Why Messina Denaro’s arrest will curb Nordio’s “revolution” on wiretapping – Corriere.it

Concept number 1: It can never be reiterated enough that there will be no reforms that will affect interceptions on the mafia and terrorism.

Concept number 2: Interceptions are mainly used to identify the movements of people suspected of mafia and terrorism. Preventive ones are also essential. Judicial ones involving people who are neither defendants nor suspects are another matter and who, through a perverse and controlled mechanism, end up in the newspapers and offend citizens who are not involved in the investigation at all.

Concept number 3: We will carry on to the end, we will not falter and we will not hesitate. The Copernican revolution on the abuse of interceptions is a cornerstone of our programme.

In theory, January 18 in the Senate Carlo Nordio, kept the point in his ultra-guarantee battle for one of the reforms he has been fighting for for years and on which he now, as Minister of Justice, says he does not want to back down (there are also little things like the separation of the careers of magistrates and the abolition of compulsory prosecution).

In reality, however, there is an increasingly widespread feeling that the arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro, due to the political and media impact it has had, has put an almost definitive brake on Nordio’s revolutionary intentions in terms of wiretapping. A slowdown has actually been underway for some time, because in the end Giorgia Meloni who commands is the culture of the Prime Minister, if she cannot be defined as an executioner, certainly ultra-legalitarian and instinctively collide with the risk that a loosening of the bolts of justice will make someone get away with it. Especially if the crimes of that someone – white-collar workers, politicians, administrators – in many cases are not so distinguishable from those of the mafia. Not surprisingly, the prosecutor of Palermo Maurizio De Lucia spoke to Corriere about the mafia bourgeoisie to describe the amoral world to which some exponents of the professions, politics and business belong, trained for generations to solve problems through the mediation of a mafia always available.

Of course, it remains a bit of a mystery why Meloni chose Nordio, if the cultural distance between the two is so evident
(the Review had already dealt with it at the end of October),
but a mystery up to a point. Prime Minister Nordio likes her for her brilliance and her total independence of judgment, as well as for her ability to stand up to any debate in any red robe and to oppose the mainstream thought that irritates her so much. If he proposed him as a center-right candidate for the presidency of the Republic, just a year ago, because choices like this are fully part of Melon’s hegemonic design over the coalition, the project of a large Conservative Party that annexes more or less everything, leaving just a Northern League rib at its side in the style of a Bavarian CSU. And such a project cannot fail to include cultures that are more guaranteed than his own.

But however strong the premier’s intellectual crush on Nordio is, faced with the calls of the forest and the urgencies of politics there is no crush that holds. And so. as Francesco Olivo writes on The print, for Meloni the “victory of the state” should be celebrated and therefore not the time to return to the season of clashes with the judges. The result is that, beyond the proclamations, Nordio’s agenda will probably have to change, and that the idea of ​​severely limiting interceptions for minor crimes – a cultural rather than a legal case than in the hyper-guaranteed approach (above all) of Forza Italia it includes those of corruption — once it leaves the window of more or less good intentions, it will re-enter the door of realpolitik.

So far, in fact, words like those of the former National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor Federico Cafiero de Raho — Most of the time wiretapping does not arise for the fight against the mafias. We arrive at the mafias later. Because interceptions start from corruption and other crimes and developing on this track then arrive at everything behind it – they could be declassified upon exiting a yellow-red toga that entered the parliamentary ranks of the 5 Stars and therefore in themselves, from the point of view of the guaranteed center-right, not credible. But now the importance of the so-called spy crimes, which make it possible to trace purely mafia-related criminal activities, is reaffirmed with the same concepts by Cafiero’s successor.

In a long interview with The Republic, Giovanni Melillo establishes points which, in the new climate inaugurated by the arrest of the Trapani boss, will be very difficult for Nordio to shake. Therefore, explains the Prosecutor: It is a delicate and complex field that questions all national systems. First of all, because in the digital age, incomparably larger and more delicate masses of information flow into investigations and processes than in the past. This objectively poses the need for rigorous governance of tools and techniques of investigations involving fundamental rights. Therefore, it is up to the legislator to draw the boundaries. However, as a national prosecutor, I have the responsibility to underline that today the mafias speak above all the language of corruption and tax fraud, a language widely practiced by and in the market, acting as a bond between heterogeneous interests.

a fundamental concept, which is worth reiterating: corruption and tax fraud, if they are not crimes attributable directly to the mafia, are often committed by mafia, and therefore to say that you want to intercept the mafia but not whoever commits those crimes is not in feet. In short, the mafiosi are often traced starting from those crimes, from their financial breeding ground, which has become their favorite broth.

For these reasons, subtracting corruption from the crimes that can be intercepted at this moment is unthinkable, and Melillo demonstrates this with a rhetorical device that surprises, displaces and even amuses, in its ability to illuminate the issue: It would be serious damage. Because a non-secondary part of the knowledge that we build every day comes from investigations into the most relevant phenomena of corruption and tax fraud. On the contrary, it should be emphasized that it is more difficult to penetrate the secrecy of corruptive agreements than to penetrate the contents of a mafia meeting. Investigative experience tells us: it frequently happens that illicit meetings between public officials and entrepreneurs are surrounded by precautions and elusive techniques that rival the secrecy of mafia movements.

Melillo doesn’t stop there: he defends all interceptions, even the most invasive ones, the so-called trojan, which enters computers, telephones and the lives of others, to quote a splendid German film, in a way that his detractors not by chance they compare to the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious espionage. Nordio, today in the Senate, was just a little lighter, choosing an older yet more sophisticated historical parameter: What is emerging in the Senate Judiciary Commission on the possibility of manipulating the interceptions of the trojan is nothing new. The great Richelieu said “give me a letter and a pair of scissors and I will hang the author”. just take a letter, cut and crop it and copy and paste that you attribute to the author of the letter things that he never thought. All arguments that Melillo liquidates seraphically: On the side of corruption, I think that instrument is also necessary. Which must be anchored to rigorous parameters. But I repeat: it belongs to the political responsibility to define these choices, as well as to evaluate the timing of these choices.

Here, political responsibility and the time for choices are now conspiring for a freezing of Nordio’s Copernican ambitions. A woman of the world like Simonetta Martone, a former magistrate, historical face of Porta a Porta and now a Northern League parliamentarian, predicts how it will end: What will change is the use of wiretaps for publication in the media. A repainted for media purposes, or anti-media if you prefer. If it is not enough for Nordio, it is not so absurd to predict that sooner or later he will give up everything, charge and coalition, and maybe move on to the third pole. Renzi loves it, and he reciprocated with the preface to his latest book. As Richelieu would have said too, tout se tient.