Melvyn Theuma, our own weepy Tommaso Buscetta, seems distinctly skilled at self-pity. To call him a pentito flatters him with notions of contrition. On the contrary, the only reason he regrets hiring assassins to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia is inconvenience to his illegal business and family life. Even as lawyers in the room helpfully prompted him by reminding him that Daphne actually died as a result of his machinations, he was still full of tears for his own fate.
“I died too,” he said in an exquisitely inappropriate metaphor.
Theuma is no hero. He’s a money launderer, an underground bookie, a whimpering lackey. He’s a murdering bastard and a snitch. His concern for his own skin is loathsome.
He is a cartoon figure of a middle-aged man: a self-centred, auto-commiserating, undiagnosed narcissist in a permanent state of man cold.
Which is why the evidence he gives is credible.
People with traits of sainthood are not hired to organise a car bomb. Do not seek genuine remorse in the snitch that turns on his accomplices. And do not believe it if you see it.
Look for the pathological egoism that made them kill for money because it’s the same egoism that ranks staying out of jail over any loyalty to their former friends.
Theuma pointed his finger at Yorgen Fenech. He says Fenech asked him to find ‘iċ-Ċiniż’, gave him the money to pay his gang and chased him to get it done. Fenech wants Theuma’s deal because someone else put him up to it, a bigger fish than he.
Fenech says the government denied him immunity because the real mastermind is one of them. Fenech does not quite deny wrongdoing. He denies culpability for it.
The bigger fish yet would be Keith Schembri. He definitely denies any wrongdoing. Theuma says Fenech told him Schembri had warned him of the arrest of the hired killers a month after Daphne was killed. That’s when Fenech was nobody’s suspect. Add to that direct contact between Schembri and Theuma, a gift of a salary in exchange of no work, and a letter to Fenech with instructions on pinning the murder on Chris Cardona.
Last time Schembri was on a witness stand in a court room, he refused to answer questions about Fenech’s 17 Black for fear of incriminating himself. That was last November 11, the week Theuma was arrested. It’s time again for Schembri to answer some questions on a witness stand. What will he do now?
Melvyn Theuma is putting our own Mafia state under some serious strain
Cardona was not conjured from thin air in that letter to Fenech. In April 2018, activists demanded his arrest after he was seen meeting one of the Degiorgios before their arrest.
In October 2018, he had to claw back his protestations when he was found on the same guest-list as one of the Degiorgios at a private party.
Theuma says that the Degiorgio cabal were blackmailing Cardona. Cardona had paid them handsomely, they allege, to kill Daphne but had not delivered on all his promises. Theuma says Cardona relied on his long-time friend David Gatt, the former cop charged and acquitted of a series of bank heists. Gatt denies all that.
And he denies threatening the Degiorgios they would be killed in prison if they snitched on his buddy Cardona.
Under pressure from Robert Abela, Cardona has left politics. The man, seen on TV the day the prime minister announced his deputy had resigned, looks a mess.
Nothing like the hyper bully that last January posed for photos with Abela the day Labour picked a new prime minister.
In this week’s moribund TV appearance, a woman accompanying Cardona, perhaps his wife or partner, was heard speaking for him: “Leave us alone,” she said, rather pathetically. You wish. He can’t find words to say it anymore but Cardona technically continues to deny any wrongdoing.
Lawrence Cutajar is on a charm offensive. He’s giving interviews like a rock star on tour.
It is amazing to learn he is so loquacious considering the fact that between the day Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed and his resignation, we only heard from his police force twice: at a train wreck of a press conference the same week of the bombing and in a short statement declaring the police has nothing to complain about Schembri.
Now Cutajar is having to deny he helped Theuma avoid justice, fished for damning evidence behind the backs of investigators for reasons never fully explained and discussed immunity from prosecution outside the scope of the law.
Denying wrongdoing is harder for Cutajar given the frustrated effort of his former number two, Silvio Valletta, to deny his own wrongdoing.
Theuma says Valletta was the eating, driving, flying and football buddy of Fenech even as Valletta’s department identified Fenech as prime murder suspect. Valletta denies wrongdoing. Few believe him.
Adrian Delia denies wrongdoing too. He finds himself defending his reputation, such as it is, from Theuma’s evidence that Fenech boasted having him in his pocket and using him to wipe out David Casa, a thorn in Fenech’s side. The pregnant silences in conversations with those closest to Delia would be ominous if the man hadn’t been a political abortion before he was even given his job.
Tommaso Buscetta’s testimony punctured the power of the Mafia in which he had made his career. Theuma is putting our own Mafia state under some serious strain. It is hardly any comfort that all concerned deny any wrongdoing.