Where anti-mafia legislation exists (such as Italy’s 416bis17 provision in that country’s criminal code and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act18 in the USA), a mafia-type organisation is defined as an organisation whose members use the power of intimidation deriving from the bonds of membership, the state of subjugation and conspiracy of silence that it engenders to commit an offence, to acquire direct or indirect control of economic activities, licenses, authorisations, public procurement contracts and services or to obtain unjust profits or advantages for themselves or others, or to prevent or obstruct the free exercise of vote, or to procure votes for themselves or others at elections.
Membership of such an organisation is in and of itself a punishable offence even if a Mafioso cannot be directly linked to the execution of any crime committed by Mafiosi on the organisation’s behalf. Penalties are aggravated if the members of the organisation are found to have access to weapons or explosives for the purposes of furthering the aims of the organisation.
The absence of the legal option to pursue component members of an organised criminal organisation whose membership and association can be proven, even if their direct involvement in the commissioning or execution of a specific crime perpetrated on behalf of that organisation cannot be proven, risks allowing people who should rightly be held responsible for what happened to Daphne Caruana Galizia to get away without giving account to their action.
There is no doubt that murder – the termination of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s life – is the gravest crime that requires the gravest consequence. But this murder cannot be separated from the corrupt public procurement, the money laundering, the bribery and the voting manipulation that Daphne was killed for exposing. Daphne was killed to allow the other activities of this organisation to continue unhindered. It is not just people who are proven to have been directly involved in Daphne’s murder who should suffer consequences, but the punishment should extend to all those whose illicit profits and electoral clout were protected as a result of her elimination.
In seeking to prosecute this organised criminal conspiracy piecemeal, by picking on narrow elements and manifestations of the action of the mafia, without regard to the existence of the mafia in and of itself, allows the conspiracy to survive relatively unscathed.
For as long as our laws deny the existence of the mafia and fail to recognise that its mere existence is a threat to the viability of the State itself, we will have no way of addressing the violent scam to which the country is subjugated.
This is not about someone killing a journalist because she was about to expose their secrets. Or rather it is not just about that. This is about an organisation that systematically and secretly manipulates the relationship between private interests and the public sector to profit from those interests.