At 6.17pm on March 5th the then mayor of Avellino Gianluca Festa is in his studio in the city palace dismantling his computer tower with makeshift tools. Failing to do so, he puts the PC in a box, calls an employee and gets help to carry the heavy PC into the car. He also loads two other less heavy boxes full of documents into his black Mercedes. Festa fiddling with the computer is filmed by the police microcameras that a private investigator, called to clean up the mayor’s office, had failed to find two days earlier.
These are the images contained in the precautionary custody order from the Avelino prosecutor’s office which yesterday led to him being placed under house arrest Gianluca Festaa municipal manager and an architect who collaborated with the Municipality.
The magistrate, in search of the computer and documents, had Festa’s home and that of his parents searched on March 6th without success. The mayor had taken papers and computers to an acquaintance who had made him disappear. During the car journey, the bugs intercept a dialogue between Festa and his son: «What are these?“, he answers: “Stuff to throw away».
On the morning of March 6, the mayor called a press conference at the Municipality, where he explained to journalists: «They didn’t find anything. If they were looking for a bomb they found a fuse.” He takes it out on the investigators: “I don’t allow anyone, not even the magistrates, to have doubts about my morality.”
In reality, the investigators found a lot, given that the crimes hypothesized against the mayor range from criminal association, to auction rigging, to corruption, to forgery, to corruption in the exercise of office.
Yesterday the suspect’s lawyer explained that the computer is an old model of rather dated manufacture, “it could not contain any element of investigative interest, if only because it was protected by a password known to many”.
Times
The legal case of Festa (a former basketball player with some appearances in Serie A and a former journalist) began last summer when he organized a series of maxi concerts for the August holiday. This is followed by direct assignments for the organization of services to allow names of the caliber of Tananai, Achille Lauro and Gaia to perform at Ferragosto. Then again in February the Eurocholate event which has been taking place in Perugia for years, moved to Avellino and Festa organized a fundraiser through his contacts in the form of sponsorship of the event among the municipality’s service providers. It reaches half a million sponsorships which it obtains from the company that collects taxes on behalf of the Municipality, from the company that obtained the contract for waste collection, from a large-scale catering company that wanted to be favored in waste disposal and pay minus Tarsu. According to the investigating magistrate, all behaviors had to be linked to the upcoming electoral campaign (in Avellino there will be voting in June). The mayor organizes major events not to promote the city but to obtain a return in terms of visibility and therefore on an electoral level, the magistrates essentially say in the precautionary custody order that put him under house arrest yesterday morning.
The competitions
Another line of investigation into Festa is that of public competitions. Also in this case the investigation is well documented by the microcameras in his office. In one frame there is Festa delivering an envelope to the father of an aspiring traffic policeman – investigators believe – with the answers to give to the examining commission. However, the young man boasts to his friends that he knows the answers and the investigation leads to an invasion during the oral test. Seizure of cell phones, searches, and a notice of investigation arrives for two municipal managers. In another competition for wiretap technicians they indicate the mayor as the one who directs the commission towards one of the competitors to be favored, because it is close to his political party (which is not that of the Democratic Party, from which he was expelled in 2019 when he ran against the democrats for the Common).
The investigation by the prosecutor Domenico Airoma, entrusted to the deputy Vincenzo Toscano, draws a scenario in which the mayor appears as the one who decides the management of any administrative initiative, directing the choices of the managers as in the case of assignments of tasks below the threshold. He unpacks the assignments, whether it involves replacing the fixtures at the municipal building or lighting a rock concert, so as to stay below the legal threshold that would require a public tender.
A management that was also possible thanks to a particular interpretation of the rules on the publication of Municipality documents. Only the expenditure decisions and not the resolutions were published on the municipal noticeboard. Well 108 resolutions of the municipal council, relating precisely to activities relating to the investigation, were in fact made known only the day before yesterday on the day the prefectural commissioner took office.
In this way, as denounced by the minority city councilors and by a parliamentary question from the Five Star Movement, the administration’s decisions were known only after the games were over, when tasks had been assigned and contracts with companies decided. A climate that also attracted the attention of the parliamentary anti-mafia inquiry commission. Yesterday the commissioners requested the documents of the investigations into three municipal administrations where there have been arrests in recent days: Paterno, Trapani and Avellino.
Tags: disappear hide evidence crime
