It was essentially an episode involving Mr. Pennacchio that aided set off the inquiry.
Mr. Pennacchio and a spouse had competed for the exact same courthouse cafe contract, filing an appeal just after they misplaced. He then obtained, in a corridor of the courthouse, a warning from a clan member to back off, in accordance to court paperwork.
Investigators who followed up started to suspect that the new bar ownership was a front. The police set up bugs and cameras in the cafe and commenced wiretapping suspects, acquiring a clearer image of the family’s routines. Between other issues, they explained, the clan managed a gaming cafe and was behind a jewellery shop theft in the city.
Prosecutors explained that they allow the mobsters feel they have been outsmarting the authorities.
“If a criminal from a further group goes there and sees they are managing the courthouse cafe,” Mr. Curcio explained, “they have to feel, ‘Man these guys are clever.’”
He explained that “criminal prestige” was likely the primary motive that the family members had sought manage of the cafe.
Basilio Pitasi, a attorney for Saverio Riviezzi, who the prosecutors declare is the clan’s boss, explained that the family members was not a Mafia organization. He extra that Mr. Riviezzi had previously been cleared of this kind of allegations in the previous.
Mr. Pitasi explained that the so-termed Riviezzi clan — which authorities say ran the cafe — did not manage any territory or operate “diffused intimidation,” two components that he explained have been basic to defining a mafia organization.
Rev. Marcello Cozzi, president of a feel tank, the Center for Research and Exploration on the South, explained that the Mafia households in Basilicata, which include the Riviezzis, are “young in contrast to other Mafias in Italy that go back above 150 many years.”