Mafia "poet" attacked for being gay (News Feature)

By Peter Mayer Aug 4, 2008, 12:06 GMT

Rome (dpa) - The Sicilian Mafia's 'honour code' doesn't bar members from being poets, but a jailed suspect's penchant for writing verse led his fellow mobsters to assume he was gay, so as punishment, they gang-raped him.

The alleged assault on the 20-year-old-man, a convicted foot- soldier for a Catania-based crime-family, has been brought to light by his lawyer, Antonio Fiumefreddo.

'Writing poetry is considered stuff for an 'iarruso,'' said the lawyer, referring to a Sicilian slang word meaning buttocks, but also used as a derogatory term for homosexual men.

Speaking on an internet current affairs programme, Klauscondicio, Fiumefreddo declined to name his client, who he says was sodomized by eight men in 2006 and is still in jail.

'I don't even know if he really is homosexual, but for his sensitive ways, and the fact that he wrote love poems, he is thought of as gay and treated accordingly,' Fiumefreddo said in a video interview posted on Monday.

Italian gay-rights activists have reacted with outrage at the report, condemning authorities for their alleged inaction.

'It is stupefying that news of a prisoner's rape has only surfaced two years after the attack,' the president of the Arcigay association, Aurelio Mancuso, said.

Equal Opportunities Minister Mara Carfagna has asked Italy's Justice Department to provide more details on the matter to establish if the case represents an 'act of violence based on sexual discrimination.'

Fiumefreddo said his client was treated for the injuries he sustained in the rape at the Catania prison Piazza Lanza's medical centre.

Apparently the attack was not reported to authorities and no charges were laid against the alleged assailants.

The lawyer said the decision to 'go public' with news of the alleged rape followed remarks by one of Italy's top anti-mafia prosecutors, Antonio Ingroia, who said the Mafia's gay bosses are afraid of coming out because they would get tossed out of the organization.

Ingroia, citing US mafioso Johnny 'Boy' D'Amato, recently said that being gay was more of a taboo for the Sicilian mafia than for its United States-based equivalent.

Despite rumours he was gay, D'Amato rose to the top of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family before he was murdered in January 1992, Ingroia said.

The character of Vito Spatafore, a gay mafia boss in the hit US television series The Sopranos was reportedly inspired by D'Amato.

Ingroia argues that the Mafia's violent reaction towards affiliates who declare themselves gay or are 'outed' as such, exposes a weak-link in the secretive organization's dealings.

'The mafia's vision of (traditional) masculinity serves to emphasize its power and its claim of being 'set apart' from (modern) society where there is growing openness to the role of women and gay people,' Ingroia said in an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera.

But there are 'growing signs' that the barrier erected by the mafia between itself and modern society is crumbling, Ingroia said.

He cited Mafia turncoat, Enzo Scarantino, a suspect in the 1992 bombing which killed anti-Mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino in Palermo.

Scarantino moved in gay circles, 'yet he was given the delicate task' of preparing the car bomb which killed Borsellino and the five members of his police escort, Ingroia said.

During the trial, lawyers defending the alleged masterminds of the bombing, scorned Scarantino's testimony, saying that as a homosexual, he could could not have been a mafioso.