It is the retired chief commissioner Carmine Gallo, who served for years at the Milan Flying Squad, and then administrator of the private investigation company Equalize, the former policeman who ended up under house arrest as part of the DDA investigation. The hypotheses alleged in various capacities against the suspects are criminal conspiracy aimed at unauthorized access to the computer system, corruption, violation of official secrecy and illicit wiretapping. Gallo’s company, which is based near the Milan Cathedral and deals with investments for listed companies, was seized.
The Carabinieri of the Varese Investigation Unit carried out arrests and precautionary measures against 6 people and company seizure decrees ordered by the investigating judge of Milan at the request of the prosecutors of the District Anti-Mafia Directorate. It would be an organization dedicated to the exfiltration of sensitive and secret data and information for economic gain. Among the targets of the hackers there would have been the SDI National Strategic Databases of the police forces, Serpico used by the Revenue Agency and financial police, INPS, the National Registry and the Currency Information System.
The Milan Prosecutor Marcello Viola spoke at a press conference about a “dossier” activity which concerns a “hardly calculable number of unauthorized accesses” to various databases, especially the SDI, for the illicit acquisition of sensitive data of thousands of people , which in some cases ended up in the newspapers.
The investigation revolves around the private investigation agency, Equalize, a few steps from the Duomo, of which the president of Fondazione Fiera Milano (totally unrelated entity) Enrico Pazzali is the majority shareholder, among those under investigation, and who instead sees the former policeman Gallo as minority shareholder.
Among those under investigation, it transpires from the investigation, there would also be Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, son of the founder of Luxottica Leonardo Del Vecchio, and the banker-financier Matteo Arpe. They are responsible for unauthorized access to the competing computer system. In particular Del Vecchio jr. he allegedly commissioned information searches during the complicated inheritance story of the industrial dynasty which, through Delfin, owns shares in Mediobanca, Generali, Luxottica and others.
The illegal dossiers would have been commissioned to the group of hackers and law enforcement agents also by “important companies operating in Italy and abroad” and “law firms”, said the Milan Prosecutor Marcello Viola in a press conference, “Su request from clients”, explained Viola, a series of private intelligence agencies (3 of which were seized by the investigating judge) provided “reports and dossiers with illegally collected information” which however were “disguised as coming from journalistic sources” or other open sources.
An investigation that “allows us to start connecting some dots” to “understand the functioning of a gigantic market for confidential information”, said the national anti-mafia and anti-terrorism prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, in the press conference on the investigation coordinated together with the DDA of Milan which put 4 people under house arrest with electronic bracelets including the former super policeman Carmine Gallo, and suspects Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, Matteo Arpe and the president of Fondazione Fiera, Enrico Pazzali. An “alarming picture”, said Melillo, explaining how the “system of attacks on national cyber security” has never been “organically explored”. The gang of hackers and former policemen, some of whom are still in service, have made “hundreds of thousands of euros in profits” from the illicit dossiers in the last 2 years.
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