SCANDIANO (Reggio Emilia) – The lawyer Giuseppe Pagliani returns to politics. He does so on the Civici and Centro-Right list, which supports the doctor Antonello Salsi’s candidacy for mayor of Scandiano. “His political-administrative project convinced me to give my support by running directly for the election of the city council – writes Pagliani – I deeply appreciate the union between a civic list and a political one, with the aim of creating a new model of administrative government for our land. In the last five years I have noticed a complete abandonment of the hamlets, in addition to the missed opportunities for Scandiano. We count on the direct connection with the main exponents of the current centre-right government, who will be able to support us in the relaunch of Scandiano and its numerous excellences”.
This last reference is to the friendship that binds Pagliani to Senator Maurizio Gasparri, Forza Italia group leader in the Senate. A world, that of Roman politics, which after Pagliani’s acquittal in the Court of Cassation on charges of external complicity in a mafia association, welcomed him back with open arms. Arceto’s lawyer wrote a book – also presented in the Senate – and has never stopped calling himself a “persecuted person”.
Pagliani’s troubles began in 2012, when the Bologna DDA documented his relationships and meetings with leading exponents of the Grande Aracri gang, some of whom – like Nicolino Sarcone – were already on trial for the mafia. Arrested on 28 January 2015, he was acquitted at first instance and sentenced to 4 years on appeal. But the Supreme Court, accepting an appeal from the defence, ordered the trial to be re-run, which then ended with acquittal on appeal and the subsequent definitive acquittal. Sentences that acquitted Pagliani of the charge of external complicity in a mafia association, but reconstructed approaches, meetings and phone calls with the bosses and stigmatized his conduct.
“If I had known that Nicolino Sarcone was at the dinner at the Antichi Sapori restaurant, I would never have gone,” Pagliani said firmly during one of the first presentations of his book “Twenty-three days”. But two weeks before the dinner with the elite of the gang, on 2 March 2012, the former leader of the PDL in the Province had already met Sarcone for the first time, even in the latter’s office. For the rest, the sentences speak for themselves. The one that acquitted him in the first instance in 2016, pronounced by the Gup Francesca Zavaglia, lashes out at “the ease and enthusiasm with which Pagliani immediately placed himself at the service of the boss” Sarcone and concludes: “The abundant evidential compendium offers, which reconstruction considered by the judge to be the most reasonable is that which sees Giuseppe Pagliani initially giving full and conscious adhesion to the project proposed to him by Nicolino Sarcone, only to then withdraw, perhaps even become frightened”.
In the acquittal sentence of the Court of Appeal of Bologna in 2021, however, the judges wrote that Pagliani, when he met Nicolino and Gianluigi Sarcone in the headquarters of their company, “was certainly aware of their criminal caliber”. They also write that the agreement between the Sarcones and Pagliani was “functional to the interests of both parties, in the politician’s awareness that one of the parties was the ‘Ndrangheta”.
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