Italian Prisons Named in Honor of Fallen Officers Targeted by Organized Crime

The Benevento prison has been named in memory of the penitentiary police officer Michele Gaglione, who was serving at the Naples Secondigliano Penitentiary Center, and became a victim of an attack on August 7, 1992, while returning home in his car. The prison in Vallo della Lucania (Salerno) will bear the name of the custodial officer Alfredo Paragano, killed by the Camorra on February 12, 1982. This was announced by the National Penitentiary Police Association. "The murder of Michele Gaglione was an act of organized crime to try to soften the treatment towards detainees under the 41 bis regime," recalls Donato Capece, national president of the ANPPE. "Gaglione, a twenty-seven-year-old from Avella, along with a colleague also a Penitentiary Police Officer, was returning by car when they were victims of an ambush in Secondigliano. That murder, it was later revealed by informants, was committed in an attempt to soften the conduct of the penitentiary officers towards the Camorra." Paragano was serving at Poggioreale G. Salvia and on February 12, 1982, off-duty, near his home in Arzano "was mortally wounded by gunshots fired by unknown individuals from a car. Twenty-eight years after his death, the Camorra matrix of the crime will be confirmed. Alfredo died a few steps from his family, on the sidewalk of the small parish of the neighborhood, under a wrought iron cross. That morning he was unarmed, because being on leave he had left his service pistol in the prison armory." Capece applauds the decrees, signed by the head of the penitentiary administration Giovanni Russo: "Remembering is important and, unfortunately, in our country there is still a lack of a culture of memory," he concludes.