Paolo Borrometi: How a mafian plan has been discovered and thwarted

Several legal phone-tappings revealed that the businessmen and a gang leader, whose deals had been exposed, planned for two months how to kill the journalist

They spoke about how engage a team of five to ten hit men and how and where to hide the killers at the end of the job. For months they had discussed in several phone conversations the Mafian plan to kill the journalist Paolo Borrometi. The plan had been revealed and thwarted on the10th April 2018 by the magistrates with the arrest of four individuals held responsible for having planned and organised an explosives attack with the aim of a ransom on the vehicle of the liquidators of a company in Pachino (Syracuse). The attack was carried out on the 30th December on the car of a lawyer who was going to attach legal seals to a service area.

In the arrest warrant, the general prosecutor of Catania, Giuliana Sammartino wrote that on the request of the Syracuse boss Salvatore Giuliano, the Mafian clan of the Cappellos from Catania, “were about to organise a striking murder operation” aimed at “eliminating an awkward journalist” Paolo Borrometi, editor of the online newspaper laspia.it, as revenge for the news which he had published on the illicit businesses of the clan. The general prosecutor wrote that, “Between the businessman Giuseppe Vizzini and the boss of the area, Salvatore Giuliano there was a mutual interest in the defence of their “reputation” damaged by the publication of the news of the nature of their interests.”

Paolo Borrometi had described the association between Vizzini, Giuliano and their respective relatives, their legal record, their businesses, the election of Vizzini to the municipal council of Pachino and the background to the attack on the car of the lawyer Adriana Quattropani in several articles, the last one published on the 8th January 2018 on La Spia with numerous photographs (read here).

The plan was discovered a few days later in January by the police through the telephone tapping of the “boss” of Pachino, Salvatore Giuliano, in the course of investigations conducted by the Questura of Syracuse and coordinated by the district anti-Mafia division of the Procura of Catania.

The intention to carry out a murder was confirmed by phrases alluding to it by the businessman Giuseppe Vizzini, one of those arrested. Speaking with his sons who also have ended up in prison, Vizzini cynically referred to the murder plan with these words in dialect, “Picca n’avi” (little time remains for him) and added the following mangled phrases, “See, I have threatened you with death”. “By now we are attacked by a journalist…” “Drugs, extortion, mafia, clans, that, the other …”.

Vizzini said that there was no need to worry too much about the possible negative consequences for the clan which at his word could be avoided. He expressed it with these words, envisaging a plan to involve a team of hit men from outside: “if it unravels …if it unravels what can happen, small fry? What can happen, small fry …a rented house at Pozzallo for fifteen days… slaughter for everybody and they go away. About ten, five, six from Catania, stolen cars, a house in the countryside, one here, one there … as soon as they are found that evening, they come out … we have to hit that one, boom, on the ground! And here there is a iocufocu (fireworks)! As there was in the Nineties, when one couldn’t move even on foot….every so often you see that a murder is useful, it’s needed, in that way it would have a calming effect on all the novices, all the mafia, suffering from mafia! A murder …”.

In an intercepted telephone call Giuseppe Vizzini reviled the journalist Borrometi and, in addition, the boss Giuliano recommended killing him “Stu lurdusu” (this sordid man) said Vizzini. And Giuliano replied, “I know …but why doesn’t he kill himself? But let’s have him killed! What the hell does he interest you?”.

In another wiretap one of the sons of Vizzini, Simone, one of the four arrested, talks about the bomb which exploded in the car of the lawyer Adriana Quattropani, demonstrating that he was, writes the general procurator, irritated by the article written by the journalist Paolo Borrometi in which it accuses him of having acquired a “cigarette lighter” referring to the attack on the car of the liquidator and denying any contemptuous remarks: “the event of the bomb? It’s true” says Simone Vizzini in the police interview “I bought the cigarette lighter and then what? I can buy 1500 of them each day, then there could be an attack. Do you have the proof that it was me to ignite the bomb? There is no proof. Full stop. What more do you want?”

(Source: ANSA)