Italian Man Sentenced in Violent Scheme Targeting Gay Son
It sounds like something from "The Godfather": an Italian man has been sentenced to two years in a failed scheme in which he paid a criminal to break the fingers of his gay son, Newsweek reports.
Neither the father nor the son were identified in media accounts, but reports said they live in Turin, Italy.
Media accounts said the father agreed to pay �2,500 (just over $3,000) for the hit. "My son's a criminal," the man, now 75, reportedly told the goon for hire. "Break his fingers."
The son, now 43, is a surgeon; such an attack might very well have ended his career.
The father hatched the plot in 2017, after subjecting his son to years of harassment. Two precipitating events have been reported in media accounts: Newsweek reports that father and son argued "over a beach house in France," and the father threatened to have his son's legs broken.
But a second event also reportedly took place: A tabloid published a photo of the son together with a famed actor, reports Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
The son had been out as gay to his family for a year by then; La Repubblica reported that the father's response at the time of his coming out had been to lament that he would not have grandchildren. But when the photo ran in the tabloid, the father started putting violent plots in motion, as well as harassing his own wife after she sided with their son and left him after 42 years of marriage.
The finger-breaking scheme was only the latest act of violence the man had commissioned, reports note. Two months earlier, in February, 2017, the father hired goons to assault his son's same-sex partner, leaving the man hospitalized.
But the Romanian hit man the father had hired had doubts when, after tailing the son for two weeks, he saw nothing to verify the father's claim about his son's supposed criminality. Instead of carrying out the attack, the hit man revealed the plot to the son.
What followed was a year of intense fear as the surgeon lived under the shadow of his father's potential for violence. In the meantime, his father falsified a complaint against him, claiming that the son had assaulted him and "removed some of his teeth without permission," Newsweek reported.
Finally, in May, 2018, the son went to the police and reported his father's violent schemes to the police. Charges of aggravated assault and stalking followed. The two-year sentence was handed down this week.
Local LGBTQ advocacy group Arcigay Torino took to Facebook. Saying that "a parent became an executioner towards his own son because the son loves another man," Arcigay Torino declared that, "no person should live in fear because of their sexual orientation and gender identity."
The group pressed for the passage of a proposed law that would enhance criminal penalties for violence targeting the LGBTQ community.