“I have broad shoulders”, being a mayor you receive “fair, not fair attacks, which come from many quarters, in that last period especially from parliamentarians of a national character from the centre-right, but honestly these two people are not there they enter nothing and I don’t see why they have to find themselves in a photo in national newspapers and in all the programs today, just because they asked the mayor to take a photograph in front of their shop, as happens to me, every day, with dozens and dozens of people “. The mayor of Bari, Antonio Decaro, said this during a live broadcast on social media where he explained that this morning he found a photograph of himself with two women, relatives of the boss Antonio Capriati, published in some national newspapers (Il Giornale and The Truth, ed.) “combined with the term ‘mafia’ and when I saw this photograph, I asked myself who the two women portrayed were”.
After a few calls to the former commander of the Carabinieri station in the old city of Bari and then to the former director of the State Police, Decaro called the parish priest of the Cathedral, Don Franco Lanzolla, and “we all understood together that they are two related people of the boss Capriati, but they have nothing to do with the rest of the family”: “Don Franco told me – explained Decaro – that the lady married a man with whom she managed a shop, that then the shop located on behind this photograph, the daughter has married a writer and she and her husband attend Don Franco’s parish, they are part of the family community”. And he concludes: “I was certainly sorry to end up in a photograph where I am compared to the mafia, but I also imagine the difficulty of these people who have nothing to do with it.”
“This morning we gave our full availability to the Commission for the inspection, which came to present itself today – Decaro then stated, speaking of the arrival of the Anti-Mafia Access Commission to the Municipality -. We gave them the documentation, everything that it will be useful, also because we have issued a directive to all the division managers to make themselves available to the commission. The doors of the Municipality are wide open. We have always tried to work in compliance with the rules and legality”.
In the live social broadcast, Decaro then returned to explain the controversial episode told by the president of the Puglia Region, Michele Emiliano, from the stage of the “Hands off Bari” event. Emiliano remembered having accompanied the current mayor to the house of the sister of the boss Antonio Capriati. A story denied by the mayor who explained how 20 years ago he was a young engineer, called by Emiliano, then mayor of Bari, to deal with mobility. “One of the first topics I addressed was mobility in the old city,” Decaro said via Facebook. “It was a period in which there was wild parking, illegality, not only in the car park, but old Bari, twenty years ago it was ‘Scippolandia’, there was an anti-mafia magistrate (Mayor Emiliano, ed.) and a young councilor, gripped by the fury of technicality, who wanted to close the city, but it wasn’t easy. Everyone got angry: the residents, the municipality employees, the shops in the city of the Murat center that parked there. Some of them also got angry. people linked to criminal clans, because I don’t think it was easy for them not to enter by car or to have cameras appear that recovered the license plates of those who entered”.
Decaro said that his activity lasted six months on those streets and that, in the first days, he happened to “meet people who mistreated me. There were some quite old boys and one evening”, one of these allegedly approached “the jacket, I don’t know what he had in his pocket. I told Emiliano the next day and a few days later, while we were going to the cathedral, alone, we met this group of people and he in his own way, as an anti-mafia magistrate, tells those people, ‘Decaro, you have to leave him alone, he’s a young engineer, he’s working for me, he’s useful to the neighborhood, he’s especially useful to the children, do you see the children who are on the street, with the cars passing in front of the cathedral square? ‘”. Hence the conclusion: “This was it. I don’t know what Emiliano remembers, I have never met anyone’s sister to talk about this thing. I met many people in the old city to try to find a solution that would bring together the needs of the residents, traders, we had many meetings.”