They are unable to make Marcello Dell’Utri a defendant in the massacre, just as they failed to do so with Berlusconi, and so the Florentine magistrates who have been investigating the bombings of 1993 and 1994 for thirty years fall back on his assets. The prosecutor’s office has filed the documents closing the investigations, the formula that preludes the request for indictment, for a crime provided for by the Rognoni La Torre law, which requires those convicted of mafia crimes to report any change in assets in the ten years following the sentence. Dell’Utri apparently omitted the report. This is what they think in Florence. While in Palermo just a month ago, a court not only rejected the request to subject Dell’Utri to special surveillance and to seize his assets, but also dismantled the theorem that arouses so much passion in Tuscany. With these words: “The illicit nature of any revenue traced, however, cannot be presumed, and for which the protagonists have provided an explanation not contradicted by the evidence.” It’s called good faith. And it’s called friendship and affection, what has linked the relationship between Silvio and Marcello for sixty years of their lives.
And it’s called guilt that afflicted the former until the end, aware of the fact that if he hadn’t entered politics in 1994 and hadn’t involved the manager of Publitalia in his project, his lifelong friend would never have been not even touched by any magistrate and would never have been tried or convicted for external complicity, and would not have been sent to prison. This is exactly what Miranda Ratti, Dell’Utri’s ex-wife, intended to say when, speaking on the phone with a friend, and intercepted, she alluded to the great debt that Silvio had with Marcello. Instead, she is interpreted as if she were aware of real blackmail from her husband towards the president of Forza Italia.
In fact, in the filing of the papers, the prosecutors of Florence write, in relation to the violation of the Rognoni La Torre law but above all of a second new charge, that of “fictitious registration of assets” for fifteen million euros paid by Berlusconi to Miranda Ratti: ” with the aggravating circumstance of having committed the crimes of fraudulent transfer in order to conceal the more serious conduct of complicity in the massacres, attributable to Silvio Berlusconi and Dell’Utri himself for which Berlusconi was investigated… constituting the latter’s disbursements the amount received by Dell’Utri to ensure impunity for Silvio Berlusconi”.
An argument full of holes. Especially one. For thirty years various prosecutors with an obsession with the former prime minister have opened investigations into him because they suspect that one fine day he told the Cosa Nostra bosses to plant bombs and kill, so that he could become head of government . As if in 1994 Berlusconi had then implemented his project through a coup d’état and not free elections. For four
times, from Caltanissetta to Florence, files were opened and then closed with dismissals largely requested by the prosecutors themselves.
And the political thesis that wants to see the cessation of the massacres in the first months of 1994 as a result of the victory of Forza Italia was denied by the justice collaborators themselves, who were many and very talkative in the Cosa Nostra trials. Pietro Grasso himself, former national anti-mafia prosecutor, said this some time ago during an interview with Lucia Annunziata. When I went to ask Gaspare Spatuzza, he remembered, he told me that by now the leaders of the Corleonesi were all at Ucciardone. The massacres had stopped because the leaders of Cosa Nostra had now been arrested and because the State had won. But it seems that some magistrates do not want to accept it. The prosecutor Luca Tescaroli, now no longer in Florence but in Prato to manage another office, was 27 years old and was a simple substitute when this type of investigation began in Caltanissetta. Yet, after four filings, he opened another one in 2017, one that still hasn’t closed, even though Silvio Berlusconi is no longer with us. In Florence there is no longer even that director of the Dia who had shown so much curiosity even in the formation of the assets that gave rise to the birth of Fininvest, the “super policeman” Francesco Nannucci, transferred to Lucca with great displeasure of the prosecutors whom he had supported in the investigations into Berlusconi. Deputy prosecutor Luca Turco remains, the one Matteo Renzi likes because he has looked after his family for a long time.
In order to continue to keep that file open after seven years and after the antics of the Baiardo ice cream man affair and the mysterious and non-existent photo, the prosecutor’s office will have to demonstrate the substance of that alleged “blackmail” by Dell’Utri to Berlusconi. Did the silence of the former president of Publitalia serve to “ensure impunity for Berlusconi”? Then it must be demonstrated that the leader of Forza Italia had committed a crime, that of having instigated bombs and massacres, with the complicity of Dell’Utri.
Why then do the Florentine prosecutors not have the courage to ask for at least one of the two accomplices, the surviving one, to be sent to trial for the massacre? Let them do it, and let’s see if there will be a judge in Florence, or in any other part of Italy, willing to commit a trial. If not, ask for the fifth filing. And what do Florence’s chief prosecutor Filippo Spezia and the CSM think of all this?
