‘Non sacciu Totò’

When a government minister, standing outside a property he occupies, is asked about Totò Riina and replies, “I do not know who he is,” something significant is revealed. Not about the past, and not even necessarily about the minister himself, but about the country in which such an answer can be considered plausible.

Let us begin by clarifying what this story is not. There is, so far, no evidence that Anton Refalo was involved with Riina. The Italian reports that brought this issue back into the spotlight, in La Stampa and on Rai, suggest that Riina may have used properties in Gozo while he was a fugitive.

Refalo states he has occupied the Qala property under a lease since 2002, well after Riina’s arrest in 1993. If this is correct, then any events in the 1980s and early 1990s are unrelated to him personally.

But that is not the point.

The point is what happens when serious journalism raises a grave public interest question, and the state is called upon to respond. Journalism is not a tribunal.

It does not deliver verdicts. Its role is to uncover facts, assemble testimony, and raise questions that require institutional follow-up. When those questions concern one of the most violent criminal figures in modern European history, and the possible use of Maltese property during his years in hiding, the proper response is not dismissal. It is scrutiny.

Instead, what we have seen is something else. We saw a minister who, when first confronted, did not respond with clarity but with evasion.

A prime minister who, instead of insisting on a public explanation, took it upon himself to privately review documents and declare himself satisfied, as though his reassurance should suffice for everyone else. And a familiar reflex in political discourse: to turn a question into a partisan exchange, to say this happened “under the other lot,” and therefore need not be examined now.

This is not taking responsibility. It is its opposite.

Refalo does not serve only the prime minister. He serves the public as a minister and as an MP. If a property he occupies becomes the subject of credible and widely reported allegations linked to organised crime, he owes the public a clear and direct explanation. Not annoyance at being questioned. Not rhetorical deflection. And certainly not the pretence that the name Totò Riina requires no recognition.

Whether meant literally or not, “I do not know who he is” does not function as an answer. It functions as a refusal.

And it is in that refusal that the deeper problem lies.

Malta has long behaved as though organised crime is something that happens elsewhere. We speak of it as Italian, Balkan, Libyan, anything but ours. We have no dedicated parliamentary structure examining organised crime as a systemic issue. We have little sustained research treating it as a social phenomenon rooted in our own institutions and economy. We lack legal tools that explicitly recognise mafia-type organisations as a distinct threat. More importantly, we have not developed an anti-mafia culture: the instinct to recognise, to name, and to reject.

There is no neutral ground here. A society either confronts organised crime or creates the conditions that allow it to be ignored. What we like to call indifference has another name. It is omertà.

That is why this episode matters.

Not because it proves anything about a minister’s past, but because it reveals something about our present. When confronted with the name of Riina, a man whose crimes are written in blood across Italy, whose name is synonymous with a war against the state, the response was not shock, or curiosity, or even basic recognition. It was a deflection.

Malta has long behaved as though organised crime is something that happens elsewhere- Manuel Delia

Consider what a normal reaction might be. Imagine discovering that a place you just leased was the scene of a famous murder from several decades ago. You would not begin with legal distinctions. You would react as a human being: surprise, discomfort, a need to understand what happened. That reaction is not about guilt. It is about moral awareness.

What was striking here was the absence of that instinct.

The prime minister’s attempt to dismiss the issue as “decades-old speculation” only deepens the problem. Time does not diminish the significance of such questions. It heightens them. If Malta was, at any point, a place where a figure like Riina could move, stay, or operate without consequence, that is not an old story. It is an unresolved chapter.

The political response, to reduce the issue to whether it occurred under one government or another, misses the point entirely. If true, this would not be a partisan failure. It would be a national one.

The mature response would be to ask: what happened, what do we know, and what does it say about us?

Instead, we have argued about who should be embarrassed.

Anti-mafia is not only a matter of law enforcement. It is a matter of culture. It is the ability to recognise names, to remember what they stand for, and to respond accordingly. In Italy, that culture was built through trauma, through the murders of magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, through decades of civic struggle. It is not perfect, but it exists. In Malta, it does not.

And where that culture is absent, the response to uncomfortable truths is predictable: deny, diminish, deflect.

“I do not know who Totò Riina is.”

Taken at face value, it is implausible. Taken as a gesture, it is revealing. It tells us that we still inhabit a political space where the safest response to a difficult question is not engagement, but withdrawal; not acknowledgement, but distance.

We should not accept that.

What is required now is not outrage, but seriousness. The relevant facts about the property in question should be placed clearly in the public domain.

The authorities should indicate whether the claims raised in Italian reporting are being examined, and if not, why. And our political class should understand that accountability is not something that can be delegated upward or dismissed sideways. It is owed directly to the public.

This story began with a question about a house. It has become a question about a country.

And the answer we give will say more about us than about anything that may or may not have happened in Gozo decades ago.