Dedicating a square to Enzo Tortora is a leftist choice

Today, on the fortieth anniversary of her father’s arrest, Gaia Tortora will be in Bergamo to present her book together with me and Filippo Sensi. Afterwards, we will proceed together to name the recently redeveloped gardens of Piazza Dante after Enzo Tortora, due to his battle for just justice. The building of the Public Prosecutor’s Office overlooks the north side of the square.

On June 17, 1983 – forty years ago – Gaia Tortora was a fourteen year old about to take the eighth grade exam. At 4.15 that morning her father, Enzo Tortora, was arrested in Rome, where he was staying in a hotel. Collected before dawn, he was transferred to the nearby Carabinieri headquarters. The accusation: Camorra-type criminal association aimed at drug and arms trafficking. At noon he was brought out in handcuffs and escorted by two officers. To get on his cell phone – parked on the opposite side of the road – he was forced to pass in front of a swarm of journalists, photographers and cameramen. The arrest was carried out as part of an operation by the Naples prosecutor’s office which included 856 arrest warrants and 412 simultaneous arrests. Against Tortora, only the declarations of two pentiti of the Camorra – Pasquale Pandico and Pasquale Barra known as “‘o animali”, the killer of Francis Turatello as well as devourer of his entrails – who accused him of having dealt drugs in the world of entertainment on behalf of Raffaele Cutolo.

Before obtaining house arrest, Enzo Tortora remained in the Bergamo prison for seven months, during which he was only interrogated twice by prosecutors Lucio Di Pietro and Felice Di Persia; meanwhile other pentiti, enticed by the reductions in sentences promised by the Cossiga law, mentioned his name. He was thus indicted, while 215 of the more than 800 arrested were released because, it turned out, they had been arrested by mistake. The vast majority of the media chose in those months to represent Enzo Tortora as a criminal, all the more contemptible due to his great popularity. There was no evidence against him but nobody seemed to care. After a seven-month trial, Tortora was sentenced to ten years and six months’ imprisonment; in the 267 pages of the sentence that concerned him, he was indicated as “socially dangerous”: “a cynical merchant of death”. Except that he was innocent. It turned out that the telephone numbers contained in the address book of Giuseppe Puca, a camorrist near Cutolo, from which the prosecutors had left to interrogate Pandico, belonged to a certain “Enzo Tortona”, whom someone had confused with “Enzo Tortora”. On 15 September 1986 the second degree trial saw him acquitted with full formula (and with him 112 others of the 191 defendants), recognizing the unreliability of the pentiti: sentence confirmed by the Cassation of 1987. He died the following year, worn out by the judicial affair that had overwhelmed him, while the Neapolitan magistrates who in the meantime had sued for damages were acquitted by the CSM. In his grave he wanted a copy of History of the infamous column, the essay that Alessandro Manzoni dedicated to the abuses suffered by innocent citizens during the plague of 1630.

Forty years after Gaia Tortora, her second daughter, today a popular television journalist of TgLa7, presenter of “Omnibus”, has decided to tell this story from her point of view and that of her family, indelibly marked by the events that took the I start that June 17th. The book you wrote is titled “Head up, and forward”. His father’s judicial history is concentrated in the first pages. The subsequent ones document the pain that that affair has poured into the lives of the people who loved him, changing its course, and not just immediately. Overcoming her instinctive reserve, in the belief that stories can help change the world, Gaia has decided to tell what happened to her – from that morning forty years ago to today – in alternating phases characterized by strength and extreme fragility, anger and shame, fear and indignation. The fact is, as Gaia observes, that nothing can be ignored. Because the “Tortora case” – beyond the sensation caused by seeing an enormously popular character accused, detained and sentenced without any proof, and in the meantime described as a monster by newspapers and television – has not changed Italian justice. “The innocent continue to end up in prison unjustly, while the media system insists on claiming the right to judge them prematurely, decreeing their innocence or guilt by popular acclaim”.

“We are becoming the coffin of law”, Enzo Tortora often repeated, referring to the times of justice, preventive detention, the dramatic situation in prisons. And we are still there, if in the last ten years citizens imprisoned awaiting trial have consistently been 35 per cent of prisoners, against 22 per cent of the European average, and 12 thousand 583 people – recalled Alessandro Barbano -, as many as the inhabitants of Isernia, have been acquitted or acquitted in the last three years after having ended up in prison as innocents. And if a criminal trial continues to take an average of six to seven years, three times the European average. And if the overcrowding rate – which in Italy is on average 119 percent – reaches 151 percent in Lombardy, with peaks of 184 percent in Milan San Vittore and 178 percent in the via Gleno prison in Bergamo, the house prison where Gaia Tortora went to visit her father during the months of detention. And if in just one year, as happened in 2022, as many as 84 inmates committed suicide in Italian prisons. The case of Enzo Tortora remains exemplary also for the behavior of the media, who with very few exceptions immediately judged him guilty, seeing him as the protagonist of a narrative as irresistible as monotonous: the fall of the untouchable. The judges were described as “serious, scrupulous and prudent”, while Barra, the Camorra killer who accused the popular presenter, was “an electronic brain”, “a precise database, without hesitation”.

Enzo Tortora and his family lived the fiercest of media pillories on their own flesh, fueled by the false common sense that led Camilla Cederna – among others – to declare: “You don’t go handcuffing someone in the middle of the night if there aren’t good reasons”. “Something must have done. Good people don’t get arrested.” Few exceptions to this ruthless rule: Piero Angela, whom Gaia affectionately describes, almost like a second father, Enzo Biagi, Federico Fellini, Giorgio Bocca, Stefano Rodotà, Leonardo Sciascia, Indro Montanelli. And Vittorio Feltri, who was the first (and only one), while the trial was underway, to take the initiative to call the famous telephone number contained in Giuseppe Puca’s address book and attributed to Tortora, to discover that it belonged to a completely different and unsuspecting person; and that he verified that the day in which he claimed to have given Tortora a shoebox full of drugs, the repentant Gianni Melluso was actually in the maximum security prison in Campobasso. A few exceptions, a few straight backs. Gaia Tortora has not written a pamphlet, she has written the story of her life, with the urgency of one who feels – after the death of her sister Silvia, in 2022 – a special duty of testimony, perhaps also towards herself, and a responsibility increased by being the “last of the turtledoves”. But her book affects more than a pamphlet. Because she has the strength of firsthand experience. The pain floats, and the only way to make sense of it is to turn it into a battle, in this case for more ethical journalism and a more attentive judiciary.

This is the direction in which the justice reform package approved in recent days by the government is finally moving. It is paradoxical that it is promoted by a right-wing government, but so be it. The tenor of the reactions tells us that we are still there: presumption of innocence vs presumption of guilt, rule of law vs culture of pillory, with a large slice of the political left unable to embrace a banner of common sense and freedom. Enzo Tortora would certainly have known which side to take. In the short time he has left to live, after his judicial odyssey, he dedicated himself entirely to battles such as the one on the civil liability of magistrates, with the referendum that in 1987 received 80.5% of “yes”, or that in favor of the victims of maljustice. Radical battles, but also highly liberal ones. “Because – he recalled – they concern the freedom and dignity of human beings, they concern the civilization of a country”.