Between revolutionary expert reports and potential new evidence, the defense panel of the “Giù la testa” appeal trial announces a dialectical-juridical battle to overturn the first degree sentence and the life sentences inflicted on the instigator and executor and the motive for the murder of the tobacconist of Cato, Bruno Ielothe businessman killed on the evening of May 25, 2017 when, after closing the doors of the family business that he ran together with his daughter, he ended up in the sights of the killers. They left him no chance. For those who investigated it would have been an ambush to crush the courageous life choice of remaining light years away from the mafia claims of those who did not want him as a competitor in the populous area north of the city. Between Archi, Gallico and Catona.
Instead, it was a normal entrepreneurial choice undertaken by Bruno Ielo, who also worked as a carabinieri; and would not have caught, as the investigators and the judges of first instance state, not even the warning signal from someone who, disguising an attempted robbery, would have gone into action on 8 November 2016, at approximately 9.15 pm, when the same Bruno Ielo was injured by a pistol shot to the mouth. Accusatory thesis which also emerges in the reasons for the first degree sentence: «After just over six months from the violent episode of the robbery, Ielo Bruno, who in the meantime had resumed working at his tobacco shop, was killed on the evening of 25.5.2017 in Catona, while traveling on his scooter to return home after finishing his working day. The dynamics of the facts were illustrated before this Court, at the hearing on 19.7.2021, by Dr. Sandra Manfrè, chief commissioner of the State Police and director of the third section of the Flying Squad of Reggio Calabria, who reviewed the initial investigations carried out by the police at the scene of the crime and reconstructed the moments of the murder through video footage of the plants in the area, acquired in the documents of the trial file”.