VIDEO| When Cicalone said: “There are criminal gangs on the Rome metro…”
A few days before the attack, the Quartieri Criminali youtuber already said he had received "serious threats" in the "underground" capital
ROME – “We were threatened. Serious threats, they told us ‘You think it’s a game but I’ll come back with 15-20 people and we’ll stab you.” Then seeing how it went, even if with decidedly lighter contours (it didn’t go beyond a hint of a fight, mostly involving pushes), one could try to lighten things up by saying that Simone Cicalone, historic Roman YouTuber with the only name ‘Cicalone‘ and former boxer, predicts the future. Or that he was the ‘victim’ of a coincidence.
But no. The Dire agency met him a few days before, in the interview he gave he had tried to photograph with videos the difficult situation experienced in underground Rome, that of the > Metro line A. It is the ‘tourist’ one, the one that stops at Termini, Piazza della Repubblica, and in the very central Piazza di Spagna and Piazzale Flaminio. In short, the one that brings together a very high number of travellers, tourists but also Romans. And it is here that, as Cicalone explains in his many videos, what he defines as “criminal organizations” gather, i.e. pickpockets ready to attack.
THE YOUTUBER FROM THE SUBURBS, BEFORE THE BRASS< /strong>
But before getting to the brawl involving Cicalone and the people accompanying him, including the world kickboxing champion Mattia Faraoni and the videomaker Evelina, to enter the Roman slums, to talk about the suburbs, to give voice to ordinary people, to visit subways, it was…‘Criminal Novel’, “the series. When it started to catch on among young people I was already on social media with tutorials on combat sports. I tried to tell how the gang ended up, with the bios of the individual characters. And there was always one that ended up badly from all over Italy my videos, they asked me to also tell what the neighborhoods were. I went to tell them with Mattia Faraoni who told me to do it together”. And then came Naples, Florence, Milan, but also abroad, for example with the French banlieues (“in my opinion, Italy has not yet reached those levels, at least in terms of petty crime or street gangs”).
Until the case of recent days. Cicalone, in fact, documents what happens on line A of the Metro, reporting the presence of pickpockets to tourists and Romans. During one of these ‘patrols’ together with other people, he came into contact with an alleged gang of pickpockets presumably from Latin America. The clash ended with shoves, blows, nights in the emergency room and complaints.
COME CASSANDRA: “GANG IN THE METROPOLITAN, UNDERRATED PHENOMENON”< /h3>
“In the subways the phenomenon of these gangs is underestimated – his words to the Dire agency, spoken before the attack of the last few hours – Specifically, they are criminal organisations. From what can be deduced that the are they? Because they have a very large number of members, they are well organized with groups where they communicate with each other, they have voice chats with Bluetooth earphones. They are divided into small groups, they have a consolidated scheme for escaping, hiding the stolen goods of the laws, updated day by day, in fact, today, without a complaint from the victim, they cannot be prosecuted even with the stolen goods on their person”. But they know “that if they are caught at the time of the theft, they will be charged with attempted theft and that they will not go to prison for up to 24 months of accumulated sentences. They risk nothing while the profit is very high”. According to the YouTuber, “these organizations are increasingly ruthless – he concluded – We were seriously threatened, they told us ‘You think it’s a game but I’ll come back with 15-20 people and we’ll stab you’. Here it’s no longer the poor who he steals out of hunger. Here we are talking about people dressed in luxury, with two cell phones worth 1500 euros, they are not skinny but fit and they do this for a living and in an organized and functional way.”