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.

The video was immediately picked up by Italian media Web sites yesterday and prompted instant outrage from Italian politicians. Naples is Italy's third biggest city and is known for its home-grown organized crime called Camorra.

The only people seemingly not shocked by the video were the people in the popular Sanita' neighborhood where the killing took place. Interviewed on Italian TV news today they seemed unmoved. "We are used to it," a young man says blandly. "It is part of our daily life, we just have to get used to it." Another man who seemed scared and tightlipped mumbled "We are used to it. We must just protect ourselves and our children" as he turned from the camera.

Roberto Saviano, the writer whose 2006 bestseller Gomorra exposed the Naples Casalesi crime clan and has had to live under armed guard ever since, is quoted in Italy's leading daily paper "La Repubblica" today as saying that when a city is at war, people stop caring about the things they see around them. 'This video shows that in some parts of Italy, life isn't worth anything."

Saviano hopes that something good will come from this video's release, maybe "it could lead to a whole community, a whole neighborhood denouncing the killer, not just one enormously courageous solitary witness." In his front-page editorial he explains that the witnesses' reaction is not indifference but total fear.

"If you find yourself in the midst of such a killing," he writes, "the only emotion one has is fear and the only desire is not to be identified by an accomplice who you know are present. You do not want to be identified as someone who saw what went on or could become a witness and denounce the killing to the police …It is not plain cowardice but something much worse…It is self defense and terrible proof that the city is now in their hands."

Police investigators believe there could be various motives behind the killing of Baccioterracino: his shooting of a very powerful rival clan boss 33 years ago or an affair with another rival clan boss's woman. They also think that it is possible that the killer may not be recognizable to the people in the neighborhood because he was a hired gun from the Balkans or Russia. This could also be the reason why he arrived on foot – rather than on a motorcycle which is the more common way these killings are carried out - and walked away without hiding his face.