Italy’s Ostia, Mafia-by-the-sea where silence is safe
Ostia, Italy, (MILLAT ONLINE):The resort town of Ostia, on Italy’s west coast, is a magnet for tourists in the summer but is also mafia territory where clans carve up the drugs and extortion business.
“If you don’t see anything, hear anything or say anything, then you can live to be 100 here,” a sexagenarian resident of Ostia, near Rome, told AFP, declining to give his name.
“But if you want to change things, then you are going to have some major problems ahead,” he added.
“That should have happened a lot earlier. These problems are enrooted and now it’s no good lopping off a branch because another will grow and the tree will be just the same.”
Ostia, a town with a population of 85,000, where many live on impoverished estates, has been in the media spotlight since Tuesday when the brother of a mafia boss violently assaulted a journalist.
Roberto Spada was filmed headbutting TV reporter Daniele Piervincenzi, before attacking him with a baton.
Piervincenzi had been investigating Spada’s alleged links to the far-right CasaPound movement and his nose was fractured in the attack.
In Ostia on Friday dozens of Italian journalists protested in defence of freedom of speech after the attack on their colleague.
Piervincenzi was questioning Spada for a report for national broadcaster Rai about municipal elections, two years after the local council was dissolved due to mafia infiltration.
CasaPound, suspected of links to organised crime in the area, won eight percent of the first round votes.
Italian police arrested Spada on Thursday for assault, with prosecutors saying his behaviour was typical of methods used by organised crime groups to control territory.