ROME – The Casamonica crime family, a mafia-style organized crime syndicate that operates in and around Rome, has been blamed for a black coffin that was left in front of an anti-mafia activist’s home last Sunday, police said.
The activist, Tiziana Ronzio, is president of the Toripiubella anti-mafia group, named after the Tor Bella Monaca neighborhood where the Casamonica’s main family villas were based until they were destroyed by the city in 2018 and 2019.
Police found garish decorations, including life-sized porcelain tigers used to hide cash, diamond encrusted swimming pools lined with golden horses and gilded mirrored ceilings in many of the rooms during the demolition. They also found several tons of drugs, police said, including heroin and cocaine. In 2022, two members of the family were convicted of attempting to traffic seven tons of cocaine from Colombia.
The coffin was found last Sunday outside Ronzio’s Rome residence in the Tor Bella Monaca district.
Ronzio said Sunday afternoon that she had seen the coffin and that people had sent her photos of it, but that she did not immediately realize that it was meant as a threat to her until her security detail informed her.
While she called the threat “stupid” and said it would not stop her, she also said that it “destabilized” her group, which regularly reports members of the group for crimes against local residents and often testifies in court on behalf of them.
“I’m not afraid, I’m moving forward,” Ronzio told local media. “These are stupid gestures which make us even more angry and want to fight.”
Meanwhile, Rome police told CNN that the coffin is being examined for fingerprints. Toripiubella, Ronzio’s group, told CNN that they would not be making a public statement as the investigation is ongoing.
Ronzio has denounced several clan members in the past.
“There have been many things that one always lets slide,” she told Italy’s Sky24 news last Sunday evening, noting that she has experienced previous acts of intimidation, including written threats and feces left by her door by her own neighbors.
“I try to live it with detachment but it’s not easy – I live these things as if they didn’t concern me, to move forward,” she said, adding: “It’s difficult to live in the same place as the people you report to police,” she said.
While Ronzio’s home and office have been broken into multiple times, she told La Repubblica newspaper that “it’s not every day that you find a coffin under your house.”
“It can happen that an uncivilized person leaves a piece of furniture, a sofa, but not a coffin,” she said in the article, which was published last Monday. Several political groups have condemned the act of intimidation. (CNN)…[+]
