Sicily, the Land the Law forgot

For the living and the dead, no justice, just bureaucracy

For us English here is nothing worse that can happen than, let us say, someone pinching ‘your’ parking place. Things are different in Palermo, where parking is a nightmare, and any type of space is hard to find, and where you can find that someone is illegally squatting in your family tomb. Yes, really. The report is here.

The tombs in Italian cemeteries are underground chambers covered over by slabs, for the most part, not earth burials. So imagine the surprise of one family, on visiting their loved ones in the tomb to find that someone else was there too, with their photograph affixed to the marble, in Italian fashion, and lots of flowers left for the deceased, who was completely unknown to them.

The burial of the squatter took place in 2021, and now, after an endless court case, the squatter is still there, though the local commune has decided it will remove the unwanted coffin, and place it elsewhere. Four years have passed, and it will be done in the next month. Or so they say. Don’t hold your breath.

I have written about the chaos that engulfs Sicilian cemeteries before now, and the Rotoli cemetery in Palermo in particular. And I have also written a book The Gravedigger of Bronte which was a product of my fevered imagination, about the way criminals can take over cemeteries and run them as part of a racket. Once more I am left stoking my chin, and thinking that what I imagined was not so very far from the truth after all.

How did this ‘foreign’ body get into the tomb in the first place? What were the cemetery authorities doing? What were the undertakers thinking of? Was this an example of corrupt double selling? There are lots of questions to be answered. The other thing is, when the family of the deceased were told that this was not their tomb, why didn’t they gracefully withdraw? One wonder just who they were. And why did it take so long to evict the intruder?

All of this is another example of the sheer lawlessness of Sicily. It is sad but true: the law is a very poor defensive weapon in the hands of those who are victims of such impositions.

It gets worse, much worse. Here is the latest report of a murder from Catania.

“A 37-year-old illegal parking attendant, at the height of an argument, fatally stabbed an employee of one of Catania’s most famous pastry shops, Quaranta, stabbing him in the arms, torso, and abdomen. Santo Salvatore Giambattista Re, 30, a resident of Mascalucia, married, father of a 4-month-old baby girl, died after being transferred to the Cannizzaro hospital.”

The details are truly pitiful when one considers the victim, a young, hardworking, married man, with a new baby.

But it gets far worse.

Visitors to Italy are perhaps familiar with these illegal parking attendants, who, when you want to park your car, hassle you for money. But this illegal parking attendant had form:

“The illegal parking attendant arrested by the police for the murder does not have a residence permit and has been fined in the past for similar illegal activity and has been arrested several times by the police for violence and resisting a public official. In July 2019, while he was acting as an illegal parking attendant in Piazza Mancini Battaglia, in the same area of ​​the Ognina seafront where the murder took place, he attacked two police officers who were about to fine him, hitting them with punches and kicks, before being stopped by the carabinieri and arrested for voluntary injuries and resisting and insulting a public official. One of the two officers, hit in the face, was taken to the emergency room for treatment. He was imprisoned for this crime.”

It is not clear as yet what the motive for the murder was, and what led to the encounter that was fatal to the victim, Santo Re. But what is clear is that the illegal parking attendant ought not to have been in Italy, and should surely have been deported for that, if not for the crime of assaulting a police officer, after he was released from prison. It is staggering that he was allowed to stay, and one asks why. Was it sheer indolence on the part of officialdom? Heads should roll over this.

This report sums it up. I shall add no comment.

“Grief, emotion and anger are running through social media over the killing of Santo Re, the 30-year-old pastry chef stabbed to death by John Obama, an illegal parking attendant, a 37-year-old Zimbabwean without a residence permit. Like the feelings expressed by Samantha, one of his co-workers, who yesterday posted a long post on Facebook after the crime: “An honest, good and hard-working young man has paid the ultimate price, but it could have been any of us, at the hands of a repeat offender left free to break the law on a daily basis.”

“Santo spent his last seconds of life with us, trying to stay alive,” she recounted. “Tonight, while I was taking off my blood-soaked clothes, I felt angry because it's not right! He was one of us, and we won't forget him. He did not die just at the hands of a murderer, he was murdered by a judicial system crippled by bureaucracy, full of nit-picking jobsworths. Santo died at the hands of those who receive money for every person who enters our country illegally! Santo died of negligence on the part of the State.”