ROME — Pancrazio Caranno, 42, had whittled a shard of his prison cell’s ceramic toilet bowl into a knife, then stowed the weapon in his rectum. He had talked his way into a face-to-face meeting with Lecce anti-Mafia directorate (DDA) prosecutor Carmen Ruggiero, who coordinated the blitz last July which put Caranno and 21 other alleged members of the Sacra Corona Unità behind bars. He had slipped the knife back into his hands. 

And he would have managed to slit Ruggiero’s throat, Caranno told investigators last week, if he hadn’t been so high.

 But on that day in late July, as Caranno spooled out what he has retroactively called a false confession about his 13 years in the Sacra Corona — he had presented himself as a turncoat in order to get face time with Ruggiero, he said — Alberto Bruno, a Carabinieri lieutenant, noticed the prisoner acting strangely.

 Bruno found and confiscated Carrano’s weapon. The interrogation ended immediately. 

 Caranno told investigators that he decided to kill Ruggiero after seeing the full slate of charges against him on a television programme at the Lecce prison. "It made me angry with everything the State represents, everything that represents the State," Caranno said.

 Caranno told the prosecutor to whom he confessed his murder attempt that if he had not been under the influence of drugs, Ruggiero "would be history." He told the prosecutor that in fact he had considered killing him as well. And Caranno also said that he had been involved in threatening Maria Francesca Mariano, the presiding judge in Lecce's Sacra Corona case — which has garnered national attention for a pattern of brazen intimidation of public officials. 

 Last July 17, lead prosecutor Ruggiero gave the green light for a special operation codenamed 'The Wolf.' After an investigation into two years' worth of activity by a branch of the Sacra Corona Unità, an Apulian organized crime ring, Carabinieri arrested 22 men accused of membership in the Sacra Corona's Lamendola-Cantanna family. Three of Carabinieri's targets — Adriano Natale, Rosario Cantanna, and alleged boss Gianluca Lamendola — evaded custody. German special police apprehended Catanna at a pizzeria in Schwulper, a north German town, in September, and Natale in November. Emiglia Romana Carabinieri arrested Lamendola in Correggio in November. 

 The targets of The Wolf raid were together responsible for a wave of violence and intimidation that "bent the Sanvitese territory to the will of the Lamendola family,' Judge Mariano wrote in a pre-trial detention order. The 34-year-old Lamendola, the clan's alleged leader, had peppered Brindisi "with fire and iron, dominated it with brute force and ruthlessness, extorted merchants and organized rivers of drug trafficking." Prosecutors charged the detained men with Mafia-type association, drug trafficking, attempted murder, illegal possession of and carrying of firearms and weapons of war, first- and second-degree assault, extortion, receiving stolen goods, arson, money-laundering, and self-laundering. 

 Ruggiero and Mariano began receiving death threats shortly after the raid. In November, Lecce's Committee for Order and Security assigned security details to the two officials after Mariano received a two-page handwritten letter whose sender warned her about her and Ruggiero's murders, advocated for a number of satanic rituals, and signed the missive in blood.  

 The threatening letters continued through early February, when Mariano found a bloodied lambs' head skewered with a butcher's knife outside her front door. Attached to it was a note which read così: "Like this." 

 The Committee for Order and Security has stated that the Sacra Corona is "unequivocally" responsible for the threats to Mariano and Ruggiero. 

 The Lamendola-Cantanna's alleged leaders have sought to distance themselves from the intimidation. Through their lawyer, Lamendola and his father Cosimo, also in custody, denied knowledge of or involvement in threatening Ruggiero and Mariano. ""We have respect for the roles of others," they said.