Reporters in Italy Press On, Protected by Police Escorts
ROME — For much of the past four years, Paolo Borrometi, a reporter who covers the mafia, starts each morning with an espresso, a cigarette — and his police escort.
Angering the mafia as a journalist in Italy makes for a lonely life. And yet Mr. Borrometi, 35, is in good company. Almost 200 reporters in Italy live under police protection, making it unique among Western countries, advocacy groups say.
“None of us wants to be a hero or a model,” Mr. Borrometi told an assembly of high school students on a recent morning in Rome, where he now lives. “We just want to do our job and our duty, to tell stories.”
Yet murders connected to organized crime are rising in Italy, the authorities say, and international observers consider criminal networks the principal threat to journalists in Europe.
“Don’t stop writing, Paolo,” read an email Mr. Borrometi received two days after he was assaulted in 2014 outside his family’s country home in Sicily by two men wearing ski masks. “Our countries need free and investigative journalism. You have my respect.”
The note came from Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist who was herself killed in a car-bomb attack last year, after exposing her island nation’s links to offshore tax havens and reporting on local politicians’ crimes for decades. When she died at 53, she had 47 lawsuits pending against her, including one from the country’s economy minister.
In addition to Ms. Caruana Galizia, who was killed in October, a 27-yearold reporter, Jan Kuciak, was killed along with his fiancée in Slovakia in February. He had also been investigating corruption with suspected ties to Italian mobsters.
Among those under 24-hourpolice protection is Lirio Abbate, a mafia expert with the magazine L’Espresso, who has been under protection for 11 years, since the police thwarted a bomb attack in front of his house in Palermo. Federica Angeli, a reporter with La Repubblica, and her family have been under police escort for five years. And Roberto Saviano, the author of “Gomorrah,” a best-selling book, movie and TV series about the Neapolitan crime syndicate, has been under escort since 2006.
For Mr. Borrometi, it took just a year of reporting on the secret businesses and clandestine political ties of the mafia in southeastern Sicily for his independent news website, La Spia ( The Spy), before criminals menaced him. In five years, he got hundreds of death threats from local mobsters.
Last month, the mobsters decided to scale up their threats. The police say they intercepted a Sicilian mobster while he was discussing a plot with his sons to kill Mr. Borrometi with a car bomb.
“We need a ‘ firework’ like those in the 1990s, when one couldn’t even walk on the streets,” said the man, who was caught on a police wiretap. “A death every once in a while is useful, so that all the whippersnappers calm down a little.”
Mr. Borrometi is thankful, of course, that the police intervened before the plot against him could be put into action.
“I owe my life to my state, to those policemen and magistrates,” Mr. Borrometi said.
And he owes his life to the men who protect him constantly, though once the armored door closes on his apartment in Rome’s city center, he is alone.
“I am without my family and my loved ones,” he said smiling, surrounded by framed anti-mafia recognitions. “But I have my wonderful job.”