Mafia, final sentence for the "boss of two worlds" Alfonso Caruana
04 November 2020
mafia, Alfonso Caruana, Trapani, Chronicle
Alfonso Caruana
The Turin prosecutor's office wins the game against the boss of the two worlds . The Supreme Court has declared inadmissible the appeal of Alfonso Caruana , one of the major players of international organized crime according to the investigators, against the sentence to eighteen years in prison for drug trafficking pronounced in 2019 by the Subalpine Court of Appeal. Thus, the word for an end to a hard and tormented judicial affair is written in Rome, the beginning of which can even be traced back to the last century.

Caruana, 74, originally from Castelvetrano (Trapani), is considered one of the leaders of the Caruana-Cuntrera mafia clan. The nickname of boss of the two worlds was sewn on him for the activities he carried out on the American continent, where he lived for most of his life. In Canada, where he took his citizenship, he appears to have landed in 1968 with 87 dollars in his pocket, claiming to be an electrician, as claimed by those who compiled his biography. In Turin he was involved in one of the largest trials ever set up against drug trafficking: the Carthage operation, born in 1994 after the kidnapping, in Borgaro - a town on the outskirts of the Piedmontese capital - of a truck with five tons of cocaine from South America .

The investigation led to the conviction of dozens of characters linked to Calabrian crime and, in one of its innumerable strands, touched the right arm of the then Brazilian president Fernando Collor De Mello (died in 1995). Alfonso Caruana remained for a long time only a name in the trial papers. Until, at the height of an investigation carried out by a carabinieri officer, Paolo Palazzo, now a colonel of the Arma under the team of the judicial police of the Turin prosecutor's office, his arrest in Canadian territory was not reached. Then, after the brawl of extradition and a slalom between contradictory sentences, yesterday there was the last intervention of the Supreme Court. "It is a great satisfaction - now comments Sandro Ausiello, retired magistrate, former assistant prosecutor in Turin, who from Carthage was one of the prosecutors - for me and for the many people who worked on this result. After 26 years, a story concerning one of the most significant personalities of the elite of organized crime has finally come to an end ".

Caruana - who has always professed his innocence - is today in prison where he has just finished serving another sentence. If the Supreme Court had not confirmed the Turin sentence he would have returned to freedom. "Although not with the same speed with which the mafias proceed - says Nicola Morra (M5S), president of the parliamentary anti-mafia commission - justice often comes at the end of long and exhausting debates. This news from Piedmont deserves importance. provincially, that mafias are only a southern problem. Indeed, of only four regions ".