Cannelloni Schadenfreude

It sounds like something you’d eat in Bolzano. But it’s actually happening in Gozo.

This Facebook post was put up by a senior staffer working for Gozo MP and government minister Anton Refalo. Kevin Mompalao has developed a disgust for Yorgen Fenech but it’s only really come through since the former tycoon that stands accused of murder turned out to have been a friend of Silvio Valletta’s.

The cannelloni are a reference to a detail Melvyn Theuma – the witness for the prosecution that is testifying against Yorgen Fenech – provided in court yesterday. He said he saw Silvio Valletta at Yorgen Fenech’s ranch. And he spoke of a meal they had that is a real-life version of Peter Clemenza’s cool after a hit on the New Jersey turnpike: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

To stretch the Puzoesque metaphor Silvio Valletta was the Mark McCluskey to Yorgen Fenech’s Virgil Sollazzo. For as long as Valletta was eating the veal or the cannelloni, Fenech was safe from arrest. This hasn’t been proven in a court of law yet, but no one has tried either.

So, while bowing to all the malarkey about the presumption of innocence, we can rely on the facts that we see. In Murder on the Malta Express which came out last October, the best thing my co-authors and I could say about Silvio Valletta was that he “was not Sherlock Holmes”. He presided over the criminal investigation department of the police during a series of 6 car bombings and no one was ever brought to arrest.

When the Degiorgios were arrested when the FBI were here multiple burner phones were found sunk outside their potato shed in Marsa. That, and the detail that one of the victims of the car bomb was a former business partner with George Degiorgio with whom he fell out, is a hint that il-Fulu and iċ-Ċiniż were, as the lingo has it, professionals. Professionals who conducted their bloody trade with impunity.

Another detail is a conversation from April 2017 – the month of the great Egrant-belongs-to-Michelle-Muscat crisis – between Yorgen Fenech and Melvyn Theuma. Melvyn Theuma says Yorgen Fenech asked him if he knew “George iċ-Ċiniż. I want him to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia for me.”

Did Yorgen Fenech find George iċ-Ċiniż on the Yellow Pages? Or did he ask a friend?

But Kevin Mompalao is not wading these murky waters. Sometimes everything is what it seems. Silvio Valletta’s wife is Gozo MP Justyne Caruana who unseated Mompalao’s boss Anton Refalo as Minister for Gozo before she was forced to resign when “not Sherlock Holmes” became “Yorgen Fenech’s bitch”.

Justyne Caruana insists she had no idea what her husband – perhaps more appropriately described now as estranged husband – was up to with Yorgen Fenech. But Anton Refalo’s man is pleased she is no longer much of a challenge.

But note this little forensic detail. How did this screenshot start to make the rounds? Who took it and who shared it first?

Look down to the very bottom of this screenshots of the comment section and you’ll see a small picture of Minister Clint Camilleri with a prompt for him to reply, if he wishes. That means the screenshot was taken from a phone that had Clint Camilleri’s Facebook credentials. Almost certainly it is the clueless Clint Camilleri himself who doesn’t realise he is outing himself.