WHY HAS THE UNITED KINGDOM NEVER INVESTIGATE WHAT CONNECTED THE RAPE GANGS?

Italy spent decades arresting mafiosi while the mafia survived. Falcone finally proved the organisation behind the crimes. Britain has spent thirty years failing to prosecute men it already knew about, and has never once investigated what connected them. Why?

PART 2.

Greater Manchester Police sorted 97 people into perpetrators, facilitators and associates.

English law has a charge for the first word. A perpetrator commits the act and can be convicted of it. A facilitator can be convicted where his help is tied to criminal activity that can be proved against him. An associate can be reached only if something he personally did can be pinned to something the others did.

What does not exist in English law is an offence of belonging to an organised crime group. Conduct here can prove conspiracy, or assisting an offence, or participation in the activities of a group whose crimes have already been established. What it cannot prove is membership itself. There is no charge that says this man is part of that thing, and that on its own is enough.

Italy has had one since 1982.

ITALY MADE BELONGING TO THE MAFIA A CRIME

The offence is mafia-type association, Article 416-bis of the Italian penal code, and it requires three or more persons. The prosecution does not have to prove the defendant committed a murder, moved a shipment or touched a child. It has to prove the association exists, that it operates by the mafia method, and that he is part of it.

The mafia method is written into the statute. The members avail themselves of the force of intimidation that membership carries, and of the condition of subjection and silence that follows from it. No threat has to be made to anybody. The standing of the association does the work.

The statute then sets out what the association does with that power.

• It commits crimes
• It takes over the management or control of economic activities, concessions, authorisations, public contracts and services
• It obtains unjust advantage

And since 1992, when the electoral purpose was added in the months after they killed Falcone;

• it prevents or hinders the free exercise of the vote
• or procures votes for itself or for others at elections

So the financier, the fixer, the man who owns the flat and the man who delivers the votes are inside that offence, provided their conduct proves participation. Not because of who they are related to. Because of what they do and what it shows about what they belong to.

The law carries the names of the two men who took it through the Italian parliament, Virginio Rognoni and Pio La Torre. La Torre was shot dead in Palermo that April and the law passed in September. They killed the man who wrote it. It made no difference. Italy knew what was at stake and it passed regardless.

Ten years later Italy created a second offence, Article 416-ter, aimed at the man on the other side of the arrangement.

In its current form it covers accepting a promise of votes from members of a mafia association in exchange for money, for any other benefit, or for a willingness to satisfy the association's interests, and the penalty rises by half if the man who took the deal is elected.

Italy decided the politician who takes the bloc vote is not a bystander to organised crime. He is inside it, and he serves longer if it works.

THIRTY YEARS OF PROSECUTIONS. THE MAFIA WAS STILL STANDING.

Italy did not write that law because its lawyers were cleverer than ours. It wrote it because everything else had failed.

The Italian state was never short of convictions. It convicted mafiosi through the fifties, the sixties and the seventies, and it convicted the man who fired the shot whenever it could find him. It could not reach the man who gave the order, because an order given to someone who will not name you leaves a court nothing to hold. So the prosecutions went on and the organisation was untouched. Every case was about one man and one act, and every case ended with the association where it had been the day before.

Nor was Italy in denial that the mafia existed. Italy set up a parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission in 1962. It ran for fourteen years. It produced forty-two volumes and something near thirty thousand pages, and at the end of it the Italian state still could not describe how the thing was organised. An enormous quantity of paper about mafia crime, and nothing establishing the mafia as a single structure with a command running through it.

Pio La Torre wrote the bill that would have fixed that and put it to parliament in 1980. It sat there for two years. On 30 April 1982 they shot him in Palermo, along with his driver Rosario Di Salvo.

Rome then sent Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa to Palermo as prefect, the general who had broken the Red Brigades, with instructions to do the same to Cosa Nostra. He lasted a hundred days. On 3 September they killed him in his car in the middle of the city with his wife Emanuela beside him, and his escort Domenico Russo died of his injuries two weeks afterwards.

At the funeral the people of Palermo jeered the ministers who had come from Rome.

La Torre's bill passed ten days later, on 13 September 1982.

FALCONE PROVED THE SHAPE

A law against belonging is worth nothing unless a court can be shown what the thing is that men belong to, and no Italian court had ever been shown that. It had been shown bodies and individual defendants by the hundred, and never once the structure connecting them.

The work was done by the anti-mafia pool in Palermo. Rocco Chinnici created it on the principle that mafia investigations had to be worked collectively, with the files shared between magistrates, so that the connections between cases could be seen and so that murdering any one man would not kill the case he was carrying. Chinnici was blown up outside his home in July 1983 for having created it. Antonino Caponnetto took it over, working with Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta.

Tommaso Buscetta was a Sicilian boss, arrested in São Paulo in October 1983. Falcone flew out the following June and Buscetta refused him, though he left the magistrates thinking he might come round, and told the Palermo prosecutor who saw him that he was not their adversary.

Brazil approved the extradition on 27 June. In the days before he was flown out he swallowed strychnine and the prison guards saved him.

At half past midnight on 16 July 1984, in a small office at Criminalpol headquarters in Rome, he started talking, and he talked for forty-five days.

He was not repenting and he never claimed to be. In 1982 the Corleonesi had killed two of his sons, his brother, a nephew and a son-in-law, which broke the rule that families stayed out of it, and his own boss had gone over to Riina. He told Falcone he would say enough to produce results and no more, that he believed in him personally, and that he did not believe the Italian state seriously intended to fight the mafia. He would not discuss the politicians at all, on the ground that the state was not ready for statements of that magnitude.

What he gave them was the shape. A commission at the top. Families beneath it, each with its territory. Rules about who could order a killing, who had to be consulted first, and who had to be told afterwards. A chain of command with men occupying places in it.

Falcone then ordered three thousand six hundred separate checks on what he had been told. Salvatore Contorno, who had refused to talk for two years, came forward once Buscetta had and confirmed the structure from a different position inside it. What survived produced three hundred and sixty-six arrest warrants, executed in a single operation on 29 September 1984.

The maxi-trial ran from February 1986 to December 1987 and went through appeal. On 30 January 1992 the Court of Cassation confirmed the convictions and restored most of what the appeal court had struck out. Four months later they killed Falcone on the motorway at Capaci along with his wife and three of his escort, and two months after that they killed Borsellino. The convictions stood, because the case had never rested on any one man.

BRITAIN NEVER RAN THE SAME INVESTIGATION

We have not reached where Italy was in 1962.

Italy's failure before La Torre was that it prosecuted the men and left the organisation standing. Britain has not managed the first half of that. Operation Augusta identified 97 people and produced almost nothing. Telford had suspects West Mercia never pursued. Baroness Casey found perpetrators still walking free because nobody had joined the dots, and cases dropped or downgraded from rape to something lesser.

We did not fail at Falcone's investigation. We failed at the one that comes before it. We are still avoiding prosecuting men that gang raped children.

And the second has never been attempted at all. No English court has been given the shape. No prosecutor has offered one and no police force has built one, and across thirty years of convictions in Rochdale, Rotherham, Halifax, Huddersfield, Oldham, Telford, Newcastle. Bradford, Birmingham and everywhere else, not one court has been told how the men in one town were connected to the men in the next.

We have the paper. Jay, Crowther, IICSA, Casey, and now Beaconport. Thousands of pages, exactly as Rome had thousands of pages, and the same hole in the middle of all of it. Every one of those inquiries was asked why the institutions failed. Not one of them was asked what the men belonged to.

Girls have described being handed on, driven between towns at night and delivered to houses where men were already waiting, which means somebody made a call before they arrived. They have described being passed between brothers, cousins and uncles. Survivors have told me they were taken to men flown in from Pakistan who spoke no English, who they never saw again, and who were on a plane home inside the week.

Every one of those girls was asked what was done to her. Nobody asked her any of it to prove membership of a larger thing, because no offence in English law would have made her answer relevant to anything on the indictment.

The men were convicted of what they did. The thing they did it inside has never been named in an English courtroom.

I have spent eight years saying the biraderi is that thing. I have said it under police investigation, on bail, and to the face of every institution that tried to stop me, and I say it again here.

Falcone did not take Buscetta's word for it either. He ran three thousand six hundred checks before he asked a court to believe any of it. Nobody in this country has ever been told to run one.

Not Greater Manchester Police, who wrote the ninety-seven names down and then closed the operation. Not the Crown Prosecution Service, who were never handed a case that asked the question. Not Jay, not Crowther, not Casey, and not the national inquiry sitting now, because not one of them was given terms of reference that reach it.

So I am putting it where it belongs. The Home Secretary can order this. Nobody else in the country can.

Take every one of the men Augusta filed and never charged, and establish who they are to each other, whose houses those girls were delivered to, who made the call before they arrived, who sat on the council when the file was closed, and who has been getting the votes out in those wards for thirty years.

You've pasted the old ending and the new one together, so the chain runs twice and the accusation lands twice. Here it is as one section.

I have also cut they will tell you it cannot be done, because it argues with an objection nobody has made yet and it delays the chain. Palermo answers it better as a fact than as a rebuttal.

Run them.

Nobody has, because of what they would find.

Run them properly and they do not stop at the men who raped the children. They run to the men who select the candidates. From the candidates to the councillors who were selected. From the councillors to the officers who closed the files, and to the members of parliament sitting on the bloc vote those same men deliver.

Every institution that could order this investigation is political, and every one of them has spent a generation living off the votes it would have to examine. The councils were selected by it. The police answer to authorities that were. The Home Office is run by ministers who hold their seats on it. Ask any of them to establish what connects the men who raped those girls and you are asking them to open a file with their own selection meeting inside it.

They were not incompetent. They were not overwhelmed. They were not, whatever they told the inquiries, held back by a fear of appearing racist. They did not look because they already knew what was there. Nobody accidentally fails to look for thirty years.

Palermo was done by a handful of magistrates working out of one office, in a city where the state was burying its own investigators, and it stood up through three courts. They had to write a new law to do it.

We do not. Britain has had an offence of belonging on the statute book since 2000, and it carries fourteen years.

Part 3 is about who we use it on, and the woman who gets to decide.

I am Raja Miah MBE. It is now eight years since I first started to expose how politicians protected the rape gangs.

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