The puzzle of the murder of Italian Ponzo Salvatore is starting to make sense.
The 38-year-old foreigner received six shots at noon on May 23rd in front of the Italian embassy in Los Yoses. The shots were perpetrated by two gunmen, who traveled by motorcycle and fled to the south of the capital. The vicitim’s girlfriend was wounded in the shooting. The Ecuadorian woman surnamed López recovered for a few days and then left the country.
Salvatore was listed as the owner of the pineapple exporting company Tierra Nuestra Latina. According to details revealed after the crime, he was constantly visiting Costa Rica. He lived between Italy and Spain and tried to obtain a temporary residence here.
The crime seems to be clarified after a major operation by the Italian State Police on October 2nd to dismantle two drug trafficking organizations that sent cocaine from Costa Rica to Europe through pineapple shipments. In total, 29 people were arrested.
The Italian investigation links the company Tierra Nuestra Latina and Salvatore with 215 kilos of cocaine shipped inside pineapples from Costa Rica and later confiscated in Livorno, two months before Salvatore was murdered. In addition other foreign members of the company (Cademartori and the father of the victim) were also linked to international drug trafficking.
The European authorities believe the organization managed to successfully ship more than 100 kilos of cocaine between October 2017 and March 2018.
The Salvatore are originally from Catania, the second largest city in the region of Sicily. It is believed they had links with mobsters in the area; however, they lived in Sabadell, Spain.