Reporters risk it all to cover the Mafia
ROME — For many of his days over the past four years, Paolo Borrometi has lived in isolation, though he is barely ever alone. He has not walked through a park or by the beach in his native Sicily for years. He cannot go to a restaurant freely, or to a concert or the movies. He can’t drive a car alone, go shopping alone, or go out for dinner by himself.
Before heading to work as a reporter covering the Mafia, he 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 Borrometi, 35, is in good company. Almost 200 reporters in Italy live under police protection, making it unique among industrialized Western countries, advocacy groups say.
“None of us wants to be a hero or a model,” 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, authorities say, and international observers consider criminal networks the principal threat to journalists in Europe.
“Don’t stop writing, Paolo,” read an email Borrometi received two days after he was assaulted in 2014 outside his family’s country home in Sicily by two men wearing balaclavas. “Our countries need free
and investigative journalism. You have my respect.”
The note came from Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist who was 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 Caruana Galizia, who was killed in October, a 27-year-old 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.
“There have already been two journalists killed by the Mafia inside the European Union, both investigating Mafia stories and stories that domestic governments were not looking into,” said Pauline Adès-Mével, who is responsible for the European desk at Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for press freedom.
“Italy is historically the country that has felt the Mafia the most, and has a dozen of journalists under 24-hour police protection,” Adès-Mével said. “That doesn’t happen in other countries.”
For 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.