“For us, the mafia is obvious. Everyone suffers from it, and it has to stop, because the phenomenon is getting worse”, Jean Toussaint Plasenzotti no longer hesitates to say it loud and clear since his nephew Massimu Susini, a 36-year-old nationalist activist, was savagely murdered with a gun on an idyllic beach in Cargèse (Corse-du-Sud), on September 12 2019, by going to open his straw hut.
“Massimo, he was not a thug, he was someone who openly opposed land speculation, he was an environmental activist, he opposed drug trafficking in his village, racketeering, recount Jean Toussaint Plasenzotti. By killing him, we made an example on two counts. We get rid of someone brave and we send a message to those who would raise their voices against the criminals”.
Today founder of the “Massimu Susini” collective named after the man he considered his son, Jean Toussaint Plasenzotti does not hide his anger at the silence of the State and his inaction in the face of the scourge. The Corsican language teacher also requested an interview with the Minister of the Interior passing through Corsica, Friday 22 and Saturday 23 July. But if Gérald Darmanin must notably meet Friday at the end of the morning in Bastia, the State services against organized crime, the request for Jean Toussaint Plasenzotti is remained a dead letter. “The state refuses to admit that there is a mafia. It’s like the Chernobyl cloud that stopped at the borders”, abounds Irène Quilichini, also a member of the collective: “the Mafia is rampant throughout Europe but in France, no”.
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A risky position that earned them, not threats, but rather “advice from friends”, as they say in Corsica. Marie France Giovanangelli has also heard these friendly advice since she chose to join, in Bastia, the collective “A Maffia No!”, founded with the nationalist activist of the first hour, Léo Battesti. For this director of the Leroy Merlin brand in Corsica, it is a question of changing the legislation: “From the start, it seemed to us that without the establishment of a crime of mafia association in the penal code, the fight was going to be difficult”.
Collective “A Maffia No!” asks for the revision of the status of repentant, which for the moment cannot be granted to a person suspected or convicted of a crime of blood. “It’s reducing the possibility of getting to the heart of the machine”, continues Marie France Giovanangelli, who went to Italy for study trips on the mafia. To move forward, it would be necessary, according to her, the establishment of a special court, as is done for terrorist trials, composed of specialized magistrates, when it comes to mafia offenses and not jurors from civil society. “There are too many pressures, there are far too many acquittals”, she believes. On charges of exceptional justice, it decides: “What is more liberticidal than the law of the mafia and omerta?”
In 2019, in a confidential report, magistrates from the Marseille JIRS, the interregional jurisdiction specializing in organized crime, called for the creation of an anti-Mafia unit with special powers, “faced with the exceptional nature of Corsican banditry”, revealed the newspaper Le Monde. But for the Ministry of Justice as for the Attorney General of Bastia, Jean-Jacques Fagni, the current organization works well: “We have the tools, the testimony under X we have it, the possibility of protecting witnesses and pentiti we have it in French legislation, it remains to convince the people in possession of this information to collaborate with justice”.
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The magistrate refuses to speak “of mafia influence which would plague Corsica”. SAccording to him, the collectives magnify the line: “We have on Corsican territory, 25 criminal clans which evolve from North to South and in the micro-regions, but we are not in a mafia phenomenon as it exists in Italy or in certain Eastern countries and which would incline us towards legislation that largely derogates from ordinary law”.
Even if the State remains deaf to the demands of the collectives, certain lines are moving. Gilles Simeoni, the president of the Corsican executive recently announced the holding of an extraordinary session in October of the Assembly of Corsica dedicated to the mafia, promised for more than three years.