'What do you want to leave?'. 'Marco, I don't want you to give me anything! But I took on a million (euros - ed.) of debts that weren't mine!
Make me pay off this million in debt!'. 'Okay, okay, okay! Let's do one thing: Donna Margherita will be taken by my brother, Pizza Margherita by that other brother of mine, you stay with me at 40% in Regina with the proceeds of the 40% you pay off your debts!' Well, luck wanted that on the day we went to the notary in Donna and Regina Carmine, the brother, who was supposed to sign for Pizza, had a fever and didn't come down to us, that's why we find Pizza Margherita”.
It is the account of a conversation that Luigi d'Ari, one of the eight suspects in the investigation entrusted to the Naples Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate arrested today, had on March 13 of last year with Domenico Mollica, another arrested person, retracing the steps that led him first to become a front man for the brothers Marco (his interlocutor in that conversation, ed.), Carmine and Massimiliano Iorio, in prison in 2011 for reinvesting in their restaurant activities the capital of a family of loan sharks from Pallonetto di Santa Lucia, the Potenzas, and 2 million euros from the Lo Russo clan, and then the victim of extortion by the boss Carlo Lo Russo who had invested part of the gang's money in those restaurants. “A million in debt and 90 employees have been taken from me,” Luigi is said to have told Marco Iorio, returning the keys to the club to him after his release in 2015, “I only want that million euros.” In 483 pages of her precautionary measure, with which she ordered the arrest of Luidi and Antonio D'Ari, two brothers and doctors, and precautionary measures also for the wife of the club leader Adriana Lo Russo, for Mollica himself, for two other members of the gang and for Vincenzo De Gaetano, the investigating judge Emilia Di Palma reconstructs a complex story that sees the two professionals as both accomplices and victims of the Camorra.
Antonio D'Ari is a cosmetic doctor, his brother Luigi is an anesthetist, and they work in two leading private facilities in Naples. As Luigi himself says, not knowing that he was being intercepted in an office where a Mollica company is based, at the request and insistence of the Iorio brothers' father, Antonio, who later died, took over the management of the restaurants Donna Margherita, Pizza Margherita and Regina Margherita, on the seafront and in the center of Naples, in fact guaranteeing control of them to the detained owners.
A “great courtesy” for which he only wants to recover from the debt he has taken on. Instead he is forced to pay the Lo Russo clan 5 thousand euros every 15th of the month to cover the 200 thousand that the gang had given to Marco Iorio to open Pizza Margherita.
And once, when he was leaving the operating room of the clinic where he worked, he found himself in front of an emissary of the clan, appointed by Mollica himself, who told him that he had to go immediately to Carluccio, that is, to the boss. It was Mollica himself who then collected the installments of this 'pizzo' to give the money to the wife of Mariano Torre, a hitman for the Lo Russos who later repented and was also in prison at the time.
The investigation by the men of the center chief Giuseppe Linares traces a series of money transfers that also include the transfer of 8 thousand euros per month to Torre's wife by the clan through money partly from the D'Ari family to support the family during the killer's detention, but also that of 5 thousand euros per month to the boss Carlo's sister, Adriana, also reached by a precautionary measure.
Article published on May 17, 2018 - 15:40 pm
