Dossierage, that red thread that links the mystery of the Pace suicide to the investigation into the dossiers –

Rita Cavallaro

08 October 2024

There is a mystery that intersects the investigation into spies. A great mystery that reopens precisely at the moment in which the Striano & Co team carried out the illicit intrusions to hunt down Matteo Salvini, in that summer in which the leader of the League was under attack for the closed ports. It was then that the financier Pasquale Striano combed through the SOS, sent regularly to Domani’s journalist friends, to create the 49 million scandal. And in those same days, the suicide of Omar Pace, the colonel of the Guardia di Finanza who killed himself with a gunshot on the morning of 11 April 2016, in his office at Dia di Rome. Pace was not just any investigator, but the chief analyst of Suspicious Transaction Reports and superior, as well as a friend of Striano, at the time when the two had worked together on the Breakfast operation, under the coordination of the then chief prosecutor of Reggio Calabria Federico Cafiero De Raho. This is the investigation that led to the arrest of the then minister of the Berlusconi government, Claudio Scajola, for having favored the absconding of the former Forzista Amedeo Matacena, who died in Dubai on 16 September 2022 from a heart attack, now the subject of a case for murder of his last wife.

Colonel Pace, who had led the investigation against Scajola, was supposed to testify at the trial two days after that suicide and his testimony was considered crucial because, as the prosecutor of the DDA of Reggio Calabria Giuseppe Lombardo recalled in the hearing of 13 April 2016 , Pace had physically seized documents from the Scajola house on the day of the arrest, 8 May 2014, including a fax written by the former Lebanese president Amin Gemayel, involved together with other Italians residing in Lebanon in aiding and abetting the fugitive of Matacena. Pace was continuing to investigate to reconstruct the affairs and transfers of money of those characters but, at that hearing, he never got there, while Striano testified at the trial. The officer’s death was archived as a suicide and now, from the new papers in the dossier of the Perugia prosecutor Raffaele Cantone, some messages on the case emerge, exchanged between Striano and his colleague from the SOS group Massimo Carlesi, who, on June 1 2019, forwards to the spy the link to an article by Stefania Limiti in the daily newspaper, regarding the Pace suicide, in which she underlined the phrase “a tragic and embarrassing affair for Dia”. Striano comments: «It sounds new to me… it’s from 2017, I was thinking about today». And Carlesi: «Me too… they screwed me». Striano specifies: «Also because I provided some things to Stefania». Regarding the relationship with the journalist, the investigators report “some exchanges of messages of possible investigative interest”, which concern the Pace case.

In November 2017, speaking about the ordinance on the Occhionero affair regarding cyber espionage and linked to Pace, Striano, in addition to asking the journalist if she had it, provided her with information on the request for dismissal due to suicide. Limiti replies that “I have one or more questions for Farla”, that is, the general of Finance who was director of the Dia from 2014 to 2017. And the spy tells her that “he’ll tell her everything on Saturday.” Having obtained information, the journalist sends Striano the published article, which contains the inconsistencies of that suicide. The colonel was right-handed and shot himself with his left and, even worse, he discovered that he had been followed by some Dia officers while he went to San Marino for some lessons at the University. In the article, in addition to asking “why an expert officer like him taught in that small foreign state”, the circumstance is reported that, to the prosecutor, the agents responsible for the “espionage” explained that they had carried out the shadowing to ascertain that the SOS analyst actually went to the University and did not instead go to private facilities. An article that comes back to the attention of Striano & Co just when the group takes action against the League over a report from San Marino.