That Ugly Mess On The Piazza Trilussa
This item from the "Cronache" in yesteday’s Corriere della Sera describes how three Pakistanis, impersonating Italian policemen in mufti, would accost tourists, and proceed to intimidate them (at times slipping an envelope with white powder into the tourist's things, and then "discovering" the envelope, thus frightening the tourist into total compliance) into handing over everything to be "searched" and, apparently, to be relieved of their money.
When the Italian police searched the car of these people, they found 2,000 Euros in cash, 150 Australian dollars, 430 American dollars, 200 Hungarian florins, 200 Czech crowns, along with Swiss francs, Rumanian lei, Indan rubles, English pounds, and Russian rubles. That, presumably, was just that day’s take (for surely they would have emptied the car of the accumulated loot at day’s end). And the oikuce also found in the same care three credit cards with the names of foreign tourists, fake driving licenses and counterfeit permessi di soggiorno (akin to long-stay visas), a flashing blue light, a beret with an army crest.
But – and this is most important –all of those tourists of so many different nationalities, English and French and Swiss and Rumanian and Czech, and Russian, and Indian, were apparently willing to believe that in Rome three Italian detectives might look exactly like Pakistanis. And while that is extremely unlikely in Itlay, it is not unlikely in England, and not unlikely that a maghrebin might be a policeman in France (where Sarkozy is busily “integrating” or so he thinks, Muslims) or elsewhere in Europe where the mad effort to actually put Muslims in the security services proceeds apace, when they should be kept far away from those security services, not be permitted to learn a thing about their operations. And thus it comes to pass that today, in Rome, in the Piazza Trilussa, named after the quintessential Roman poet with his comical romanaccio, a Frenchwoman is accosted, and harassed, and is terrified by, and hands over her purse to, three Pakistanis, thinking that they must be Italian detectives.
Posted on 7:30 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
