Mafia, the stele in memory of judge Rosario Livatino damaged

2020-09-21T10:26:06.068Z

A week after the outrage to the memory of Falcone, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the massacre in which judge Paolo Borsellino lost his life, in Sicily a symbol of the fight against the mafia is once again scarred. The stele commemorating Rosario Livatino, the judge killed on 21 September 1990 while, alone and without escort, from his village, Canicattì, went to the courthouse in Agrigento was torn to pieces. A week ago it was an employee who found the decapitated statue of Giovanni Falcone in front of a Zen school, today it was a worker who was passing by who noticed the damage and warned the managers of the associations that, for years, have been organizing events for remember the figure of the young magistrate. According to the first investigations, someone with a heavy object, a stone or a hammer, broke the circle on which was written "A Rosario Livatino ..." blasting the name of the judge. The prosecutor has opened an investigation. "It is a disturbing fact, we do not exclude the mafia trail," Patronaggio said. "If anyone thinks they are frightening us, they are wrong. The example of Rosario Livatino will go on even if it obviously disturbs someone", say the representatives of the associations. On the morning of the murder the assassins were waiting for him and when they saw him they chased him, tried to ram him, forced him to stop. A witness saw with dismay Livatino attempting a desperate escape to the countryside, but the firing group caught up with him and killed him. Thus died 20 years ago the "boy judge" who carried out his work with care but also with an ideal vision of his role. He was trying to give "a soul to the law," he explained himself during a public meeting, a few days before his death. Livatino was 36 years old but he had already dealt with the first signs of a Sicilian tangentopoli and mafia events that had revealed the existence of the "stidda", a growing organization that contended with Cosa Nostra for control of the new criminal frontiers: contracts , drug trafficking, money laundering. Two of the four hit men, Domenico Pace and Paolo Amico, were immediately arrested in Germany where they had sought refuge. They were identified on the basis of the indications of a commercial agent, Pietro Ivano Nava, who at the time of the ambush was traveling on the Agrigento-Canicattì. The other managers and principals were also discovered for whom three separate trials were held. The criminal project was conceived by Giovanni Avarello, exponent of an emerging clan in Canicattì as opposed to an old clan headed by Giuseppe Di Caro and linked to Cosa Nostra. With the killing of the "boy judge" the "stidda" wanted to give a show of strength to Cosa Nostra. Pace and Amato were sentenced to life imprisonment with the other two members of the fire group, Giovanni Avarello and Gaetano Puzzangaro. In the other procedural line, Antonio Gallea, Salvatore Calafato, Salvatore Parla and Giuseppe Montanti were sentenced to the same penalty. The latter, arrested in Acapulco where he had followed his daughter on their honeymoon: he would have made a home available to the commando and maintained contact with some fugitives abroad. The repentant Giovanni Calafato and Giuseppe Croce Benvenuto were sentenced to lesser penalties. For Livatino, the Church has started a process of canonization.