If we were to apply Italian criminal law to the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the assassination would be branded a terrorist act “di stampo mafioso”. The killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia was not only intended to terminate her life. It was also intended to replace her work and her activism with the silence that would allow the people who decided on her killing to continue to thrive unimpeded. They wanted to inflict fear on sources, journalists, activists, opposition politicians and anyone who might have continued the work that she was doing.
We use the term ‘mafia’ advisedly. Even in countries with decades of experience of fighting the mafia by whichever name it would be calling itself in their context, the authorities are slow to recognise the threat of organised crime.
The intuitive tendency of public authorities is to underestimate the significance of crime syndicates. It is easier to see episodes of crime as isolated incidents rather than as manifestations of an invisible but giant entity that uses crime to pursue complex interests.
The mafia is presumed not to exist, to be a myth fabricated by the delusional self-importance of criminals or by journalists with a taste for the dramatic. Where its existence is reluctantly acknowledged, the mafia is either presumed to be foreign and alien (‘it only happens in Sicily’), or romantic and admirable (mostly due to the glorification of the noble criminal in cinema), or petty and ordinarily violent (and therefore unrelated to sophisticated racketeering involving complex public procurement and the licensing of high-yield economic activities).
We argue that the evidence before this Inquiry, the evidence heard in ongoing criminal proceedings, and the investigations of local and international journalists, demonstrated
convincingly that there exists in Malta a crime syndicate that brings together people in business, in politics and in crime that broker, arrange, transact and agree public and private contracts using bribery or coercion.
The mafia thrives when its existence is disputed or ignored and when authorities do not feel the need to develop the legislative and enforcement framework to fight an enemy they do not accept exists.
Misguided denial of the existence of the mafia is by no means a uniquely Maltese problem. European police forces outside Italy, including ours, struggle with the concept when they are confronted by Italian colleagues chasing Mafiosi throughout the continent.
However, the extensive mafia infiltration into our country because of the necessarily vulnerable nature of our porous economic activities such as financial services and online gambling, and the association of international mafia actors with local partners and accomplices, has made Malta a dangerous place for people resisting organised crime.
The need to address this shortfall is, in our view, desperately urgent.