Four arrests for the murder of the mayor of Pollica, Angelo Vassallo, killed on September 5, 2010. They are the Carabinieri officer Fabio Cagnazzo, the former brigadier of the Arma Lazzaro Cioffi, the son of the boss and collaborator of justice Romolo Ridosso of the Scafati Loreto-Ridosso clan and the entrepreneur Giuseppe Cipriano.

The special operational group of the Carabinieri of Rome executed the precautionary custody orders in prison.

Cagnazzo, for years the head of the Castello di Cisterna company, was a protagonist in Naples and the province of investigations into the most powerful Camorra clans. He then became provincial commander in Frosinone, and for a year and a half he was among those under investigation for the death of Vassallo. According to the investigations, with Cioffi he would have had a key role in the misdirection of the investigation that began immediately after the murder. They had known each other for some time, because they had worked together in the operational nucleus of Castello di Cisterna.

The motive

The investigators' reconstruction identifies the motive in the discovery, by the mayor, of drug trafficking attributable to Camorra circles and in which members of the Arma were also allegedly involved. Vassallo was killed after having confided what he knew about the affair to the former chief prosecutor of Vallo della Lucania, Alfredo Greco, but before being able to formalize his complaint to a carabiniere who Greco himself absolutely trusted.

The crime

Nine shots from a 9mm pistol, fired at point-blank range: this is how Angelo Vassallo was killed 14 years ago. A few days later, the "fisherman mayor" would have turned 57, as everyone called him because before being mayor of the seaside town of Cilento, Pollica, for three terms - from 1995 to 1999, from 1999 to 2004 and from 2005 to 2010 - he had been a fisherman. In 2010, Vassallo had been elected for his fourth term. A member of the Democratic Party, he had also previously been a provincial councilor in Salerno. In addition to his role as mayor, he also held the position of president of the Park Community, a consultative and proactive body of the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park Authority, made up of 80 municipalities of Cilento and Vallo di Diano and eight mountain communities. He had been president of the Alento Monte Stella Mountain Community and president of the "Slow Cities" in the world.

His Pollica had transformed her. In 2009 he promoted the proposal to include the Mediterranean diet among the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity; a proposal that was accepted by UNESCO on November 16, 2010, in Nairobi. Vassallo then also founded the "Study Center for the Mediterranean Diet". Above all, he was known for his past as a fisherman and for his love of the sea and the land, which had always guided him in his work as an administrator. An environmentalist, beloved by his fellow citizens, he is also remembered for his singular ordinances. In January 2010 he signed one that provided for a fine of up to a thousand euros for anyone caught throwing ash and cigarette butts on the ground.

(Unioneonline/D)

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