The Gunsmith of Librino
In Catania, a Mafia armourer is uncovered.
Running anything illegal these days is hard enough, particularly in Italy where you need a licence and paperwork for absolutely everything. The amount of government over-regulation is astonishing. When I was a student in Rome I was supposed to have a permesso di soggiorno (permit of stay), but after the very first attempt to get one I never renewed mine and never had any problems with not having one. Funnily enough, Italy today is full of people who have no permesso di soggiorno.
If you own a shop, bar or restaurant in Italy, until very recently your opening times were governed by very strict laws. You had to close for lunch (that applied to businesses) and you had to have a riposo settimanale (a day of rest) if you were a restaurant. If you wanted to go on holiday and shut your place up for a time, then you had to have the permission of the vigili urbani (roughly, the traffic wardens); if you shut without pernission, you would be fined.
Moving a corpse around Italy is, or was, unless it has been liberalised, very difficult. A lot of Italians die in their place of residence, but want to be buried at ‘home’, the village they or their parents or even grandparents came from. There may be sentimental reasons for this, but also practical ones as well; there is a severe shortage of grave space in certain places, particularly cities. Every time a coffin crosses from one commune to another, it is ‘taxed’. The fee used to be just a few hundred lire. I am pretty certain this is no longer the case, but it is one of those things that I heard years ago, and which provided the seed for The Gravedigger of Bronte, the latest in the Catania novels.
Another ridiculous Italian rule concerns the living. If someone comes to stay in your house for more than three days, you are obliged to report this to the police. Yes, really. I have never known this to be done, except in hotels, who are obliged to register guests. But spending the night anywhere requires an identity card, even if it is on a night train. The eponymous Chemist of Catania, who moved around the country planting bombs had a forged identity card, indeed several….. In the next book, provisionally title The Good Boys of Sicily, Tonino Grassi lives with his mother, naturally enough, on paper, but in reality lives elsewhere, where he is not registered, and not known. The boss of bosses, Salvatore Riina lived ‘off grid’ for decades.
What is the result of the Italian addiction to red tape? It seems to me that the more rules there are, the less likely anyone is to pay any attention to them. Italy had more rules than anywhere else, it seemed to me when I lived there, and was the closest to anarchy that I have ever experienced.
But to move on to the latest story from Catania, where a 45 year old man has been running an illegal gun factory in his house in the Librino section of the city. The report does not say where exactly, which is a pity: was it a flat, as in most Italian habitations, or was it a suburban house with a workshop of some sort attached? If it was a flat, one wonders about the noise, and the people calling at all hours, and if the neighbours noticing anything. However, the twitching of net curtains is a very British thing; in Catania, unusual comings and goings do not arouse comment, one imagines.
The Gunsmith of Librino (good title for a book) is now in Piazza Lanza, the Catania jail. It seems his speciality was adapting starting pistols, and pistols that fire blanks, into lethal weapons. These were concealed in a compartment in his sitting-room wall, along with the tools of his trade, at which, it seems, he was rather good. The police have confiscated the guns, and are now looking into his client list.
My guess is that what the police have uncovered is a Mafia armourer. The adaptation of starting pistols into real guns is rather clever, as it circumvents having to buy ‘real’ guns. In addition the gunsmith would have been good, one imagines, at producing ‘clean’ weapons, ones that cannot be traced. One wonders how the gunsmith was reported to the police and by whom; but one can be quite certain that the gunsmith himself, now in Piazza Lanza, will not be uttering a word about the people he supplied with weapons.