The Dark Heart of Italy (22 page)

That, though, was to come later. In April 1992, after the general
election, the country’s politicians had to choose a new President of
the Republic. They were on the eighteenth ballot of the tortuous process,
with the usual names in the hat, when one of the anti-Mafia
judges in Palermo was killed. Giovanni Falcone, his wife and his
bodyguards, had been killed as they drove from Palermo airport to
the city centre in an explosion which tore apart hundreds of metres
of the motorway. The indignation against Italy’s injustices reached
new levels. The scenes from a funeral, in which one of the young widows
of a bodyguard accused the church of containing mafiosi who
would have to get on their knees if they wanted her forgiveness, were
shown on live television. Bedsheets were hung out from balconies
across Sicily, mourning Falcone and his escort. (Within months,
Paolo Borsellino, another of the investigating magistrates, was killed
as he visited his mother.) By then, it was obvious that the revolution
was being fought on more than one front, and parliament was finally
awoken to the acute danger of civilian disorder facing the country.
7000 troops were sent to Sicily, and a new President of the Republic,
Oscar Luigi
Scalfaro
, was finally chosen: ‘The abuse of public
money,’ he said
,

is a very serious thing, which defrauds and robs the faithful, tax-paying citizen
and shatters completely their trust: there’s no greater evil, no greater
danger for democracy, than the turbid link between politics and business
.
7

His indignation seemed shared by the rest of the country. The bitterness
of ordinary Italians was prompted by the fact that the only tax in
Italy that had been imposed with anything like systematic efficiency
(the ‘tangente’) had been the one that vanished into private hands.
The response was that the Clean Hands pool enjoyed an enormous
groundswell of support: people began wearing T-Shirts saying
‘Milano ladrona, Di Pietro non perdona’
(‘Thieving Milan, Di
Pietro is unforgiving’). Finally it seemed as if those words written in
every Italian courtroom,
‘La legge è uguale per tutti’,
‘the law’s
equal for all’, were coming true. Endless graffiti appeared across
Italy:
‘Grazie Di Pietro’,
or
‘Forza Colombo’.
Over the ensuing
months, Gianni De
Michelis
(the man who had written the book on
the ‘culture’ of Italian night-clubs) was pelted with eggs and tomatoes
in Venice. Bettino Craxi was showered with coins outside the
Hotel Raphael in Rome: ‘Do you want these as well?’ chanted the mob
.

The human toll of the revolution wasn’t only counted amongst
Italy’s magistrates. Throughout the next eighteen months, and as a
27 billion lire bribe, the biggest of all, was unearthed, a long list of
suicides added to the list of illustrious corpses. Those deaths would
change the symbolism of the revolution, turning it from a morality
play into a national tragedy. As always, slaughters accompanied the
upheaval. In May 1993, five people died when a bomb exploded in
the Uffizi museum in Florence. In July five people were killed by a
bomb in Milan
.

By then, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi had replaced Giuliano Amato as
the Italian Prime Minister. The lira had, like sterling, become the
object of currency speculation, had duly lost 15% of its value and had
been forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Parliament,
which had traditionally benefited from immunity, had been handed
over 600 requests to lift parliamentary privilege; Craxi himself was
the subject of seventeen different investigations, and he would later
flee to exile in Tunisia
.

Thus, the most obvious consequence of Clean Hands was that
there was a political ‘voragine’, an abyss into which almost anyone
could step. The Christian Democrats ironically renamed themselves
the Peoples’ Party. The Communists had already changed their
name to the Democrats of the Left. The Northern League, one of
whose number had brandished a noose in parliament to publicise
his revolutionary credentials, were gaining ground in the area of
Italy above the Po river. The MSI, the neo-Fascists, had reverted to
the more presentable Gianfranco Fini for leadership (Mussolini, he
famously claimed, was ‘Italy’s greatest statesman of the century’).
The progress of those two fringe parties was shown in various elections
in 1993. In June, Milan, traditionally the power-base of Bettino
Craxi and his Socialists, elected a mayor from the Northern League.
In the autumn, Gianfranco Fini was narrowly defeated in his bid to
become mayor of Rome (taking, however, 46.9% of the vote); later,
he would decide to rename the MSI the ‘National Alliance
’.

There was still, however, as one notorious businessman put it with
the usual football metaphor, a ‘midfield’ which was ‘desolately
empty’. In January 1994, that businessman sent a video to
Reuters
,
RAI and his own television networks, announcing the formation of
a new political party
, Forza Italia:

As rhetoric, that announcement was of unrivalled brilliance. Even in
translation, that combination of moderation, modernity, ‘cleanliness’,
statal good sense instead of a left wing ‘cartel’, is effective.
Berlusconi’s popularity rested, not least, on his Midas touch in business
and on his whole-hearted endorsement of Antonio Di Pietro
(who he would ask to be his Minister for Justice): ‘His [Di
Pietro’s
]
moralising anxiety belongs to everyone. My newspapers, my television
channels, my group, have always been in the front line in supporting
the Clean Hands judges’. Another of the Clean Hands magistrates,
Tiziana
Parenti, would later take her place on the Forza Italia
benches in Parliament
.

The memory, though, is short. Only a few years after the Clean Hands earthquake, the whole episode is already being assiduously rewritten.

Every few weeks during the summer, my ‘betrothed’ and I make
the spectacular journey across the mountains that takes us from the humid basin of Parma towards the warm, windy air of the Tuscan coast. At one point of the Cisa pass, as the road winds through the pine forests, the mountains loom into view. They appear snow-peaked because of the white quarries where huge blocks of marble are dynamited and lined up by the side of the roads. It’s this white marble which, interlaced with black or green, makes Tuscan cathedrals – in Pisa or Siena – look like something squeezed from a toothpaste tube. Once last summer, we decided to stop in a little mountain town, Aulla, and eat a sandwich in the main square. Opposite us were two rhetorical monuments. One was to the fallen from the war, and described in one, long-winded sentence, the ‘ardent hearth of vivid fire which at the beginning of Nazi-Fascist oppression released a spark which inflamed the children of the Resistance, who won fame with the legendary sacrifice of their women and their bloodied men who on an impassable path underwent atrocious slaughters, devastations and reprisals…’

Next to it was a small needle of white marble dedicated to the victims of the Clean Hands revolutionaries. ‘Intolerance, like bombs, kills precious liberty’, it says. ‘When the word is feeble’, read the words of one parliamentarian who committed suicide, ‘there’s nothing left but the gesture.’ ‘Let us remember in the dark of every injustice the victims and their executioners’, are the words of the Aulla mayor engraved into the marble. There are billboards announcing that the town is a ‘Di Pietro-free zone’ and there’s a cunning quotation in Latin:
Summum ius, Summa
iniuria
(‘the greater the law, the greater the injustice’, which implies, I suppose, that the rule of law is not a particularly good thing). As ever, the roles of criminal and victim are so blurred and confused that no one can ever be sure whether Italy’s ‘Jacobin justice’ is worse than the ‘criminals’ it prosecutes.

Having been (in his own words) in the ‘front line’ of support for Clean Hands in 1994, Berlusconi has also completely changed tack. Although he won that election in 1994, his government was dogged by accusations of corruption against his entourage. His brother, Paolo Berlusconi, and Marcello Dell’Utri were both
accused of financial crimes: Paolo Berlusconi has, in various court cases, actually admitted paying bribes. In one case, he admitted paying a total of 1.335 billion lire, from 1987 onwards, to the town council of Pieve, in return for clearance to turn a castle into a residential building with a golf course. In court, he was fined the same total as the original bribe, and received a definitive, one year’s suspended sentence. The accusation against Dell’Utri, head of Publitalia, is that he over-inflated the cost of advertising space on Mediaset channels. Part of that surplus money was then sent back under the counter to the people (over-) paying for the advertising. On appeal, a guilty verdict against Dell’Utri was upheld. He was sentenced to one year and ten months. Berlusconi himself, whilst ironically hosting a G7 summit at Napoli about organised crime, was served an
avviso di garanzia
(notice of investigation) in December 1994. His troubled government fell weeks later as the indignant Northern League withdrew its support from the coalition. Since then Berlusconi has been in opposition (an experience he describes, with his usual biblical sense of destiny, as the ‘crossing of the desert’), fulminating against the judges who he once claimed as his allies.

Other investigations have begun, not least into the means by which, during the privatisation of IRI overseen by Romano Prodi, Berlusconi managed to block the acquisition of SME (IRI’s food entity) by a business rival, and duly acquire it himself. The accusations centre on Cesare Previti, Berlusconi’s Roman lawyer. (The two met when Previti was selling his client’s estate at Arcore to Berlusconi back in the 1970s.) The accusation goes that Previti had bribed the Roman judge who ‘refereed’ the deal, thus allowing Berlusconi to complete the acquisition. For reasons unknown, the bid of Berlusconi’s consortium was accepted, whilst that of Carlo De Benedetti was (despite agreement having been reached on the 497 billion lire purchase price) rejected. The means by which Berlusconi acquired Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing house, is equally mired in controversy. The accused deny the charges and both cases are on-going. It is, of course, impossible to know what to believe, especially since the man ‘gazumped’ by Berlusconi in
both deals, Carlo De Benedetti, himself owns
La Repubblica
and
L’Espresso
, which means that parts of the left-wing media have no pretence of impartiality in reporting such ‘scandals’.

Thus, Clean Hands is being rewritten, and the revolution has almost come a full circle. Those who once seemed to promise a cleaner future have been suspected of dirty pasts. The defence line of those accused is incredibly clever. The Second Republic, they say, is really very different to the First, and you can’t judge one according to the rules of the other. Before 1992 corruption was so rife in the upper echelons of politics and finance that it was impossible not to collude in some way. Now that Clean Hands has taught us all a lesson, we should wipe the slate clean and start over again. Berlusconi’s best defence, one which can only be deployed through hint rather than admission, is that he was only ever doing what everyone else was doing during the old days of the
salotto
buono
. It’s exactly the same line that Bettino Craxi used in 1992, when he deployed the classic Italian defence not that he was innocent, but that everyone else was just as guilty. Craxi admitted to ‘an irregular system of financing’, but underlined that ‘all the parties took part in it’. According to that defence, the only difference between Berlusconi or Craxi and their electorates is the scale, rather than the character, of the crime; and if that’s true, it’s obvious that any punishment that is meted out appears excruciatingly selective.

Maybe Craxi wasn’t any worse than any of us; maybe, the
Forza
Italia
rhetoric goes, Berlusconi is no worse than us, and we’re hypocrites if we pretend he is. Some Italian commentators, like Pietro Scoppola, have said precisely that: the lynching of high-ranking politicians was supported by the public since it represented some kind of vicarious absolution: we’re all guilty and we needed ‘illustrious’ names to redeem us of our sins. When the revolution began to reach lesser names and impose ‘cleanliness’ instead of ‘cunning’, the bedrock of support for the magistrates collapsed.

Thus the fact that Berlusconi is under accusation only means that the magistrates are biased against him. He has, in fact,
become a master of the art of
vittimismo
, complaining that every accusation against him is simply the work of those ‘Jacobin judges’. Seven years after he offered Antonio Di Pietro a job, Berlusconi now says: ‘
Tangentopoli
never existed. Clean Hands was only a colossal conquest commissioned by the Communists and Democrats of the Left’. Thus, according to the man who most benefited from the whole affair, Clean Hands wasn’t cleaning up Italian democracy at all, but actually strangling it. There was, say his supporters, an excess of
protagonismo
, in which a handful of judges suddenly appeared to enjoy rather too much their centre-stage; the leaks to the press about imminent arrests turned the judicial process into spectacular, televisual witch-hunts; the ‘cautionary custody’, which locked up politicians for months on end, was an abuse of judicial power, especially since white collar criminals pose no threat to society.