What happened in Rogoredo on January 26, 2026 made explicit what I myself had feared even to think, not to mention admit, given my direct experiences.
Let’s look at the facts: police officer Carmelo Cinturrino, who was no rookie but rather the chief assistant at the Mecenate precinct (essentially the deputy head of the territorially competent police), a man with twenty years of active service in the field and directly on site (in Rogoredo), fatally shoots a dealer with his service pistol, and tries to bury/cover up the whole affair by forcing his colleagues to cooperate (thus involving them in the judicial proceedings against him).
The investigators’ inquiries bring out, or rather make overflow, a scenario of widespread corruption and blackmail of dealers, with substantial payments of money and drugs for the benefit of a single police officer, who relies on his role by turning it into a sort of “competitive advantage” (I like euphemisms) over the people he should instead be prosecuting.
And I speak of “competitive advantage” because of the nature and extent of the “protection money” demanded from the dealers: In the case of the killed dealer alone it was 200 euros a day and 5 grams of cocaine which the interrogation records say was given to Cinturrino “habitually.” No one, in any newspaper article, dared ask what Cinturrino was doing with this mountain of money and drugs, and I can say from DIRECT experience that it is unimaginable that Cinturrino consumed such an amount daily; moreover, he was blackmailing numerous dealers and in the tests carried out about two months later he tested negative!
The first statements by fellow police officers reach a dark and unwitting humor and sound more or less like this: “everyone knew everything, that guy is dangerous, and we didn’t know who to tell nor what to do about it.”
Personally I believe this affair reveals a widespread reality... it is not simply a bad neighborhood and a single rotten apple; Rogoredo, perhaps precisely because it is brutally evident, reveals a “system” that can be found in numerous settings (I was tempted to write ALL of them), even in the cheerful little town where I live.
Returning to the question I ask at the beginning of this series of posts, I will try to formulate an answer.
If you are a member of law enforcement and you realize that you cannot in any way win the war against dealers, you have two paths left: 1) Try to survive, to “get by,” and 2) Let yourself be corrupted by demanding money from those you should be prosecuting, protecting the pushers and mafias that pay you to the detriment of everyone else, honest citizens included.
Well, I believe that the brutality of what happened in Rogoredo marks the breaking point of the “usual routine”: The system broke down because the one demanding money and drugs from the pushers went out of control, ending up involving not only the colleagues directly present but practically the entire precinct, whose chief, I recall, was removed from office.
Post note: About a month after what happened I saw all the TV news report, without any laughter, the police officer’s statements of almost complete innocence, and his lawyers seriously claim that it was a staged setup by the drug-dealing world. Luckily, about another month later, the Review Court rejected the request for release from custody.