Ettore Sottile’s twenty-year sentence for complicity in the murder of Luca Bruni becomes definitive. The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal of the lawyers of the accountant of the “Rango-zingari” gang of Cosenza and declared the appeal brought by the Attorney General to the Court of Appeal of Catanzaro inadmissible. In this way the Ermellini confirmed the sentence that the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Catanzaro pronounced on 3 October last year.
In the first instance, with the abbreviated procedure, Sottile – who was also accused of hiding the body and carrying the weapons used for the murder – was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sentence, which the Court of Appeal, partially accepting the defense arguments, had redetermined at 20 years of imprisonment. With this, recognizing the generic mitigating circumstances as equivalent to the aggravating ones, in consideration of the marginal role of the exponent of the “Rango-gypsies” clan in the execution phase of the murder.
The day of the murder
It was January 3, 2012 when Luca Bruni, head of the “Bella bella” clan, disappeared in Rende. Nothing more was heard of him until March 2015 when the remains of his body were found buried in the Castrolibero countryside. The declarations of the repentants were fundamental and allowed us to reconstruct not only the reasons but also the manner of the death of the young exponent of the ‘ndrina bruzia. It was Daniele Lamanna, who later became a collaborator with justice, who pulled the trigger. “I shot him in the head with the 7.65” he will tell, after his arrest as part of an anti-‘ndrangheta operation, to the DDA magistrates of Catanzaro. «The gun jammed and Adolfo Foggetto handed me the 38. I hit him, threw the weapon away and left».
The revelation
It was then Adolfo Foggetto, three years later, who indicated to investigators the exact spot where the body of the last scion of the “Bella bella” dynasty had been buried. Foggetto went with the investigators to Ortomatera, in the municipality of Castrolibero, to indicate the place where he had been buried.