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Thursday 18 December 2008

Salvatore Aracri is a hot name all over Italy in fact, with a strong connection to David "Dudi" Appel, the Israeli businessman


13:16 |

Salvatore Aracri is a hot name all over Italy in fact, with a strong connection to David "Dudi" Appel, the Israeli businessman who wanted to build Europaradiso, a huge tourist city in Crotone that was to be the largest tourism project in the world. About two weeks ago the Italian police raided Aracri's home and those of other Italians, including public officials, who were connected in some way to the project. It was part of a comprehensive campaign against Mafia organizations in the Crotone region. Police arrested 24 people on suspicion of belonging to the local Mafia and of engaging in activities such as blackmail, drug dealing and planning the murder of a prosecutor who dealt with the Mafia. Europaradiso appears prominently in the arrest and search warrants issued by the district department for Mafia affairs in the prosecutor's office in Catanzaro, the capital of Calabria. According to documents obtained by Haaretz and published here for the first time, the 'Ndrangheta viewed the project as "a tremendous source of profits, both direct and indirect."
Aracri is mentioned often in the documents as "Appel's representative in Crotone" on the one hand, and as a person working in coordination with the Mafia to promote Europaradiso, on the other. Appel himself is mentioned more than 10 times in the document as the "initiator of the plan," as one of the main shareholders in Madpit, the company that managed the project, and as the person who allegedly paid the former director general of the Crotone municipality 10,000 euros for "financial services." A document submitted to an Italian court enumerating the alleged crimes in connection to the affair contains passages from the transcriptions of wiretapped conversations between Aracri and Rami Avivi, one of the members of Appel's Israeli team on the project. In one, Aracri asks Avivi to pay money to municipal employees - the city engineer and the director-general - for their contribution to Europaradiso. The prosecutors, from the Catanzaro Province Anti-Mafia Department, suspect that the payments eventually transferred by Aracri to the two men were a bribe.
Appel has already said, in one of the interviews he gave to the local press, that it was Aracri who brought him to Crotone. Avivi, who went to Italy 48 times for Appel and is now a businessman, presents it in the same way. In an interview Avivi emphasizes that he served only as Appel's interpreter in the project. "Aracri was actually the man who brought Dudi Appel to Italy. Aracri participated in all the meetings held by Appel and his people with representatives of the administration and the region regarding the project." (In his response to this article, Appel describes Aracri as "an intermediary who sold [him] the site for the purpose of building the project" and nothing more.) An Italian member of Parliament from Crotone told the prosecutors, Salvatore Dolce and Pierpaolo Bruni, that Aracri once said to her, "Mr. Appel and I are the same person." According to reports in the local press, Aracri attended several meetings of Appel and his team with senior government officials in Crotone. He also reportedly took part in a meeting between the heads of the Calabria district and a number of Israelis including Appel, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, former Military Intelligence head Amos Malka and others. Burg was the chairman of the project directorate at the time, and Malka was introduced as his security adviser. The spokesman for the president of the Calabria district said at the time that the presence of senior Israeli figures such as Burg and Malka impressed the Italians. Burg and Malka, it should be mentioned, abandoned Europaradiso after the project began to run into difficulties. Aracri's role in Europaradiso is described as follows in the documents presented by the prosecution in connection to the current investigation: "Salvatore Aracri was investigated for the crime of handling and bringing to fruition the Europaradiso project in coordination with organized crime, and primarily in coordination with the gang that he now heads, and with the help of his brother Francesco Aracri, a man who is strongly planted in the crime circles related to the drug trade.... Aracri oversaw the acquisition of the plot on which this residential-tourism complex was supposed to be built, intervened in the political and administrative activity of the Crotone municipality and forced several city council members, and above all the chairman, to approve resolutions in support of Europaradiso; Aracri made criminal deals - among other ways by distributing money to government officials with the ability to exert a positive influence on the implementation of the project - at various levels, the municipality, the government and the European Union... In this connection Aracri attempted, directly or indirectly, to threaten Marilina Intrieri, an MP who publicly criticized the interest shown by the Mafia in the Europaradiso project; to implement the project, people close to organized crime ran as candidates in the local elections. As a result of this criticism the MP received threatening letters accompanied by bullet casings."


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