Terror in Rome as mob-style murder wave returns mafia-like violence

Italian police are conducting a forensic investigation following a shooting in Rome. The city has experienced an alarming number of execution-style murders. Photo: AP/Gregorio Borgia

Luigi Finizio was at a gas station near his home in the rugged Rome suburb of Torpignattara late at night last month.

As the 51-year-old man was filling his car, two motorcyclists pulled up next to him and fired eight bullets within seconds, killing him instantly.

Five days earlier, another man was shot to death under a hail of bullets by masked men on a scooter, in a creepy execution-style murder.

It was the third Mafia-style execution in this corner of the city in a week — a spate of targeted killings has left residents wary of a return to the Mafia violence that rocked Rome in the 80s.

Although the three Murders seem to have little to do with each other , the police believe they are the victims of a bloody struggle between organized crime families for control of the growing cocaine market in the Eternal City.

'The work of professional hitmen'

“There is no doubt that this is the work of professional hitmen,” one police source confirmed to a local newspaper, pointing to discovered links between Mr. Finicio and a powerful Sienese gang.

The audacity of the killings, combined the fact that Rome had not faced such a reality for several decades caused Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, to sound the alarm.

There is a «criminal escalation with the third murder in Rome in a few days,» he wrote on Twitter. «We have to fight this organized crime and drug trafficking.»

The newspaper Il Corriere della Sera has estimated that there have been about 20 murders in the Italian capital in the past six months alone, in addition to 15 alleged gang-related shootings.

One judge said he thought the raids carried out police in recent months against some of the biggest crime bosses, including Matteo Messina Denaro of Cosa Nostra, have left an unprecedented power vacuum and sparked a street war for control of the lucrative drug market.

“Rome is increasingly reminiscent of Naples, where the clans that make up the Camorra mafia are fighting each other for control of areas, and where there is no overarching criminal power structure,” said Judge Alfonso Sabella.

“People are not really awake from what is happening in Rome, and I am afraid that attention will be paid only when a stray bullet hits a passer-by, ”he said.

They are afraid of the return of the gangs

In an article for the daily newspaper La Repubblica, Massimo Lugli, an expert on criminal gangs, wondered if his city was experiencing a return to the bad old days, when the gangs of Magliana, Pesciaroli or Marsigliesi effectively ruled Rome.

Federica Angeli, Investigative journalist La Repubblica, who has been under police protection for the past decade for reporting on the Spada clan, told The Telegraph: «People in my community didn't want to know me,» she said after publishing an explosive investigation into the Spada family . “People here in [the Roman seaside town] Ostia were scared. There were bars where they wouldn't even serve me coffee.»

However, in recent years, she has seen a real change in society's attitude towards mafia gangs.

Today, residents who were once «scared» to report about anything, raised their heads in what she calls a kind of “cultural revolution.”

“Falcone [the great Sicilian mafia interrogator, killed by Cosa Nostra in 1992] said that the mafia is not invincible, that this is a human enterprise and, as such, it has a beginning and will have an end,” she said.