How to Support Victims of Extortion and Usury in a Moment of Crisis

Extortion and usury must be fighted as serious crimes, often carried out by Mafia-type criminal organizations in order to control the territory and penetrate and affect the economy.

The economic crisis following the pandemic creates a particularly fertile ground for the spread of the two crimes, so much so that, in July 2020, a permanent body was set up in Italy to monitor and analyze the risk of infiltration of the economy by organized crime, point out Eleonora Montani, Michele Polo, Giacomo Rapella, and Michele Vasca, the Bocconi scholars who authored a study presented this morning at the Prefecture in Milan to the Extraordinary Commissioner of the Government for the coordination of anti-racket and anti-usury initiatives, Prefect Giovanna Cagliostro, and to the Minister of the Interior, Luciana Lamorgese.

The study, the result of a collaboration agreement between Bocconi University and the Commissioner for the coordination of anti-racket and anti-usury initiatives, aims to put in the just light the twenty-year experience of the Solidarity Fund for victims of extortion and usury, focusing at the same time on some aspects on which to intervene to improve its efficiency.

The Fund was born from an idea of Giovanni Falcone and aims to support and reintegrate into the legal economy activities victims of the two crimes, assigning grants to victims of extortion and ten-year zero-interest loans to victims of usury, matching the financial and personal damage suffered by them.

The Bocconi researchers have constructed a database of the more than 5,000 requests for support to which the Fund has responded to date and, in a preliminary elaboration of the data, have analyzed about 20% of them.

The first critical point that emerged is the small number of requests, which not only underestimates the spread of the two crimes, but is also far from the number of formal complaints. Even those who make use of the Fund, it emerged from a series of in-depth interviews, are not usually aware of its existence at the time of reporting the crime.

If we exclude cases of bank usury, which never involve the granting of a loan, instances of extortion are twice as common as instances of criminal usury, with 8% of cases involving victims of both crimes.

The requests are relatively more frequent in the regions of traditional settlement of criminal organizations: Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily, to which Basilicata is added.

The analysis of the sectors targeted also confirms the judicial evidence on the industries most infiltrated by organized crime. The sectors of cultivation, animal production, hunting and related activities stand out (15.9%), as do those of retail trade (15.2%), restaurant services (13.8%), building construction (14.5%) and trade and repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles (9.0%). Striking, however, is the absence of the sectors of supply to public administrations and healthcare, or waste management, which are often indicated as areas of contamination.

The gradual digitization of procedures and the adoption of more sophisticated databases has progressively improved the efficiency of procedures, reducing the time required to process requests. In recent years, requests have been granted, on average, in half of the cases, with loans equaling around half of the requested sums.

From the interviews with the victims, emerge the dramatic contours of usury, which Eleonora Montani, adjunct professor in the Department of Legal Studies at Bocconi and coordinator of the study, defines as a "devious crime with an incredible capacity to annihilate the victims humanly, psychologically and economically."

Very often it is the entrepreneur who turns to the usurer in a moment of cash crisis and the usurer is almost always seen, at least initially, as someone who has lent a helping hand. Furthermore, psychological factors push the entrepreneur to hide the need for loans, equated to a failure in the management of the business. All this, Professor Montani says, "means that the entrepreneur reports the crime when he is at the end of his rope and has no more alternatives, when he is psychologically destroyed and the business is on its knees, when he is full of debt and is no longer able to meet the demands of the usurer." In 82% of cases, the entrepreneur uses the zero-interest loan granted by the Fund to pay off past debts, thus failing to relaunch his business and to repay the State.

The main recommendation contained in the study is therefore to equalize the treatment of the victims of the two crimes, granting non-repayable grants, rather than loans, to those who have fallen into the hands of usurers.

The effectiveness of the Fund is also measured by the effective reintegration of businesses into the legal economy. In this regard, the study notes the extreme usefulness of accompaniment, at a time when the multiple pressures to which the entrepreneur is subject can undermine his lucidity. The activity of anti-racket and anti-usury associations should therefore be enhanced and competent professionals should be created help the entrepreneur rationally invest the grant.

Both recommendations are currently being examined by the legislator.

The Prefect Cagliostro has underlined, in particular, that "the results achieved qualify a path of reflection, conducted in recent years by the commissarial structure, on the need to undertake initiatives -of an administrative nature, the strengthening of digitized procedures and initiatives to modify the legislation -, aimed at making the Fund a better known tool, more efficient in terms of time and methods of application processing and, therefore, more effective as an incentive to report the crimes, thus strengthening a healthier socio-economic context and ensuring greater well-being to the younger generations."