Favors to inmates in exchange for crates of fish, meat and cheese: 2 prison officers arrested

They favored the inmates in exchange for 50 euro crates of fish, bags of meat and cheese, an iPhone and a few hundred euro in cash.

For this reason, two prison policemen from the Trani prison were arrested: in handcuffs the deputy superintendent Vincenzo Cellamare, 56, a consu-in-law of the mafia clan leader of Bari Giuseppe Misceo and the inspector Antonio Cardinale, 57, under house arrest.

The first would have accompanied the wife of an inmate in a private car to interviews in prison, when during the lockdown secret news was prohibited, secret news was revealed and allowed with the complicity of the second also called WhatsApp group of inmates with the outside.

In the order, the investigating judge defines them as "public officials on the payroll" of the detainees. In the investigation, which has a total of 29 suspects, 5 other prison policemen are involved, six inmates, including Christian Lovreglio, 30 years old from Bari, nephew of Japigia's boss Savinuccio Parisi, and their families.

For the boss's nephew, Cellamare "would have thrown himself into the fire" writes the investigating judge, suggesting defensive strategies to get out of prison. The suspects respond, for various reasons, for corruption, extortion, misdirection, embezzlement and abuse of office.

The investigations, which began with the report in February 2020 of a police colleague who, "to avoid censorship", went directly to the Trani Public Prosecutor's Office, documented - mainly through audio-video environmental wiretapping in the interview room of the prison - 17 episodes of alleged corruption from May to October 2020. "In this prison, inmates are free to do what they want, they go around undisturbed on all sides and enjoy privileges, they pay to make more phone calls than those already authorized, even making 15 video calls a week" he reported to the investigators a "confidential source" inside the Tranese penitentiary.

An "alarming picture of a criminal system based on stable illicit relations between members of the prison police force and prisoners" writes the judge in the order. It was not a question of "single and sporadic episodes", but of "a well-established modus operandi", based on "friendly relations with prejudiced subjects in a relational framework completely devoid of the necessary detachment imposed by the role covered". The two prison officers would thus "sell off the public service for little money".

(Unioneonline / D)