The Reset sentence now has a body, a weight, a definitive voice. Four thousand five hundred and twenty pages filed within the extended deadlines, a monumental work in which the president Carmen Ciarcia and the assistant judges Urania Granata and Iole Vigna brought order, measure and boundaries to the verdict pronounced at 1.34 pm on 18 July, in the bunker courtroom of Castrovillari. A device which, already upon reading, had revealed a deep fracture with the original accusatory system and the motivation today clarifies its full scope.
The toll was clear: fifty-eight convictions, for over four centuries of prison in total, and sixty-three acquittals. Numbers that told of a process capable of redesigning the perimeter of responsibility, reducing and reorienting the scenarios hypothesized by the prosecution. Reset was not a demolition, but a recomposition: the Court had separated what had withstood the test of the trial from what, upon rigorous examination of the evidence, had instead dissolved.
The investigation was born from the miasma of the ‘Ndrangheta which had long been rising from the bowels of Cosenza and its immense urban area. Three years ago the District Anti-Mafia Directorate of Catanzaro had turned the spotlight on a land different from the one exhibited, describing a system founded on seven families, capable of making the territory a gold mine, feeding a common fund for business, investments and support for prisoners. An impressive story, supported by the declarations of twenty justice collaborators and the testimonies of over two hundred people, brought together in a trial that lasted a year and nine months.
It is on that choral, layered and often dissonant story that the judges exercised a severe selection. And the most evident breaking point emerged in the excellent acquittals. Marcello Manna, former mayor of Rende, already under house arrest and then at the top of the Calabrian ANCI and the regional water authority, emerged from the trial with a full formula. The same happened for former councilor Pino Munno. “Because the fact does not exist”, as the judges wrote, rejecting requests for conviction that created a gray area of contiguity between politics and the mafia. For the Court, that third level was not confirmed.
