The former mayor of Riace, famous for opening his village to the migrants, was sentenced to more than thirteen years in prison, for various irregularities.
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The Catanzaro Investigation Cerabinists (Calabria) captured, Thursday, October 7, Cosimo Damiano Gallace, 60, in a hidden bunker behind a false partition, in an apartment located in Isca Sullo Ionio. He had been on the run for years, after a sentence to fourteen years in prison for mafia association.
A week earlier, not far from there, it is another man with the same age who was sentenced to a similar sentence (thirteen years and two months of detention) by the court of love, for about twenty counts whose association of criminals, misappropriation of funds and abuse of power. His name: Mimmo Lucano, former mayor of the small town of Riace, on the edges of the Ionian Sea. This “mayor of migrants” had acquired a global notoriety by setting up, during the 2010s, an original model of reception that had made a little life to a place in the process of desertification (the municipality of Riace counted, In 2018, more than 600 migrants among its 2,000 residents).
Parallel with a master mafia
This parallel between the two men, sentenced to almost similar for facts of seriously comparable gravity, it is the great writer Sandro Veronesi, crowned by two Strega awards (the Italian equivalent of Goncourt), who In the evening of October 7, during a demonstration of support that gathered a few hundred people in the center of Rome, in front of the headquarters of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The announcement of the outcome of this trial, Thursday, September 30, immediately provoked a strong mobilization of the left, as well as much of the Italian episcopate. More than the conviction in itself, part of the facts reproached in Mimmo Lucano having been recognized by the accused, it is his disproportionate character with the nature of the prosecuted offenses that is denounced.
“It’s not the welcome in itself who has been condemned, but the violation of the standards and laws,” the Repubblica assured the Prosecutor Michele Permunian, who had requested, during the trial, a seven-year sentence and eleven months in prison, in order to explain why the judge exceeded his requisitions of more than five years. For him, it is the result of “a very technical procedure, that opinion does not want to understand”. Mimmo Lucano, he says, “was” like a western bandit, idealistic, intoxicated with a larger role than him “. By moving away from the rules in force to give life that the media from around the world have described as a “model”, the former mayor deserved, according to him, to be condemned, and that’s the simple addition of the offenses he committed who resulted in a total so heavy.
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