“Decaro doesn’t give anything… They are the ones who are giving a lot of money… All those from Bari Vecchia are going, why are they giving the money, do you understand?”: there is a sentence, in the thousands of documents of the investigation ‘Codice interna’, which explains how things were going in Bari during the electoral campaign for the renewal of the city council in 2019.
pronounces it Michele De Tulliusmember of the powerful Parisi clan, conversing with Tommaso Lovreglionephew of the boss Savino Parisi, considered by the DDA to be a key man for the councilor’s political rise Maria Carmen Lorussoelected five years ago in the Municipality with the centre-right (and then passed into the centre-left majority, with the opposition of the mayor Antonio Decaro) also thanks to the votes of the mafia.
Two days ago the Ministry of the Interior ordered the sending of an anti-mafia access commission to the Municipality of Bari, to evaluate possible conditioning of administrative acts by people believed to be close to organized crime. The access came less than a month after 130 arrests, which also involved the former councilor Lorusso, and the decree that ordered the judicial administration of Amtab, a municipal public transport company.
In the conversation intercepted on 19 February 2019 by the police, Lovreglio urged De Tullio: “Give him some votes to Di Rella” referring to Pasquale Di Rella at the time a competitor (then victorious) in the centre-right primaries for the choice of the mayoral candidate, who he would have challenged the outgoing Antonio Decaro. Of the latter De Tullio clearly said “Decaro gives nothing”. And, to explain even better, he added: “I don’t care… Decaro, Di Rella, they’re all rubbish… But he doesn’t lack money.”
That is, he made it clear that the votes he could move – between relatives, friends and clan affiliates – would be directed not on the basis of an ideological choice but towards the candidate who offered the most. And, in that perspective, Decaro was out of the picture, because it was well known that he did not pay, so it would have been necessary to consult Olivieri, who was already promising money to voters in other districts. The “Internal Code” investigation – which on 26 February led to prison around a hundred members of the Parisi and Palermiti clans as well as the lawyer Giacomo Olivieri, who made pacts with those and other clans to have his wife Maria Carmen Lorusso elected ( under house arrest) – documented that in 2019 there was intense work by members of organized crime to support centre-right candidates.
The DDA contested, among other things, the crime of political-mafia exchange voting and reconstructed the network that the lawyer Olivieri had set up thanks to representatives of various clans. The confirmation that Lovreglio had moved many months before the elections, to sell his package of votes to the highest bidder, and that discussions with the centre-right had started some time ago, is also found in an interception from December 2018 in which he says to Benito Visciglia (trusted man, also believed to be Olivieri’s frontman) “then you have to introduce him to Pasquale…” referring precisely to Di Rella and obtaining an invitation to participate in a political meeting that would take place on the 15th of the same month.
But on this point Lovreglio, like the old fox that he was, was cautious: “There is no point in speaking at the congress…”. In the following months, his meetings with Giacomo Olivieri were documented, with promises of money from the latter both in relation to the primaries and the elections of the city councilors. And in support of the Parisi clan’s support for Di Rella, in the first confrontation with the other aspiring mayoral candidates of his own coalition, another sentence from Lovreglio intercepted in February five years ago: “For that one five-six thousand euros I took off.”
And then the unmistakable photo of the boss’s nephew who on the night of 24 February 2019 went to the Sheraton hotel in Bari, where the primaries had taken place, probably – the investigators hypothesize – to collect the compensation for the votes he had cast disposition. He would have done the same thing five years earlier, when Giacomo Olivieri had challenged Antonio Decaro in the centre-left primaries for the choice of candidate for mayor. Even in that case, the current mayor had not implemented anything illegal while his challenger had presumably asked for and obtained the clan’s help at the time.
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– 2024-04-03 15:34:32
