regulations are definitely not functioning.
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A raw nerve has been hit inside the courtroom by the prosecution team’s choice to keep the three-year probe under wraps from other team members. It was “a terrible scenario from a human viewpoint,” Mr. Curcio said.
In order to maintain their good looks, prosecutors who were aware that the café was being investigated would have a coffee and talk to the employees. But most were ignorant.
The prosecution team admitted that this suggested that it was possible for investigational information in other instances to leak over a cup of coffee.
But they said that alerting other courtroom employees would have endangered the whole investigation. The team said that all it could do was hope that other prosecutors would be tactful in their remarks at the café.
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Some Attorneys Weren’t Exactly Sympathetic
Local attorney Davide Pennacchio said that “so many police, prosecutors, and carabinieri walked up to the pub to drink coffee.” And how many other things might they have said?
The investigation was sparked by an incident involving Mr. Pennacchio.
Having fought for the same contract for the courthouse café, Mr. Pennacchio and a partner filed an appeal after losing. According to court records, a clan member then gave him a warning to back off in a courtroom hallway.
Following up investigations led investigators to believe that the new bar ownership was a ruse. In order to have a better understanding of the family’s actions, the authorities set up bugs and cameras in the café and began wiretapping suspects. They said that the clan was responsible for a citywide jewellery shop burglary as well as controlling a gaming café.
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According to the prosecution, they gave the mobsters the impression that they could outwit the law.
Mr. Curcio said that if a criminal from another gang visited and seen that they were running the courthouse café, they must have thought, “Man, these guys are brilliant.”
He said that the family’s pursuit of ownership of the café was likely motivated mostly by “criminal prestige.”
Mafia Group | All About
The family was not a Mafia group, according to Basilio Pitasi, a lawyer for Saverio Riviezzi, who the prosecution say is the clan’s head. He continued by saying that Mr. Riviezzi has already been exonerated of these claims.
Pitasi said that neither the so-called Riviezzi clan, who officials claim managed the café, controlled any land nor engaged in “diffuse intimidation,” which he claimed were essential characteristics of a mafia organisation.
The head of a think tank called the Center for Studies and Research on the South, the Rev. Marcello Cozzi, said that the Riviezzis and other Mafia families in Basilicata were “young compared to other Mafias in Italy that go back over 150 years.”
But they murder, extort, and penetrate the economy, he said.
The attorney who was unsuccessful in obtaining the café contract, Mr. Pennacchio, said that a friend had discovered one additional issue with the restaurant’s roast chicken: “Hard as plastic.”
