Paolo Borrometi: Who is the journalist who is so bothersome?

Founder of the website La Spia, with legal training, has lived for four years with a police escort. With his investigations Paolo Borrometi has documented the active presence of the Mafia in the provinces of Ragusa and Syracuse

“Have him killed, but what ……is it to us” rages the boss of Cosa Nostra of the province of Syracuse, Salvatore Giuliano in a phone call tapped by the police. He’s not speaking of a mad dog or a lame horse but of a human being. He asks for Paolo Borrometi to be killed, the journalist who is damaging his clan’s businesses, who has published exclusively news, investigations, scoops which other publications and other journalists don’t publish (read here).

Paolo is 35. He was born in Modica in Sicily and has shown that in his area at the southernmost part of Italy at Ragusa, Syracuse and in the municipalities in these two provinces that the Mafia is an active presence contrary to what is believed and said and there are Mafian infiltrations in the local authorities and other public organisations. This real situation is the object of very little investigation and very little highlighted by newspapers, even by local ones.

Borrometi is a good journalist, he has among other things a legal training (a degree in law and practical experience as a legal procurator). He knows how to read documents and transform them into news which makes those who read them leap out of their chairs. Borrometi collaborates with the AGI press agency but he does not have a stable job. He is a precarious journalist like by now the majority of Italian journalists. How can a precarious journalist publish the most disrupting and sensational news which he finds? Also those which the newspapers shun or refuse to publish? Usually by creating an ad hoc publication, as Paolo Borrometi did when in 2013 he launched the online newspaper La Spia. It was officially registered and he is its chief editor. Whoever can read it for free and it is easy to stumble across it when using search engines.

Paolo has published exclusively in La Spia all the discomforting news for which he has been attacked and several times threatened with death. After the first warnings in August 2014 the Italian security agency assigned a protection service to him which, as “Ossigeno” has commented, is not a real armed escort. They provided him with this protection one year after he had received the first threats. Since then, the police force protect him 24 hours a day. They watch over him and they discovered that several Mafia individuals are planning an attack to kill him. They discovered it in time to prevent it because whilst in Italy there are many threats, fortunately there has also been for some years a judicial and security apparatus which knows how to deal with the most serious cases, how to prevent attacks, how to protect those threatened with death, how to prevent what happens or has happened in recent months in Malta and in Slovakia.

During the press conference at the FNSI of the 11th April 2018, the day after it had been announced that the police had discovered and prevented the attack planned in Sicily to kill him, Borrometi said, “None of us is a hero or an example. We are merely journalists who want to continue to do our job. But one thing I want to express forcefully: yesterday the State won, because it succeeded in intercepting in time what could have happened and what someone wanted to happen.”

Paolo Borrometi asked, with heartfelt words, the leaders of the union and of the Ordine dei Giornalisti who stood around him in a collective embrace to express their support, to help him get his many colleagues in Ragusa and Syracuse even those who hold trade union positions to understand that they cannot continue to say that in that area the Mafia does not exist because that is not the case. Because to continue to say so helps those who want to kill him.

ASP