| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 27, 2000 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| INTERNATIONAL -- EUROPEAN COVER STORY
Witnesses to a Murder (int'l edition) For 40-year-old Ion Cazacu, the decision to flee Romania for Italy was a fatal one. An engineer by training, Cazacu hoped to provide a better life for his wife and two daughters by working in Italy. So he contracted with a criminal network to smuggle him over the border and line up a job for him. According to police reports, Cazacu ended up being indentured to an unregistered construction company in the province of Varese, about 30 minutes from the center of Milan. His job: laying tiles and building cabinets. Working in Italy's black market turned out to be worse than being poor in Romania. Last March, Cazacu complained to his Italian boss, Cosimo Iannece, that he and his co-workers were not being paid promised wages. Iannece had been docking each worker's pay for everything from housing to transportation and locking Cazacu and 11 other workers in a 20-square-meter, rat-infested room at night. Enraged by Cazacu's confrontation, Iannece beat the Romanian, doused him with gasoline, and lit his body on fire in front of four co-workers, screaming: ''I'm going to burn you.'' Cazacu suffered third-degree burns over 95% of his body and died in a hospital four weeks later. On the evening of the attack, Iannece dumped Cazacu at a nearby hospital and ordered co-workers to tell police it was an accident. ''Ion was cleaning with gasoline and smoking at the same time. That is what we were supposed to say,'' says Petronel Olteanu, another Romanian immigrant. Cazacu was lucid during the weeks in the hospital before his death, and co-workers managed to send for his wife from Romania. Cazacu struggled to warn his wife in the hospital to leave Italy, because Iannece might try to harm her, too. ''He kept telling me to be careful, even after he knew that Iannece was in jail,'' says his widow, Nicoleta Cazacu, a small woman with jet-black hair and dark eyes. She says Iannece already had tried to buy her silence, contacting her in the Romanian town of Rimnicul Vilcea and offering her $5,000 to say nothing about the incident. Overcoming their fear, Cazacu's co-workers defied Iannace and went to the police. Iannece is now awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges. In his home, police found more than 80 pages of documents containing the names of businesses and local construction companies that he and his brother allegedly assisted in their search for illegal immigrant workers. ''This dramatic case has kicked off a series of investigations that have opened our eyes to a situation more vast than we expected,'' says Giovanni Broggini, police chief in charge of criminal investigations in Gallarate. If so, Cazacu did not die in vain. By Kate Carlisle in Gallarate _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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 RELATED ITEMS Workers in Bondage (int'l edition) COVER IMAGE: Workers in Bondage TABLE: The Route to Europe TABLE: A Year of Raids Witnesses to a Murder (int'l edition) Italy: Center of the New Slave Trade (int'l edition) ONLINE EXTRA: Workers in Bondage: A Photo Essay INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
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