Article 416 b (introduced into the Italian Criminal Code in 1982) defines “external complicity in mafia association” and is applicable to those who, though unaffiliated with a criminal organisation, knowingly aid its activities. The protagonist runs into this very charge following a number of accidental events, a dinner invitation, a forgetful friend, a university lecture…. These are ‘the facts’ bearing out ‘the charge’ which he listens to incredulous, dumbfounded: “I am responsible only for failing to inform the police… no matter how it turns out, I’ll be considered guilty, branded as a Mafioso”. It is neither a poem nor a novel in verse: the short sentences and absence of punctuation are part of the author’s experiment in ‘fast reading’. After the Charge, there follows the Defence, the Questioning, the Preliminary Hearing, the Trial, the Public Prosecutor’s Final Speech, the Defence Pleading and finally the Verdict.…
The author, himself a judge, has a good knowledge of his subject and gives – in the form of an apologue – the account of a true-to-life accident that keeps us with bated breath from the opening words, “I wanted to invite him over to dinner,” to the last: “In the name of the Italian people….”