“It’s inside L’Espresso, if it gets out it’ll be a mess given the attack on the Prosecutor’s Office and the reference to the investigative bodies. Please, let’s get over the trouble, I trust you as always.” It is January 28, 2019 when Pasquale Striano, the head of the Anti-Mafia spies, contacts his colleague from the Guardia di Finanza, lieutenant David Tundo, from Puglia but operating in Modena. The day before in the weekly magazine L’Espresso, the journalist Giovanni Tizian, investigated in conjunction with Striano for illegal access to databases and revelation of the secret, had signed the investigation “Emilia rotata”, a story of politics and business in which he reported a circular internal report of the Bologna prosecutor at the time, Giuseppe Amato, Unicost magistrate, certainly not a red robe, now Rome’s attorney general, at the top of the office that authorizes preventive interceptions by the AISI. The article reports the letter with which Amato invited the prosecutors to best dose the use of the mafia aggravating circumstance so as not to overwhelm the Anti-Mafia simply on the basis of suspicions. A stance that can be shared, if we look closely at the too many mafia investigations in which the mafia was not present.
Yet that letter had caused many colleagues to discuss. And it certainly had outraged Striano, the great investigator who transformed the Anti-Mafia into a vermin of illicit intrusions on centre-right politicians and VIPs who had nothing to do with the competences of the Super Prosecutor’s Office. So much so that it even unleashed the ire of the Milan prosecutor, Francesco Greco, who, having found in the newspaper Domani an illegal SOS on League funds, had engaged in an institutional tug-of-war with Via Giulia, directed by Federico Cafiero De Raho, to understand «for what reason the DNA could conduct investigations in contexts not relating to institutional tasks”, we read in the papers of the prosecutor of Perugia, Raffale Cantone, in charge of the dossier investigation. The documents, on the basis of which Cantone wants to arrest Striano and the former prosecutor Antonio Laudati, now tell of a modus operandi of the financier who, through collaboration with friendly journalists, attempted to put pressure on the activities of magistrates who were not very aggressive, all belonging to the moderate or centrist area. «Do you want the article on the prosecutor», he asks Tundo on 28 January 2019. «Tizian’s article», his colleague replies to Striano: «I’ll send it to you but it’s a version that you can’t pass around… otherwise it will recover yesterday’s Espresso, you tell me… It’s internal to Espresso, if it comes out it’ll be a mess given the attack on the Prosecutor’s Office and the reference to the investigative bodies. Please let’s get through the trouble, I trust you as always”, he specifies, sending the file exclusively for the editorial staff. «You are right to fight with everyone and everything, I have reached the point of handing the investigations over to journalists in order to get everything out in the newspapers», wrote Striano on 20 September 2020 to Cataldo D’Oria, lieutenant from Corato, in the province of Bari, commander of the Operations Section of the Puglia Regional Command.
The spy financier sends his interlocutor the article «The shadow of the clans on the competitions for Lazio’s masks» and tells D’Oria that he was lucky. “What do I care, I’ll carry on like this, we have no choice, I feel in a corner… just like you.” The financier, who has repeatedly defined himself as a “great investigator”, could not bear to be harnessed by the rules of law and used the analyst system, according to the investigators, not only to spy on journalists’ requests on political opponents to target with investigations in the press, but also to exfiltrate hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, which have completely disappeared and in relation to which a question of national security has now arisen. But also to attack those magistrates who hindered the spy system. The Cantone investigation papers report the emblematic issue of the Agira quarry, an investigation signed by Tizian in Domani concerning Fassa Bortolo, the leading company in the production of building materials which had obtained, according to the spies in incorrect manner, the authorization to extract limestone within an archaeological area. A story that depicts the financier in the guise of a journalist. On 28 April 2021 Striano wrote to Giuseppe Puzzo, a policeman from Enna and former colleague at DNA, to buy Domani because “we start from our famous information on Agira”.
Puzzo replies that it would be necessary to denounce the prosecutor, that Tizian with his articles is “just playing the shark”, not bothering to delve deeper and that “he should stay dry until he understands that writing about the mafia does not mean copying”. The criticism concerns the fact that the reporter did not investigate the inaction of the Prosecutor’s Office, urging Striano not to be used. “It seems to me that it’s the Anti-Mafia people talking,” says Puzzo. «Sure but I don’t let myself be used, in the meantime a bit of mess is good». The policeman advises the financier that «to formally request you could see if they have made any bank transactions… Otherwise Laudati or Russo would have to make a request (they will never do it)». Striano responds by talking about war between magistrates and complaining about the inertia of some of them. And it is here that Domenico Gozzo attacks, the former Palermo deputy prosecutor who investigated the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres, who landed at the National Anti-Mafia Directorate thanks to the support of Autonomia&Indipendenza officials Nino Di Matteo and Sebastiano Ardita. “They’re all at war and this idiot from Gozzo who pretends to be an anti-mafia magistrate keeps it (the investigation, ed.) locked in the drawer, this is to say that we’ll do the right thing if we send everyone to the journalists…”. And while prosecutor Gozzo proceeded with the utmost confidentiality on the Sicilian file, Striano, for two months, had “worked” with a contact in order to find all the information to pass on to Tizian.
#catch #trouble #Tempo
