A strip of plain between the sea and the mountains, this is Liguria after all. And it is from here that we must start to understand the appetites and characters that have always revolved around the strip of land of which the Port is the heart, and which are now being fully hit by the investigation that leads to the arrest of governor Toti. Because anyone who has commanded over the centuries under the Lantern knows that everything depends on the ships that come and go. The port means money and power. And trouble.
More than Giovanni Toti, who is from Viareggio and until his election in 2015 knew the studios of Cologno Monzese better than the alleys of Genoa, the true connoisseur of the eternal power of the port is Aldo Spinelli, a terminal operator by profession – that is, lord of the docks and moorings – who at the age of eighty-four ends up under house arrest, a painful mooring point for a life of toil and pleasure, of casinos and football: one with such clear ideas on the intertwining of football and business that being president of both Genoa and of the container terminal in 1989 appointed the minister of the merchant navy Gianni Prandini as vice president of the team. So, just to make sure you don’t get it wrong.
Since then, and we are talking about forty years ago, everything has been a crescendo. Now that the interceptions with Toti have become public, many will seem to recognize him, the old Spinelli, in those tignomous and slightly cocky jokes. And so too in the most colorful story of all, the one that brought the only prisoner, the port president Paolo Signorini, to the cell: the evenings and nights at the Monte Carlo casino, with free chips and so on. A tax that Spinelli reluctantly pays, grumbling about the champagne, but which must not have cost him too much, given that he is at home in Monte Carlo, an inveterate gambler with legendary fortune, and as such has access to all the facilities of important clients.
From the docks of the port, Spinelli has seen politicians rise and fall, gaining concessions from each for decades. He had also been a partner with Sandro Biasotti, who would become president of the Region, until they had argued, he had bought his shares and since he also had those of the camalli, creating a monopoly which made him end up under investigation. Then Biasotti was defeated and the eternal Genoese left, Claudio Burlando, returned to power. Spinelli complied.
Another who had to deal with the immortality of the PCI and the post-PCI Liguria was Bernardo Caprotti, the creator of Esselunga, who here – as in red Emilia – saw any attempt to open a supermarket rejected: and now it’s up to his son-in-law Francesco Moncada being investigated for having thanked the finally granted licenses with some electoral advert.
This is how the world goes, this is how Genoa goes. And it is no coincidence that Maurizio Rossi, editor of Primo Canale, the local TV which – until Tele Nord came to undermine it – had a monopoly on local information, also gets entangled in the Guardia di Finanza’s investigation. in the capital and in a large part of Liguria: for any mayor and governor it was essential to have good relations, and that the Prosecutor’s Office now accuses Toti and Rossi of having exaggerated should not be too surprising. The ugly part, the indigestible part of the ordinance is the other, the accusation on the trafficking of votes of the investigated and uninvestigated politicians with the Sicilian colony of Genoa, all people from Riesi who have moved over the years, and over whom the shadow hangs of the clans. But of the four hundred votes that they were supposed to bring in exchange for hiring and favors, no one – when the polls were opened – seems to have noticed.
So everything revolves there again, around the goods port, around the billion-dollar dam that is about to be built and will cause traffic to grow dramatically. Gentlemen, the one with the nights at the casino, at the port arrives when Toti is already president but his launch pad starts a year earlier, because it is the Renzi government that appoints him head of the Infrastructure Department of the Ministry of Transport. From there it’s all a climb of power and determination: until he clashes with one of the most powerful men in the world of the sea, the Italian-Swiss Gianluigi Aponte: who one day calls him screaming for the contract for the bunker that Signorini wants to give to Spinelli. «He was out of the grace of God, he said that he is going to the prosecutor’s office», Signorini tells his friend. And the other, without getting scared: “If he goes to the Prosecutor’s Office, I’ll go to the Prosecutor’s Office, not him.”
Then someone in the Prosecutor’s Office actually went there.
