Pirate video racketeer’s Bahar ic-Caghaq villa up for sale at €7 million

The enormous Bahar ic-Caghaq villa built in the early 1980s by pirate video racketeer and Valletta market hawker Joe Difesa, 64, is up for sale at €7 million.

When Difesa built his house, which is loosely modelled on El Fureidis in Santa Barbara, California – the mansion used as the location for Tony Montana’s home in the contemporaneous film Scarface, which was on the market last year for $35 million – he was just another hawker ta’ fuq il-Monti in Valletta.

Except that he wasn’t just another hawker, but was running a large black market operation in pirate videos, buying spools of blank tape, copying blockbuster films and selling them first in Malta, then Libya, then in other parts of the Mediterranean.

Poor photographs of the now badly dated building are on the website of real-estate agents Cottoner Properties.

The description includes information that Villa Difesa has a reception area which can hold 600 people. The villa has been used for large receptions without the required permit for some time now, including parties for Labour politicians in the last general election campaign.

And because some people never know where to draw the line and must always push that envelope further and further, Joe Difesa filed a Constitutional case last month, claiming millions of euros in compensation for lost earnings because in 1992 he applied for a permit to use his mansion as a wedding hall and the permit was granted only last year.

His human rights have been violated, he said, because the authorities had no reason to refuse his application.

This is a racketeer talking, whose black market operations in pirate videos and later, pirate DVDs, brought Malta into disrepute particularly with the Motion Picture Association of America.

What are the odds that the Constitutional Court will now find in his favour and that he will be granted his sought millions in compensation because he was not given a permit to profit even further from the proceeds of crime.

A scene from the early 1990s television series Ipokriti (The Hypocrites) for which Villa Difesa was used as the main location.

Villa Difesa in Bahar ic-Caghaq

El Fureidis, the Santa Barbara mansion used as the location for Tony Montana’s house in the 1983 film Scarface.