AFP
An Italian court on Monday convicted more than 200 mobsters and their white-collar helpers, the culmination of a historic, nearly three-year trial against Calabria's notorious 'Ndrangheta mafia.
For over an hour and a half, the president of the court in southern Vibo Valentia, Brigida Cavasino, steadily read out the names of the guilty and their sentences, which ranged from 30 years to a few months, as defendants incarcerated in prisons across the country watched via video link.
Prosecutors had asked for sentences totalling nearly 5,000 years for 322 accused mafia members operating in the Calabrian province of Vibo Valentia and their white-collar collaborators who have exercised a virtual stranglehold over the local population.
But after a trial that lasted two years and nine months, the court doled out just about half that total time, with convictions of 207 defendants Monday, including four seasoned members of the 'Ndrangheta each sentenced to 30 years in jail.
The three-judge panel acquitted 131 defendants, including 16 for whom prosecutors had recommended acquittal.
Underscoring the 'Ndrangheta's close ties with the powerful, one of the trial's most high-profile defendants was 70-year-old former parliamentarian and defence lawyer Giancarlo Pittelli, accused of being a fixer for the mafia.
He received 11 years, short of the 17 years prosecutors had requested.
A few dozen family members sat in the back of the vast, narrow courtroom, squinting at the television screens for a glimpse of their loved ones in prison, and occasionally crying out with joy over a light sentence.
The verdicts -- which can be appealed twice -- capped Italy's largest mafia trial in decades and, despite Monday's acquittals, mark the most significant blow to date against one of the world's most powerful organised crime syndicates.
Giuseppe Borrello, the local representative for the anti-mafia association Libera, said the verdict showed that prosecutors' efforts were working, even if they fell short for all suspects.
"The road is still long but it's been charted out, that's the most important thing," Borrello told AFP.
"The strong message it (the verdict) sends is that the sense of impunity that has very often been felt in our territory is gone."
