The surreal inconsistency of prosecutors on Berlusconi and the mafia massacres

Even detective novels and spy stories, even though they deal with improbable events (and often fascinate precisely for this reason), while remaining in the realm of fictional stories, in order to be treated as a serious work of intellect, must maintain a logical thread and internal consistency. Yet it seems to be an impossible requirement for the plots of investigations into mafia massacres.

Silvio Berlusconi And Marcello Dell’Utri, as is well known, are being investigated by the Florence prosecutor’s office for “complicity in massacres”: that is, they would be the “external principals” of the 1993 continental massacres in Milan, Florence and Rome, including the failed attacks on Maurizio Costanzo and the Olympic stadium. Berlusconi and Dell’Utri have already been investigated several times for this crime, by different prosecutors in the same prosecutors and by the same prosecutors in different prosecutors, and always archived. The thesis, summarized in a somewhat brutal way, is that the Milanese industrialist had made a pact with Cosa Nostra to prepare the ground for his descent into politics, weakening the political-party system of the First Republic through a blow to the heart institutions already reeling from Tangentopoli and the economic crisis.

To place bombs around the country, by eye, even assuming all possible harm for the suspects, does not seem the most linear and effective strategy to win the elections. Just as it is hard to imagine what Berlusconi did the instigator of the attack on Maurizio Costanzo, who was the most important journalist of his televisions. Even assuming a nefarious pact with the mafia, to silence Costanzo Berlusconi’s anti-mafia commitment he had less bloody means: it’s okay that at the beginning of the 90s in Italy the labor market was rigid, but there was certainly no need for a car bomb to get rid of an employee.

In the same way, it is difficult to keep up with the words spoken to the prosecutor Luca Tescaroli by the massacre boss Joseph Graviano, according to which his grandfather is the silent partner of Cav. to which he would give “20 billion lire” of the mafia to buy 20 percent of its assets: the pact would be demonstrated by one “written paper” that Graviano is unable to provide, but never formalized by the notary due to the arrest of the boss. And so Berlusconi, hitherto described as extorted by the mafia, would suddenly the only man in history capable of stealing 20 billion from Cosa Nostra. Which he then also orders to plant bombs to win the elections.

The problem is not only the implausibility of the events, moreover in the absence of concrete evidence other than the accounts of collaborators with justice. Of course, a story with evident aspects of illogicality, already archived several times in recent decades, and not corroborated by solid documentary evidence it’s little stuff to mount media-judicial campaigns. But in this decades-long activity of the judiciary on massacres and the search for “external mandates” and “third levels”, there is also a theme of inconsistency with respect to other investigations and judicial reconstructions that are intertwined in this story.

For example, precisely on the story of the attack on Maurice Costanzoa few weeks ago the former prosecutor of the “Mafia state negotiation” Antonio Ingroia made an opposite reconstruction. As part of the process “Ndrangheta murderer” in Reggio Calabria – which deals with the same historical events and where Graviano was also heard and where another repentant said he having seen in 1978, after the Moro murder, Craxi Berlusconi and a boss of the Ndrangheta, make a political agreement in a citrus grove – Ingroia, this time in the role of lawyer, said that essentially the Mafia’s attack on Maurizio Costanzo had multiple purposes, including that of to convince Berlusconi to run for poweras his entourage was largely against taking the field. So Berlusconi is no longer the “instigator” of the attack on Costanzo, as hypothesized in Florence, but the “victim” as the object of a threat. It would not be the Cav. to use Cosa Nostra to make room for itself in the political arena with bomb blows, but Cosa Nostra to convince a reluctant Cav. to engage under the threat of attacks.

A similar reversal occurs with the trial on the so-called Negotiation, set up by Ingroia himself and by the prosecutor Nino DiMatteo (already author with Tescaroli of the investigations archived in Caltanissetta on Berlusconi and Dell’Utri “external principals”). Well, in the scaffolding of the negotiation, Berlusconi and his friend Dell’Utri are not the instigators of the 1993 massacres (as assumed in Florence), but one the victim and the other the intermediary of the mafia threat. According to the indictment, which was dismantled by the appeal sentence which acquitted all the political-institutional subjects, the premier Berlusconi was in fact the injured party of the “threat to the body politic of the state” that his no longer friend Dell’Utri reported to him on behalf of Cosa Nostra.

Then there is the connected story of the Via D’Amelio massacre. In the Negotiation trial, the prosecution argued that for the murder of Paolo Borsellino there was one “acceleration” by the mafia to eliminate the judge who was an obstacle to the pact with politics: the killing of Borsellino, in Riina’s intentions, would have definitively brought the state to its knees. Just that a few weeks ago Roberto Scarpinatosenator of the M5s and former attorney general in Palermo, one of the theorists of the negotiation, argued the opposite. For the interests of Cosa Nostra, says Scarpinato, the attack on Borsellino was “madness” given that the decree which introduced the 41-bis would have expired in a few days and would not have been converted: “It was enough to wait and Cosa nostra would have collected the result – says Scarpinato – Riina instead decides to anticipate the massacre, without being able to give a explanation to the other bosses, because he cannot reveal that the massacre was requested by external parties”. Thus the mafia does not try to bend the state to remove the 41-bis, but bends to the interests of “external subjects” by getting the 41-bis. The opposite of the thesis of the negotiation process.

But the real problem is not even that many magistrates spread opposing and irreconcilable versions and reconstructions. Perhaps it would also be healthy and interesting to see them collide by saying to each other who didn’t understand anything. What is more terrifying is that the various Tescaroli, Ingroia, Scarpinato and Di Matteo agree on everything: they often find themselves in conferences in which they agree with each other. Evidently without anyone understanding what the others are saying.

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• Luciano Capone

• Grew up in Irpinia, in Savignano. Studies in Milan, Catholic University. Liberal by training, journalist by deformation. Al Foglio first as a reader, then a collaborator, finally an editor. I mainly deal with economics, but also with politics, investigations, culture, miscellaneous and possible