Six convictions and six acquittals: this is the conclusion reached by the judges of the Court of Palmi at the end of the trial arising from theOperation “Chiron” which in 2021 led to the arrest of 13 people and the suspicion that the Piromalli gang from Gioia Tauro had infiltrated the Provincial Health Authority.
The judges also have Mafia association charge droppedThe college has the main defendant, Girolamo Giuseppe Fabiano Tripodi, the entrepreneur for whom the DDA had requested 16 years in prison, was acquitted of all charges. He was accused of mafia association and, according to the prosecutors, he would have been the reference figure of the corporate structures operating in the healthcare sector of the Minerva laboratory, Mct Distribution; Service srl and Lewis medical srl. Companies that according to the accusation, not found by the Court, being the awarders of supply contracts to the ASP of Reggio Calabria, would have acted as a “screen” for the gang allowing it to obtain orders for the supply of medical materials to the hospitals of Gioia Tauro, Polistena, Locri and in the hospital company of the capital. A thesis that was contested by Tripodi’s lawyers and that did not hold up in Court.
Always accused of mafia association, they were Giancarlo Arcieri, Martino Taverna and Antonino Cernuto also acquitted. Finally, the charges were also dropped for the director of the Asp pharmacies Giuseppe Fiumanò and for the official of the Provincial Health Authority Francesca Grazia Laface. The first was acquitted of the crime of external competition with the ‘ndrangheta, while the second was acquitted of the charge of corruption. The defendants Antonino Madaffari (4 years in prison), Franco Madaffari (2 years and 6 months), Mario Vincenzo Riefolo (2 years and 6 months), Federico Riefolo (3 years and 6 months), Pasquale Mamone (3 years and 6 months), Giuseppe Cernuto (3 years) were sentenced for the crimes. For all of them, the Court of Palmi excluded the mafia aggravating circumstance of having facilitated the Piromalli gang.
The note from Giancarlo Arcieri’s lawyers
Acquitted because the fact does not exist. This is the decision of the Palmi collegiate court (president Bandiera, alongside Manfredonia and Iazzetti) against Giancarlo Arcieri from Lamezia Terme (defended by the lawyer Lucio Canzoniere), which acquitted the entrepreneur of all charges, in particular of the accusation of external competition in mafia association with the Piromalli gang, of having been part of a criminal association aimed at committing corruption crimes, of having lent himself to the fictitious registration of contracts to favor companies close to the Piromalli gang.
The release of Arcieri’s Lewis Medica company and the company shares of the same company was also ordered. Arcieri was placed under house arrest in March 2021 by order of the District Judge of Reggio Calabria, a measure that was maintained against him for over a year. “A trial ends happily for Arcieri – said the lawyer Canzoniere – in which he proclaimed his total extraneousness since the preliminary hearing, attaching documentation that attested to the exact opposite of what was claimed by the public prosecution and contesting every aspect of the unfounded accusations that were made against him”. Today the acquittal because the fact does not exist.