by Tobias Jones
Mani Pulite, Clean Hands, was the name given to the pool of investigative magistrates who, in that brief period from 1992–94, caused the political and economic revolution. It was a period that marked the end of the First, the beginning of the Second, Republic. After fifty years, the music seemed to stop: the rules of that game of musical chairs (in which no seat had ever been removed, but politicians simply changed position according to the political music of the time) were suddenly rewritten. In their indignation the Clean Hands magistrates, overwhelmingly supported by the Italian public, removed all the chairs in one fell swoop. Entire political parties which had, for decades, been taking hefty kick-backs on the contracts they dispensed were brusquely rejected; the city of ‘Tangentopoli’ (meaning literally ‘bribery city’, referring first to Milan, but subsequently used for the entire peninsula) was razed to the ground by zealous ‘revolutionaries’ who fought to apply the letter of the law.
What’s strange reading the story with a foreigner’s eyes is that everyone had always known that corruption was rife in Italy, many even had the evidence, but until the early 1990s nothing was done. It was politically or legally impossible. For years commentators had derisively talked about politicians’ ‘petrodollari’ (the money they salted away in offshore accounts thanks to deals cut with the energy industry). Elio Vetri and Gianni Barbacetto had already published Milano degli scandali, Giampaolo Pansa had written Il Malloppo (The Swag). The scandal of 1992–94, then, wasn’t shocking because of the discovery of corruption; the real shock came in the fact that it was finally possible for the millions of long-suffering, law-abiding Italians to do something about it.
The sudden crumbling of the First Republic looks, in retrospect, very much like the ‘velvet revolution’ of 1989. A system which had, since the end of the Second World War, been monolithic and menacing self-imploded within the space of a few, breathless months. There’s more than imagery to link the two events. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, had much sharper consequences in Italy than in other European countries. The credibility of the Italian Communist party obviously collapsed, but so did that of the Christian Democrats. Their winning card (and that of their junior coalition partners) had always been that they represented a dam against ‘red terror’. Once that threat was gone, the dam looked rather unnecessary and – many finally dared to say it out loud – rather corrupt. At the same time, another international situation was bringing pressure to bear on the peninsula. The advent of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the monetary orthodoxy demanded by Europe in preparation for the Euro, meant that Italy needed Clean Hands. The rules of the game were international, and Italy’s record of inflation and budget deficits was being sternly criticised from both inside and outside the country. (At the time of the signing of the Maastricht treaty, Italy’s inflation still stood at almost 7%, and 20% of all state revenue was going simply on interest payments for the public debt, which was itself over 100% of GNP.) What was new, at the beginning of the 1990s, was not that the bureaucracy was inefficient and discretionary (only useful to those with the right contacts), but that it was a luxury the country could no longer afford. The situation was exacerbated by the tradition of tax evasion which meant that, in order to recoup a percentage of the earnings of its citizens, various governments almost had to bribe them to buy into BOTs (government bonds) by offering absurdly high interest rates which the state, again, couldn’t afford. ‘The cake is finished’ read one of the headlines in Corriere della Sera at the time of the crisis,5 as if to suggest that the system of corruption had collapsed not so much because of an outburst of righteousness but simply because there was nothing left to go round.
Most importantly, Clean Hands happened thanks to the country’s ‘minoranze virtuose’, its moral minority: those ‘recalcitrant elements obstinately convinced that the official morality of the Republic, its laws and constitution, couldn’t be simply a fig leaf to cover non-codified practices’.6 The pool of magistrates was made up of men of such steely integrity that the crude corruption of generations of politicians and businessmen was thrown into sharp relief. Head of the pool was Francesco Saverio Borrelli, the dignified Procuratore Capo of Milan; others included Gherardo Colombo and, most famously, Antonio Di Pietro. The latter was a gruff former policeman who became famous for his extensive computer database and his gruelling interview techniques. The word ‘pool’ had been borrowed from magistrates in Palermo, where another investigative pool was trying to perform exactly the same task as that in Milan: the application of the law after years of fudge and neglect. Indeed, those revolutions would often overlap, the southern one against the Mafia, the northern one against its white-collar incarnation.
The revolution began on 17 February 1992. Mario Chiesa, a stalwart of the Socialist party and head of Pio Albergo Trivulzio, an old people’s home, was filmed as he pocketed seven million lire, which was half of the overall bribe, which was in turn exactly 10% of the agreed contract. He had only been caught because a disgruntled contractor, Luca Magni, had complained about the systematic extortion whereby 10% of any contract in Milan had to be paid back, under the counter, to the people who gave out the contracts, be they for laundry, rubbish collection, funeral services and so on. Chiesa, who had lowered the blinds whilst taking the money, was caught red-handed. Twelve billion lire were later discovered in his bank accounts. From that simple, innocuous beginning, the whole system unravelled. Mario Chiesa, languishing in prison and offended that the leader of his party, Bettino Craxi, had nicknamed him ‘Mariuolo’ (‘scoundrel’), began to name names. From there the investigation snowballed, although (and it’s a vital point, since it would be one of the principal accusations made years later against the revolutionaries) the Clean Hands held back from investigating any politicians since there was an election pending in April 1992.
After that General Election (in which the socialists lost only 0.7% of the vote), the revolution began in earnest. Clemente Rovati, the constructor responsible for the building of the third ring of the San Siro stadium, was arrested. On 1 May 1992 Paolo Pillitteri, Bettino Craxi’s brother-in-law, and Carlo Tognoli, ex-Socialist mayor of the city, were given ‘avvisi di garanzia’ (notice that they were under investigation). Before long, there were lines of businessmen queuing up to talk to the Clean Hands pool, keen to portray themselves as the victims of extortion rather than parties to corruption. Notorious businessmen and their political patrons were accused, arrested and tried. The sophistication and calculation of the bribery system, it emerged, was so precise that exact percentages were being given to various parties. The kickbacks arising from contracts for work on the Milanese underground, for example, were subject to an exact mathematical division: 36% to the Socialist party, 18.5% to the Christian Democrats and the Communists/Democrats of the Left and so on.
Many accused politicians would later argue that such payments were simply ‘election funds’. The number of personal accounts held offshore, however, awash with billions of lire, began to shock the public. The circumstances of the arrest of Duilio Poggiolini, head of the pharmaceutical department of the Ministry of Health, became emblematic for the corruption of an entire era. Billions of lire were found stuffed into a pouffe. 120 million dollars were found in three of his homes. He had fourteen Swiss bank accounts, sixty expensive paintings, diamonds, krugerrands, gold ingots stacked in shoe-boxes.
That, though, was to come later. In April 1992, after the general election, the country’s politicians had to choose a new President of the Republic. They were on the eighteenth ballot of the tortuous process, with the usual names in the hat, when one of the anti-Mafia judges in Palermo was killed. Giovanni Falcone, his wife and his bodyguards, had been killed as they drove from Palermo airport to the city centre in an explosion which tore apart hundreds of metres of the motorway. The indignation against Italy’s injustices reached new levels. The scenes from a funeral, in which one of the young widows of a bodyguard accused the church of containing mafiosi who would hav
e to get on their knees if they wanted her forgiveness, were shown on live television. Bedsheets were hung out from balconies across Sicily, mourning Falcone and his escort. (Within months, Paolo Borsellino, another of the investigating magistrates, was killed as he visited his mother.) By then, it was obvious that the revolution was being fought on more than one front, and parliament was finally awoken to the acute danger of civilian disorder facing the country. 7000 troops were sent to Sicily, and a new President of the Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, was finally chosen: ‘The abuse of public money,’ he said,
is a very serious thing, which defrauds and robs the faithful, tax-paying citizen and shatters completely their trust: there’s no greater evil, no greater danger for democracy, than the turbid link between politics and business.7
His indignation seemed shared by the rest of the country. The bitterness of ordinary Italians was prompted by the fact that the only tax in Italy that had been imposed with anything like systematic efficiency (the ‘tangente’) had been the one that vanished into private hands. The response was that the Clean Hands pool enjoyed an enormous groundswell of support: people began wearing T-Shirts saying ‘Milano ladrona, Di Pietro non perdona’ (‘Thieving Milan, Di Pietro is unforgiving’). Finally it seemed as if those words written in every Italian courtroom, ‘La legge è uguale per tutti’, ‘the law’s equal for all’, were coming true. Endless graffiti appeared across Italy: ‘Grazie Di Pietro’, or ‘Forza Colombo’. Over the ensuing months, Gianni De Michelis (the man who had written the book on the ‘culture’ of Italian night-clubs) was pelted with eggs and tomatoes in Venice. Bettino Craxi was showered with coins outside the Hotel Raphael in Rome: ‘Do you want these as well?’ chanted the mob.
The human toll of the revolution wasn’t only counted amongst Italy’s magistrates. Throughout the next eighteen months, and as a 27 billion lire bribe, the biggest of all, was unearthed, a long list of suicides added to the list of illustrious corpses. Those deaths would change the symbolism of the revolution, turning it from a morality play into a national tragedy. As always, slaughters accompanied the upheaval. In May 1993, five people died when a bomb exploded in the Uffizi museum in Florence. In July five people were killed by a bomb in Milan.
By then, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi had replaced Giuliano Amato as the Italian Prime Minister. The lira had, like sterling, become the object of currency speculation, had duly lost 15% of its value and had been forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Parliament, which had traditionally benefited from immunity, had been handed over 600 requests to lift parliamentary privilege; Craxi himself was the subject of seventeen different investigations, and he would later flee to exile in Tunisia.
Thus, the most obvious consequence of Clean Hands was that there was a political ‘voragine’, an abyss into which almost anyone could step. The Christian Democrats ironically renamed themselves the Peoples’ Party. The Communists had already changed their name to the Democrats of the Left. The Northern League, one of whose number had brandished a noose in parliament to publicise his revolutionary credentials, were gaining ground in the area of Italy above the Po river. The MSI, the neo-Fascists, had reverted to the more presentable Gianfranco Fini for leadership (Mussolini, he famously claimed, was ‘Italy’s greatest statesman of the century’). The progress of those two fringe parties was shown in various elections in 1993. In June, Milan, traditionally the power-base of Bettino Craxi and his Socialists, elected a mayor from the Northern League. In the autumn, Gianfranco Fini was narrowly defeated in his bid to become mayor of Rome (taking, however, 46.9% of the vote); later, he would decide to rename the MSI the ‘National Alliance’.
There was still, however, as one notorious businessman put it with the usual football metaphor, a ‘midfield’ which was ‘desolately empty’. In January 1994, that businessman sent a video to Reuters, RAI and his own television networks, announcing the formation of a new political party, Forza Italia:
As never before Italy… needs people with heads on shoulders and a consolidated experience, capable of giving a hand, making the state work. In order to make the system work it’s indispensable that opposed to the cartel of the left there be a ‘pole of liberty’ capable of attracting to itself the best of a clean, reasonable, modern country. Around this pole there must gather all those forces which refer to the fundamental principles of western democracies; in the first place the Catholic world which has contributed generously to the last fifty years of our history as a united nation.8
As rhetoric, that announcement was of unrivalled brilliance. Even in translation, that combination of moderation, modernity, ‘cleanliness’, statal good sense instead of a left wing ‘cartel’, is effective. Berlusconi’s popularity rested, not least, on his Midas touch in business and on his whole-hearted endorsement of Antonio Di Pietro (who he would ask to be his Minister for Justice): ‘His [Di Pietro’s] moralising anxiety belongs to everyone. My newspapers, my television channels, my group, have always been in the front line in supporting the Clean Hands judges’. Another of the Clean Hands magistrates, Tiziana Parenti, would later take her place on the Forza Italia benches in Parliament.
The memory, though, is short. Only a few years after the Clean Hands earthquake, the whole episode is already being assiduously rewritten.
Every few weeks during the summer, my ‘betrothed’ and I make the spectacular journey across the mountains that takes us from the humid basin of Parma towards the warm, windy air of the Tuscan coast. At one point of the Cisa pass, as the road winds through the pine forests, the mountains loom into view. They appear snow-peaked because of the white quarries where huge blocks of marble are dynamited and lined up by the side of the roads. It’s this white marble which, interlaced with black or green, makes Tuscan cathedrals – in Pisa or Siena – look like something squeezed from a toothpaste tube. Once last summer, we decided to stop in a little mountain town, Aulla, and eat a sandwich in the main square. Opposite us were two rhetorical monuments. One was to the fallen from the war, and described in one, long-winded sentence, the ‘ardent hearth of vivid fire which at the beginning of Nazi-Fascist oppression released a spark which inflamed the children of the Resistance, who won fame with the legendary sacrifice of their women and their bloodied men who on an impassable path underwent atrocious slaughters, devastations and reprisals…’
Next to it was a small needle of white marble dedicated to the victims of the Clean Hands revolutionaries. ‘Intolerance, like bombs, kills precious liberty’, it says. ‘When the word is feeble’, read the words of one parliamentarian who committed suicide, ‘there’s nothing left but the gesture.’ ‘Let us remember in the dark of every injustice the victims and their executioners’, are the words of the Aulla mayor engraved into the marble. There are billboards announcing that the town is a ‘Di Pietro-free zone’ and there’s a cunning quotation in Latin: Summum ius, Summa iniuria (‘the greater the law, the greater the injustice’, which implies, I suppose, that the rule of law is not a particularly good thing). As ever, the roles of criminal and victim are so blurred and confused that no one can ever be sure whether Italy’s ‘Jacobin justice’ is worse than the ‘criminals’ it prosecutes.
Having been (in his own words) in the ‘front line’ of support for Clean Hands in 1994, Berlusconi has also completely changed tack. Although he won that election in 1994, his government was dogged by accusations of corruption against his entourage. His brother, Paolo Berlusconi, and Marcello Dell’Utri were both accused of financial crimes: Paolo Berlusconi has, in various court cases, actually admitted paying bribes. In one case, he admitted paying a total of 1.335 billion lire, from 1987 onwards, to the town council of Pieve, in return for clearance to turn a castle into a residential building with a golf course. In court, he was fined the same total as the original bribe, and received a definitive, one year’s suspended sentence. The accusation against Dell’Utri, head of Publitalia, is that he over-inflated the cost of advertising space on Mediaset channels. Part of that surplus money was then sent
back under the counter to the people (over-) paying for the advertising. On appeal, a guilty verdict against Dell’Utri was upheld. He was sentenced to one year and ten months. Berlusconi himself, whilst ironically hosting a G7 summit at Napoli about organised crime, was served an avviso di garanzia (notice of investigation) in December 1994. His troubled government fell weeks later as the indignant Northern League withdrew its support from the coalition. Since then Berlusconi has been in opposition (an experience he describes, with his usual biblical sense of destiny, as the ‘crossing of the desert’), fulminating against the judges who he once claimed as his allies.
Other investigations have begun, not least into the means by which, during the privatisation of IRI overseen by Romano Prodi, Berlusconi managed to block the acquisition of SME (IRI’s food entity) by a business rival, and duly acquire it himself. The accusations centre on Cesare Previti, Berlusconi’s Roman lawyer. (The two met when Previti was selling his client’s estate at Arcore to Berlusconi back in the 1970s.) The accusation goes that Previti had bribed the Roman judge who ‘refereed’ the deal, thus allowing Berlusconi to complete the acquisition. For reasons unknown, the bid of Berlusconi’s consortium was accepted, whilst that of Carlo De Benedetti was (despite agreement having been reached on the 497 billion lire purchase price) rejected. The means by which Berlusconi acquired Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing house, is equally mired in controversy. The accused deny the charges and both cases are on-going. It is, of course, impossible to know what to believe, especially since the man ‘gazumped’ by Berlusconi in both deals, Carlo De Benedetti, himself owns La Repubblica and L’Espresso, which means that parts of the left-wing media have no pretence of impartiality in reporting such ‘scandals’.
