Mother May Have Been Mafia's Target in Savage Triple Homicide

Two-year-old Domenico was killed in a savage
slaughter by the Mafia in Southern Italy.
A 30-year-old woman, and not her mobbed-up boyfriend, is considered to have been the likely target of a hit in Southern Italy last month that killed her, her boyfriend -- and her 2-year-old son.

As reported in March, a Mafia hit team engaged Cosimo Orlando, 43, in a high-speed chase with before driving his car off the road and slaughtering Cosimo and two of his passengers: girlfriend Carla Maria Fornari and her son Domenico. Two other children in the car survived.

As the UK's Daily Mail reported: "The trio were killed instantly" when the hitmen "opened fire with machine guns riddling [the vehicle] with bullets..."

The hit's location -- at Palagiano, near Taranto, in the southern Italian region of Puglia -- is considered to be a stronghold of the local mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita.

Originally, the hit was seen as revenge for a double homicide committed by Cosimo in 1998.

Yesterday, the Mirror Online reported: "The target may have been the boy’s mother Carla, a mob widow who testified against her husband’s assassins in 2011 while pregnant with Domenico.


"Her father Romualdo Fornari, said: “My daughter was a brave woman. She gave evidence in court confirming her husband had an appointment with his killers that night. Everyone in the village knew it, but only she had the courage to say it, even as the killers shot her looks that promised much more than mere threats.”

Domenico is only one of around 80 children killed in Mafia hits in violent wars for mob supremacy in crime-ridden cities like Naples.

In January, 3-year-old Nicola Campolongo, known as Coco, was shot in the head at point-blank range. His charred remains were found in a burnt-out car on a farm alongside the corpses of his grandfather, Salvatore Lannicelli, and a woman. This hit was believed to have been the work of Calaberia's notorious Ndrangheta.

A 50 cent coin was purposefully left on the vehicle's roof and is said to be a Mafia message that the slaughter was over a debt.

Sacra Corona Unita, (SCU) or United Sacred Crown, is a Mafia-type criminal organization based in Puglia, Southern Italy, said to be especially active in the areas of Brindisi, Lecce and Taranto. It was founded in the late 1970s as the Nuova Grande Camorra Pugliese, having splintered off from the Camorra by Raffaele Cutolo, who wanted to expand his operations into Puglia.

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