The holy lifer – Il Sole 24 ORE

Listen to the audio version of the article

After the killing of his father by a rival mafia clan, Rocco Russo, on the emotional wave of revenge, decides to join the mafia family of Giuseppe Giacomo Gambardino, boss of the ferocious clan of San Lorenzo, of which he soon became right hand leaving behind him a trail of blood and violence that will end with his capture and sentence to life imprisonment.

Life imprisonment

It is Giuseppe Bommarito, in the book “The legend of the life sentenced saint”, who tells us the story of the man and the mafioso who, after his arrest for heinous crimes, decides not to collaborate with justice, thus condemning himself to the “never end of sentence”, life imprisonment.

The author explores the very topical theme of life imprisonment, a penalty he defines as “endless and hopeless, a slow-release death penalty”, intended for all those convicted who, for various reasons, do not want to collaborate with justice. The writer questions how a sentence, destined to end only with the prisoner’s death, can be re-educational, as enshrined in the constitution.

In the second part of the book, much more intimate, of an epistolary type, the chronicler recounts Rocco Russo’s prison life in an overwhelming way, his son’s total contempt for him who defines him as “the holy lifer”, hence the title of the book, and the distance from his wife who will never embrace again.

If for the author life imprisonment does not seem to have the aim of inflicting an unjust penalty or to make the prisoners suffer, but exclusively to not allow the mafia to command from prison. It is therefore not a matter of gratuitous torture, but it is clear how, for those prisoners, the dimension of time becomes meaningless. Hence the question of how a mafioso – who has decided not to collaborate with the state, who has not never distanced himself from the criminal organization, which has thus allowed other criminals to remain free, to commit other terrible crimes and to keep alive that river of mud called our thing – may have matured a real change.