Italy Outraged By On-Camera Mafia Killing

ROME, Italy, Oct. 30, 2009 — -- No it wasn't a scene from the blockbuster feature film "Gomorra" based on Roberto Saviano's international best-selling book about very real organized crime gangs in Naples. Italians blanched as they watched their TV news yesterday and saw what surveillance cameras had captured of a cold-blooded killing in broad daylight outside a bar in central Naples last May.

A seemingly unemotional, relaxed killer in a baseball cap passes his victim Mariano Bacioterracino as he walks into the bar and then emerges shortly afterwards to fire three pistol shots at close range. The victim is seen slumping to his knees and then falls face down on the pavement. The killer leans over a bit to fire the last fatal shot in the victim's neck before walking away calmly. Meanwhile, around the killing and the body on the ground, daily life continues.

Prosecutors released the video yesterday, five months after the killing, in the hope that witnesses will come forward with leads or anonymous tips to trace Bacioterracino's killer. "We are asking the citizens for their collaboration, we hope these dramatic scenes will move people to help us. We need more information on the killer and his accomplice," says the Chief Prosecutor Giandomenico Lepore. The accomplice-lookout can be clearly seen standing outside the bar close to the victim before the shooting begins.

It is the first time that the authorities have released such a video for this purpose. Up till its release none of the witnesses had come forward and nobody had identified the killer.

Investigators believe the victim, 53-year-old Bacioterracino, who was known to police and had been charged but not convicted of a $3 million heist in 1991, had ties to the organized crime clans that operate in the city.

What shocked most of the Italians who watched the video was not the cool composure of the killer but the seeming indifference of the bystanders and witnesses. The normal appearance of the scene seems almost surreal: a woman is seen rubbing off her scratch-and-win lottery card, a cigarette-seller moves his stall a few feet down the road, a man holding a small child in his arms looks at the victim and walks away and someone even steps over the body as they walk along the pavement.