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Italian mafia caught turning toxic plastic into shoes

Italian detectives have dismantled a mafia plastic-recycling ring headed by a murderous mobster that sent toxic materials to China to make shoes which were then sold in Italy, police said on Thursday.

Published: 25 October 2019 09:00 CEST
Italian mafia caught turning toxic plastic into shoes
Police in Italy say they discovered footwear for sale made of contaminated plastic. File photo: Michael Schincariol/AFP

Officers threw ten people into pre-trial detention in jail, placed five more under house arrest, and seized five companies in Sicily after uncovering the racket in used plastic sheeting contaminated with fertilisers and pesticides.

Those arrested are accused variously of extortion, possessing illegal weapons, grievous bodily harm and waste trafficking.

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The ring was lead by a Claudio Carbonaro, a gangster who was “responsible for atrocious crimes in the 1980s and 90s, including over 60 murders”, police said.

After turning police witness, Carbonaro returned in 2013 to Sicily where he took over a historic mafia clan and launched the extremely lucrative trafficking in contaminated plastics.

The crackdown followed a four-year probe after the seizure in Rome of shoes made of toxic materials. The investigation revealed plastic waste was being collected in warehouses in Sicily and shipped to China, only to return to Italy as footwear.

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CRIME

Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

An Italian appeal court on Wednesday reduced the decades-long sentences of two American men convicted of killing a police officer in Rome while on a teenage summer holiday in 2019.

Published: 4 July 2024 08:41 CEST
Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

Following a retrial ordered by Italy’s highest court that began in March, the Rome appeal court resentenced Finnegan Elder and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth to 15 years and 11 years in prison respectively.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth, from San Francisco, aged 19 and 18 at the time of the killing, were sentenced to life in prison in May 2021 for stabbing policeman Mario Cerciello to death during a late-night encounter.

An appeal court the following year reduced the sentence to 24 years for Elder, who wielded the knife, and 22 years for Natale-Hjorth, who did not handle the weapon but helped hide it.

But Italy’s highest court in March 2023 ordered a retrial to examine potentially mitigating factors, notably that the teenagers said they were unaware that Cerciello and his partner, who were in plain clothes at the time of the attack, were police.

Elder’s lawyers, Renato Borzone and Roberto Capra, said in a statement Wednesday that the court’s decision was “certainly more in line with Finnegan’s actual responsibilities”.

“It is regrettable that we have had to wait through five levels of jurisdiction to see recognised what the young American man has stated since his first interrogation,” they said.

The case horrified Italy and led to an outpouring of public grief for the newlywed Cerciello, who was hailed as a national hero.

But the trial, which revealed multiple examples of police error, offered two very different versions about what happened in the moments just before Elder stabbed Cerciello with an 11-inch (28-centimetre) camping knife on a dark Rome street.

READ ALSO: Italy orders retrial for Americans convicted of killing police officer

While the prosecution’s star witness, Cerciello’s partner Andrea Varriale, testified that the officers were suddenly attacked, the teens said the two men jumped them from behind and did not identify themselves nor show their badges.

The Americans claimed self-defence, saying they thought the men were drug dealers, following their botched attempt to buy drugs earlier in the evening.

Defence lawyers had denounced the life sentences originally given to their clients – Italy’s toughest criminal sentence – saying they were harsher than many given for premeditated killings by the mafia.

The high-profile case also threw a spotlight on police conduct in Italy after Natale-Hjorth was blindfolded while in custody.

The officer who blindfolded him was later handed a two-month suspended sentence.

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