On Wednesday, October 11, Domenico Lucano, aka "Mimmo," celebrated the ruling of the Reggio Calabria Court of Appeal with a cry of victory and hugs with his loved ones. The judges informed the defendant that he would "only" receive an 18-month suspended prison sentence, despite the prosecution's demands. The former mayor (2004-2018) of Riace, a small town of barely 2,000 people perched on the Calabrian hills, Lucano received a heavy first sentence in 2021: more than 13 years in prison for "criminal conspiracy to facilitate illegal immigration," "fraudulent practices" and "misappropriation of public property." As they left the court of appeals following Wednesday's verdict, his two lawyers jointly stated that "justice has been done to a man who has always worked in the sole interest of the common good and the defense of the weakest."
Lucano's trial was also that of the integration of migrants in Italy. "It was a political trial. The charges against him were excessive," said Gianfranco Schiavone, president of the Italian Consortium of Solidarity (ICS), a platform providing legal aid to asylum seekers. "This incident will be remembered as a dark chapter in Italian justice, one in which an attempt was made to destroy a man and a model of being welcoming."
In 1998, Mimmo Lucano began helping migrants by welcoming Kurds stranded on a nearby beach and never stopped. Over the next 20 years, he turned Riace into a municipality known the world over for its unconditional hospitality. Dozens of exiles from Somalia, Tunisia and Afghanistan found refuge in the town. A social cooperative was set up, as were a number of stores. The village school reopened, bringing together Calabrian children and migrants.
Seen as a path of appropriate integration through work that has also helped slow the depopulation of Calabria, the "Riace model" has been praised in many countries. In 2016, the US magazine Fortune ranked the former mayor 40th among the most influential people on the planet. The same year, Pope Francis sent him a letter expressing his support for his initiatives on behalf of migrants.
Lucano was re-elected twice before his arrest in 2018 when he was accused of fraudulently entrusting the management of public waste to migrant cooperatives. The court in Locri (Calabria) also accused him of "instrumentalizing the public reception system for the purposes of public image." At the time, far-right Lega party leader Matteo Salvini, then interior minister and vice president of the Council of Ministers, called the mayor a "zero" and began to routinely target him. Shortly after Lucano's conviction in 2021, the populist leader compared the situation with his own trial before the court of Palermo for the "sequestration of migrants" following his refusal to allow 147 people to disembark in 2019. "If the mayor champion of kindness and hospitality has been convicted, then I feel less alone," Salvini said.
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