Sordid case of sexual abuse in Italy has now been linked to Mafia

It started out as a widely reported, disturbing case of violent sexual abuse, but it may prove to have links to organised crime and the pandemic.

When Milanese businessman Antonio Di Fazio was arrested last Friday, charged with the violent sexual abuse of a 21-year-old female student from Milan’s prestigious Bocconi university, investigators soon began to believe there was a lot more sinister elements to the case.

On March 28 this year, the unnamed student, ‘X’, accompanied by her boyfriend, filed a complaint to Milan police accusing Di Fazio of violent sexual abuse and entrapment.

She recounted how she had met 50-year-old Di Fazio two days before when she had gone for what she thought was a “work experience” interview at Global Farma, a Milan based pharmaceutical supplies company of which he is the major shareholder.

The interview had been arranged for around 6pm at the company’s offices in Via Mario Pagano in central Milan.

At that hour, the offices were empty so Di Fazio proposed they adjourn to his private apartment just around the corner in Via Tamburini.

The girl was uneasy about this change, but Di Fazio told her he was hosting an informal meeting with colleagues from the pharmaceutical industry at his home.

Driven to his spacious apartment by his driver, she soon discovered there was no such meeting.

Di Fazio then offered her coffee and biscuits. Almost immediately, she began to feel strange, weak and things became blurred.

Thinking she was suffering from low blood pressure, she asked Di Fazio for something to drink. This time, her host offered her an orange juice.

As hospital tests revealed the next day, both the coffee and the orange juice had been laced with an anti-anxiety tranquilliser, of the benzodiazepine variety.

Tests on a urine sample at Milan’s Policlinico hospital showed the girl had more than four times the recommended dosage of the tranquilliser in her system.

Di Fazio is alleged to have undressed the girl, photographed her half-naked and then abused her. Sometime after midnight, his driver then left the still drowsy student home.

The next day she woke up in the early afternoon, still feeling dazed and still wearing her clothes from the night before.

Both the information about the student’s movements, substantiated by her smartwatch, and the hospital analysis seemed to confirm her story.

When police subsequently raided Di Fazio’s apartment, they not only found two small bottles of the benzodiazepine tranquilliser but also 54 photos of naked women, including student ‘X’, saved on two smartphones.

All the photos appear to have been taken in his apartment, with the same floor tiles, bed cover and sofa providing the background, clearly suggesting Di Fazio is a serial abuser.

When police then appealed to women who might have “encountered” Di Fazio to come forward, at least six responded.

All told similar stories: the false work interview, the coffee in the apartment, the laced drinks.

However, for at least one young woman it was even worse as Di Fazio imprisoned her for almost a month, during which she was continually drugged.

Police now suspect Di Fazio’s entrapment abuse of women might have gone on for over a decade and probably focussed exclusively on women living alone — such as the student, who was “re-accompanied” to her flat where there was no one to help her.

Inevitably, most of these women did not report their ordeals to police at the time of the abuse for the obvious and familiar reasons of a misplaced sense of guilt, not to mention privacy.

Dr Alessandra Kustermann, head of the Gynaecological and Obstetric Emergency Services at Milan’s Policlinico told Corriere della Sera she sees an average of 70 such laced-drink rape cases every year at the Policlinico alone.

Di Fazio then subjected his victims to death threats.

For example, when the girl’s boyfriend rang Di Fazio to confront him after the abuse, he denied ever having met with the girl.

Days later, the boyfriend received a call from one of Di Fazio’s mobile phones in which a man with a Calabrian accent threatened to kill him if he did not stop bothering Di Fazio.

This whole case, however, raises a number of worrying questions.

Not for nothing, Banca d’Italia is now looking at possibly suspicious bank transactions involving Global Farma.

Founded last April by Di Fazio right at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, the company appears to have done very well, very quickly, declaring a €6.4m turnover by last December.

Media reports also point out that last November, Global Farma concluded a deal with the central supplies office of the region of Lombardy for the provision of 51 million rubber gloves, for Covid protective purposes.

Who, then, is Di Fazio?

In recent years he has hardly kept a low profile, regularly being portrayed in the ‘social gossip’ media as a successful entrepreneur, the guy who loved to be photographed alongside his two Maserati cars. 

In one of those cars, police found a rucksack which reportedly contained a replica Glock pistol, a false Ministry of the Interior ID and an emergency, blue rooftop car light of the sort used by police. Investigators also discovered Di Fazio would sometimes introduce himself as the ill-defined “High Commissioner for the Covid Emergency”.

 

Furthermore, investigative work done by Rome daily Il Fatto Quotidiano suggests members of Calabria’s most powerful crime family, the Mancuso family, have been regular visitors to Di Fazio’s Via Pagano headquarters during the last year.

While Di Fazio likes to turn up for work in chauffeur-driven limousines, the men from the ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian Mafia) prefer the metropolitana (subway), reports Il Fatto.

For months now, observers such as the Mafia expert and writer Roberto Saviano have warned of the risk of ‘Ndrangheta infiltration into apparently legitimate, Covid-19 linked companies.

This story not only runs and runs, it gets worse and worse.