THE BOND WITH THE CUNTRERA -CARUANA - 13/15
by Giuseppe Pipitone | JANUARY 16, 2023
It is also on the basis of this long experience in the field that Paci has reconstructed the origins of Messina Denaro's criminal career. The magistrate has carried out an investigation that order in 40 years of forgotten judicial papers. The result was to cast a different light not only on the fundamental role that Matteo played in the massacres, but also on the high connections established in remote years by the Messina Denaros in the complex criminal landscape. Paci discovered that already in the 1950s Don Ciccio Messina Denaro was linked to the Cuntrera and Caruana : even a member of the Siculiana clanhe was a witness at the wedding of Matteo's father. In the 1960s, the Cuntreras and Caruanas left the province of Agrigento to emigrate to Canada and then also to Great Britain and Venezuela: in a short time they would become among the main drug traffickers in the world. It is estimated that 80 percent of the drugs produced in Colombia arrived in the United States via Caracas: there it was the people of Siculiana who distributed them. The peak, according to the DEA , was reached in 1983: 3 billion drug dollars laundered by the Agrigento mafiosi, who worked with the Colombian cartels, from Pablo Escobar to Calì. The link between Venezuelaand Messina Denaro also emerges from other old forgotten papers. There is a Mafia turncoat, a minor one, called Franco Safina: twenty years ago he said that Messina Denaro had a treasure in Venezuela, created after investing five million dollars in a poultry company. Isn't five million for a poultry company a bit much? Was it poultry or was it cocaine? Salvatore Grigoli, Don Pino Puglisi's killer, also speaks of Venezuela : in the 1990s he was wounded after an attack in Alcamo. With him was Matteo, who told him: "If you want, you can go to Venezuela for a certain period and don't worry". Grigoli never went to Venezuela. Messina Denaro who knows.
DELL'UTRI'S FRIEND
The one who has certainly been a guest of the Cuntera and Caruana is Filippo Alberto Rapisarda , a flashy man who had ended up in Milan from the heart of Sicily to lead Inim, a company that had become the third largest Italian real estate group. Well dressed, pleasant and with bloody manners, he had established his headquarters in via Chiaravalle, in a large sixteenth-century building a stone's throw from the Duomo: it is there, in those nine thousand square meters with frescoed ceilings, that years later the first Forza Italia club. In fact, when he was at the height of his success, another young Sicilian transplanted to Milan had gone to work for Rapisarda: his name is Marcello Dell'Utri and he had already worked in the real estate field, as close collaborators ofSilvio Berlusconi at the Edilnord.
The experience of the third largest Italian real estate group, however, goes badly: the companies collapse and an arrest warrant is issued for Rapisarda for fraudulent bankruptcy. The Sicilian flees, leaves Milan and Italy and runs away on the run for seven years. He first goes to Paris, then to Venezuela where he is a guest of Cuntrera and Caruana. Those are years in which Caracas and Castelvetrano seem very close. Rapisarda, in fact, will attempt to carry out a real estate speculation near Selinunte, near the ruins of the ancient Greek city. As had already happened in the Inim affair, even in the Selinunte affair Rapisarda's partner is Francesco Paolo Alamia, a very thin engineer with important friends: he was a man of Vito Ciancimino, the former mafia mayor of Palermo, the mastermind of the "sack" who destroyed the city center to create one of the most impressive building speculations in Italian history. Very close to Don Vito, Alamia will also have relations with Messina Denaro. A circumstance that emerged only a few years ago, shortly before the engineer's death. After forty years of judicial investigations, in fact, Alamia was suspected of having ordered the murder of one of his associates, Antonio Maiorana , who disappeared into thin air together with his son in 2007. That affair will greatly disturb the waters within Cosa nostra: Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who at the time was the undisputed leader of Palermo, will even order an internal investigation of the mafia to understand who had dared to commit that double crime without his consent. He will even ask Messina Denaro for explanations, summoned to his villa on the outskirts of Palermo for a summit. That meeting will never take place: on the same day, in fact, Lo Piccolo is arrested after a quarter of a century in hiding. Matteo, on the other hand, manages to save himself once again.
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/20...o-i-rapporti-con-la-politica/6629144/13/
