30 October 2009

Mafia justice, caught on tape


The Telegraph has the story:
The horrific footage, captured by closed circuit cameras, shows the assassin walk up to a man in broad daylight outside a bar in Naples and shoot him three times. As the victim slumps to the ground, the hitman then finishes him off with a bullet to the head and calmly walks away. Blood can be seen spreading onto the pavement from the head of the dead man, who is still holding a cigarette in his hand.
The dead man was Mariano Bacio Tarracino, 53, and is believed to have been connected to a mafia clan involved in a drug trafficking turf war with a rival group. Anti-mafia investigators said they released the horrific footage of the murder, which happened in May, because they still had not managed to find the killer, despite the fact that the angle of the surveillance cameras means that his face is clearly visible beneath his baseball cap. He even seems to be smirking after carrying out the execution.
"We have decided to circulate the video as widely as possible, urging the co-operation of whoever can provide information to identify the killer and his lookout," the Naples' office for anti-mafia investigations said in a statement.
His shooting was met with apparent indifference by bystanders who were caught on film outside the bar, in Naples's central Sanita district. A man holding a toddler in his arms looks at the victim and walks away, while a woman is seen rubbing off her scratch-and-win lottery card as the execution takes place. No witnesses have so far come forward.
Italy's third biggest city is home to the Camorra crime syndicate, a rival to the better known Cosa Nostra mafia of Sicily, and many locals have become resigned to violence on the streets after decades of deadly feuds.
The killing, in the middle of a busy neighbourhood, was "chilling", said a former head of the Democratic Party, Walter Veltroni, who is now a member of the Anti-Mafia Commission. The scale of organised crime and the state's apparent inability to combat it was an "absolute emergency" for Italy.
An investigative journalist who wrote a best-selling expose of the Camorra, Roberto Saviano, said the indifference of bystanders was perhaps the most shocking element of the video. "When a city's at war, people stop caring about the things they see around them. This video shows that in some parts of Italy, life isn't worth anything". Mr. Saviano, whose book Gomorrah earned him death threats from the Mafia, which means he has had to live under police escort for the last three years, said the killer's ice-cold composure marked him out as a professional hit man.
"First he walks in the bar, looks around, and then he comes out and starts shooting." The mundane surroundings of the assassination and its brutality could help to "dispel Hollywood myths about Mafia violence and show what a Camorra execution is really like," he said.

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