Tangentopoli 30 years later, it changed us forever. Italy rewritten by judicial reporters

The cyclone of Clean handswhich changed Italy forever, came unexpectedly – like almost all events that reverse the course of history – on the evening of February 17, 1992, thirty years ago. It was a Monday. One day limp, very limp for the newsrooms of the Milanese news, until nine in the evening, when the news began to circulate: “They arrested Mario Chiesa“. Church arrested? But go there. Many thought of a joke. Mario Chiesa was the president of the Pio Istituto Albergo Trivulzio, known to the Milanese as” la Baggina “, the most famous home for the elderly in the city and perhaps in Italy .

La Baggina was always the receptacle of billionaire donations (everything was measured in lire, then), and therefore an immense real estate patrimony, and therefore the possibility of dispensing rents to friends of friends, and then contracts, hiring, and so on. Mario Chiesa was one of the most powerful people in Milan. Socialist. Because the power, in those years, was of the Psi by Bettino Craxi. The Socialists had more or less 10 per cent of the vote, but with them they ruled almost everywhere: here with the Christian Democrats, there with the Communists. In Milan the system was the PSI, since the end of the war, almost continuously.

Arrested Church? Impossible. For some time he had been murmuring about the affairs of the socialists, about a round of bribes, clienteles, widespread corruption. The prosecutor had tried, sometimes, to see what was true in those rumors: but never found anything. That February 17 thirty years ago, however, the prosecutor who investigated corruption was Antonio Di Pietro, a former cop perhaps less polished than his many colleagues, but a formidable investigator like no other. Yes, Chiesa was untouchable: but Di Pietro framed him by sending a small businessman from Monza to his office, Luca Magni, stuffed with bugs and marked banknotes: seven million lire, the first tranche of a bribe required for the cleaning contract for the Baggina. Chiesa was handcuffed and Di Pietro, the next morning, told reporters: “We have it caught with his hands in the jam“.

This time there was no lawyer or quibble he could hold. Yet few understood that everything was about to come down. For two months Mario Chiesa was the only suspect in the investigation called Mani Pulite. It was above all politics that did not understand. But when is a former cop stronger than politics? And instead. Instead, history also proceeds by sudden jerks. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was also to be eternal. The Third Reich was also to last a thousand years. The Soviet Union was also to be the sun of the future. Let alone the First Republic with its five-party: Dc, Psi, Psdi, Pri, Pli. And with its opposition, the PCI. In April the political elections they were the signal that a world was ending. The old parties collapsed and took off there League of Bossi. The north wind heralded the cyclone. In Rome they did not understand. “This Di Pietro will end up in Gallarate as a traffic policeman”, they said in the building. But in another palace, the Milanese palace of justice, in front of Di Pietro’s office, lines of entrepreneurs were formed in the afternoon, tired of paying protection money to politics.

They told of bribes for each job. They mentioned names and surnames. Di Pietro invented a picturesque expression, “environmental action”, To define a system in which paying a bribe had become the norm. Milan was renamed Tangentopoli. And the arrests arrived, and the notices of guarantee to the socialist mayors of the city, Tognoli and Pillitteri, and then those to the parliamentarians. Di Pietro, initially alone, was joined by other prosecutors: Colombo, Davido and of course the head of the office, Borrelli. The famous pool of gods was born anti-corruption magistrates. Unfortunately another pool was born: that of judicial reportersthe. It was the beginning of the pathological phase of Clean hands.

The editors were wrong to leave everything in the hands of the judicial reporters. They were wrong because they did not see, or did not want to see, that the chronicles had all become the sameeach newspaper photocopy of the other and always in support of the prosecutors, not only that of Milan but all Procure, because the investigations multiplied throughout Italy, often with very bad imitators of Di Pietro. They were wrong because the judicial reporters (and it is written by one who at the time was a judicial reporter and followed this investigation) are, albeit in very good faith, too tied to their sources, which are the prosecutors. The directors got it wrong because they didn’t understand that what was happening was not just a big criminal trial, but a political, cultural, human cataclysm.

On the streets they did the torchlight processions, on the walls was written “Di Pietro salvaci”, at the Raphael hotel in Rome where Craxi was going they tossed the coins. It was sadly renewed iconoclastic fury that accompanies, blindly, every revolution; the sad rite of the tricoteuses was repeated, macabre. It was right, and providential, to put an end to the system of bribes and to a corruption of politics that had become scandalous impunity. But it was neither right nor providential – indeed it was fatal – to replace the corruption of money with that of souls. It was wanted divide the people into good and bad, they wanted to pass the concept that politics is always rotten and that parties are a cancer, they wanted to hand over the fate of the country to the prosecutors. Nothing could be distinguished anymore: between personal enrichment and the financing of politics.

At that time the horrible habit of force anyone to resign receive a simple warranty notice. At that time the even more horrible habit of calling oneself was born “honest”, And to always blame others. At that time anti-politics, resentment, social hatred, conspiracy were born. The editors were wrong, because they did not understand that we were once again ending up in our perhaps worst vice: the conformism.

They have passed trent’anni. What is left? Politics has never really recovered: to look for a head of state you always have to go fishing in the First Republic. The disaffection of Italians with politics has increased. Confidence in the then plebiscite judiciary was at least halved. Justice, from being a resource, has become a problem, perhaps the problem. I close it with the words that Antonio Di Pietro himself said to our newspaper, perhaps in his last interview, on March 30 last year: “There has been a degeneration of the investigative system. a crime was sought to find the culprit, now often first the culprit is sought, then we work hard to find a crime to be challenged. To understand better: we have gone from the magistrate gravedigger to police magistrate. I found the dead man and then I looked for the killer; now they find the killer and then look for a dead man“.