Mafiosi in Asinara, the former director Massidda: "The island, a hard and closed prison"

Dressed in elegant suits, white shirts, sunglasses and fedoras, and someone with a cardboard suitcase, they disembarked at Asinara from the Cala Reale pier, sent on compulsory stay as a precautionary measure, after the inhabitants of Filicudi, the island Sicilian, refused to host them. That protest changed the fate of Asinara, the island where the first 15 alleged mafiosi were welcomed on 25 June 1971 , with known names: Calogero Sacco, Antonino Buccellato, Tommaso Scaduto, Gaetano Accardi, Nino Bonventre, Diego Gioia, Gaetano Badalamenti , Giuseppe Chiaracane, Nicola Cancelliere, Calogero Sinatra, Vincenzo Ragona, Giacomo Coppola, Mario Brusca, Luigi Cali and Rosario Terrasi.

The theme was the subject of the conference "Asinara 1971, the first alleged mafiosi arrive" , organized by the Asinara National Park Authority, curated by the director Vittorio Gazale, in the presence of the professor Carlo Marini, of the University of Palermo and of the journalist Giuseppe La Greca, journalist and historian. The reconstruction of their arrival and the events that followed is by Paola Fontecchio, responsible for the exclusive guides of Asinara who presented her research based on the historical archives of local and national newspapers. He traced a historical period between 25 June 1971 and mid-October 1976. «The first bigwigs reached the island after a crossing of more than 20 hours with the military frigate Aldebaran. It was General Dalla Chiesa - explains Fontecchio - who decided to lock up the alleged mafiosi on the islands, considered a perfect place to avoid connections with the outside world, and no longer on the outskirts of the cities where contacts with families and friendships were easy" .

The mafiosi were not happy with the decision to arrive in Porto Torres and not even the municipal council of the time welcomed the decision of the Italian Government, and in an emergency meeting protested against that provision deemed harmful to the tourist interests of the city. It was the mayor Sabino who had started the process of release from the penal colony who sent the telegrams to the regional and national administrations. But the state won. After the first 15 mafiosi, a few days later, on July 11, 1971, another small group of mafia bosses arrived, and later also those linked to Calabrian families. The management building, the canteen of the health guard and the pagodas were housed in the rooms of the health station, places defined by the newspapers as a "villa for nabobs". Instead, the alleged mafiosi protested the "precarious" conditions in which they were detained. Thirty-six of them went on hunger strike, a protest "over inhumane treatment" because they were prevented from cooking in their lodgings for security reasons. In the following month of September, another 18 members of the mafia clans arrived on the island, including Totò Riina and Giuseppe Brusca .

They marked the turning point of the agricultural penal colony of Asinara which became, in the second half of the seventies, a maximum security prison . Franco Massidda , head of the Asinara penal colony from 1980 until 1986, was among the people who witnessed the arrival of the mafiosi on the island on 25 June 1971. The place where he was born and raised. On the Cala Reale pier, the former director saw them arrive aboard a patrol boat. Also on the quay were the local inhabitants, about ten families, prison officers and the carabinieri. «The advent of terrorism determined the transformation of the penal colony of Asinara into a hard prison, a pole of maximum deterrence that lent itself well to control», explains Massidda «an example was Fornelli, the first prison structure built by prisoners, and reopened by me to host 80 inmates of the Sardinian Company with severe penalties. But on mafia prisoners we realized that the police had great difficulty in guaranteeing them the minimum services. It was then that the Massidda family, at the request of the prefect, opened a shop to supply cigarettes, food, medicines, a support activity for the military forces to offer service to the alleged mafiosi».