Piera Aiello

Piera Aiello (born July 2, 1967 in Partanna ) is a Sicilian witness and activist against the Mafia and a member of the Italian parliament for the five-star movement .

Piera Aiello

Life

Piera Aiello forcibly married the son Nicolò of the mafioso Vito Atria in 1985. She herself did not come from any Mafia family. After Vito Atria was murdered by opposing mafioso nine days after the marriage, her husband Nicolò was also shot with a sawed-off shotgun in her restaurant in the presence of Piera Aiello in 1991. Nicolò Atria was active in the drug trade. Piera Aiello knew the two murderers and from then on worked with the Italian authorities (examining magistrate Paolo Borsellino ) against the mafia, as did her seventeen-year-old sister-in-law Rita Atria , Nicolò's sister, from 1991 . Based on the statements of the two women, Borsellino was able to indict numerous Mafia members. The women were then in the witness protection program. Rita Atria committed suicide in 1992 after the murder of Borsellino.

In 2008 she became chairwoman of the anti-mafia association Rita Atria and in 2017 of the unified association La verità vive . In 2012 she published a book about the mafia mischief in Italy with the journalist Umberto Lucentini.

In the 2018 elections, she became a member of the Italian parliament ( Camera dei deputati ) for the Marsala constituency in the western tip of Sicily. She stood up for the five-star movement, initially without informing the police authority protecting her. For the first time in decades she stepped out of the anonymity of the witness protection program and had a current photo of herself distributed. She ran for the election without a photo and wore a dark scarf over her head during her few campaign appearances, but a remark by an Italian journalist about the first MP with a burqa struck her. She uses her old name, her new name is kept secret. For the time being, she wants to be represented by colleagues in debates.

She remarried and has three children.

Fonts

• with Umberto Lucentini: Maledetta Mafia. Edizioni San Paolo, 2012. ISBN 978-88-215-7692-8

Web links

• Walter Mayer: "Italy's black widow shows her face" , Spiegel , June 14, 2018.