Introduction

INTRODUCTION
- Riccardo M. Ghia, "Italian White-Collar Crime in the Globalization Era"

“Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
Woody Guthrie, “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd”

As a court reporter in my hometown, Asti, a small-size town in northern Italy, I had the chance to cover a variety of stories, from rapes to animal mistreatment. The courtrooms offered an enviable cross-section of the society I was living in. There was no limit to the imagination. I covered grotesque stories such as cat killers, wild boar abusers, peeping toms, and women who were rivals in love and mistook the streets of Asti for a racetrack. But I also covered tough stories, such as the most heinous child abuses, drug trafficking, prostitution rings and corruption.
I began to write crime and court stories when I was 21 years old: plenty of enthusiasm, zero experience. However, I soon developed a keen interest in enterprise journalism and in-depth reporting. I wanted to become a foreign correspondent to cover transnational crime rings active in drug trafficking, money laundering, organized crime and slush funds. I became fascinated by the complexity of a system that time-pressured reporters couldn’t describe except by bits and pieces.

The first important story I ever covered as a court reporter was an offshoot of the so-called “FME trial.” Chief Prosecutor Sebastiano Sorbello had accused prominent labor representatives of extortion at the expenses of some entrepreneurs. According to Sorbello, Fausto Cavallo, Claudio Caron and Adriano Rissone had demanded money in exchange for their approval to restructuring plans and their support to obtain government funds for the companies. In Asti, the trial received some attention at the local level, since Caron was one of the most important politicians in town. He had also been appointed undersecretary at the ministry of labor between 1998 and 1999.

The divestment of Asti’s industry loomed in the background. Multinationals and speculators had swooped in on Asti and plundered as much as they could. Bankruptcies, job cuts, close-downs.The unions seemed powerless.

I understood that the key figures were not the local labor union leaders, whose role, if they had any, was limited to the province of Asti. Journalistically speaking, the most intriguing character was Silvano Sordi, a former prominent labor union leader who had been kicked out of CGIL, the major Italian labor union, because of alleged wrongdoings. After 1987, Sordi had become a prominent industrial consultant who specialized in relations with the unions. He was connected to an important entrepreneur in Varese, Guido Borghi, who seemed to have played some role in Sordi’s illegal financial operations in Asti. In addition, rumors circulated about the involvement of members of Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia.

However, the local weekly newspaper for which I worked in Asti was reluctant to support serious investigative reporting, which could have damaged its dwindling revenues. Even if I were to work for free, I could have irked powerful people, who could have pulled their ads – not to mention the possibility of costly lawsuits. In addition, sources were wary to open themselves to an unexperienced journalist working for an obscure newspaper. As I was preparing myself to study in America, I shelved my plans to go deeper into the issue.

In July 2008, I had just been accepted into the Schreyer Honors College and I was thinking about my future thesis. While I was reading Italian newspapers in Asti’s library, I saw a leaflet related to the FME affair in which a group of young people, politically close to Caron, denounced mafia infiltration in my hometown.

“That’s it,” I thought.

I could have used my thesis as a pretext to do some enterprise journalism, a chance that I had never had before. And if there were leaflets around, it meant that there were most probably people who were willing to talk. I contacted a couple of lawyers, who pledged to give me a copy of the sentences of the FME, Newcompel and Trust cases.

When I went back to the United States in the fall, I began to scour the newspaper archives online and read thousands of news stories related to the characters. At the same times, I filed applications to have access to court documents. In Italy, it is not as easy as it is in the United States. When I went to visit a newspaper in Florida, reporters were able to find even criminal records online. In Italy, criminal records are strictly confidential. While you are entitled to a certain degree of access to court documents, Italian bureaucrats give you a hard time granting you authorization. Unfortunately, Italy doesn’t have a Freedom of Information Act. Access to institutional sources is notoriously laborious, and courthouses are the epicenter of Italian red tape. Most of the time, they reject your request on the most bizarre grounds. While I was in the U.S., a court clerk verbally assaulted my mother, who had gone on my behalf to the courthouse to ask for a copy of the sentences. The sentences are public acts and Italian citizens are entitled to request a copy. However, that court clerk – whose ignorance was matched by his insolence – is an expression of the Italian “culture of secrecy” that negatively impacts transparency.

Fortunately, many other clerks proved to be much more collaborative. Some of them went to great lengths to help me, and I’m very grateful for that. I also must thank the chief prosecutor of Asti, Maurizio Laudi, who died last September; and the chief prosecutor of Varese, Maurizio Grigo, who gave me authorization to access crucial court documents.

I began to interview dozens of people, make hundreds of phone calls and consult thousands of court documents in Asti, Varese, Treviso, Naples and Rome during my Christmas and summer breaks between 2008 and 2009.

Time and money were unsurmountable challenges.

In the U.S., I had to work on my thesis during my spare time. In Italy, I worked mainly during the winter and summer holidays, when most of the offices are closed and people are on vacation. Travels, intercontinental phone calls, and photocopies also cost money – too much money for the self-financed project of a penniless student. But I can say it was worth the effort.

The more I delved into this story, the more I realized how little I knew about it. It’s an endless investigation. One little bit piece of information often raised more questions than it did answers. I didn’t have time to consult important court documents in Varese, Brescia, Milan and Naples. Some of the documents in Asti are still classified. I couldn’t interview many people who could feed me with crucial information. However, almost every oral source was double-checked and, where possible, I tried to establish a degree of reliability. I also gave all the parties involved a chance to tell their version of the story.

My investigation had two turning points.

In December 2008, I found out that the name of Ottaviano Del Turco, one of the most powerful politicians in Italy, had emerged in connection with the Newcompel investigation. Luigi Esposito, Sordi’s accomplice in fraudulent bankruptcies, had told the investigators that Del Turco was Sordi’s political patron. Later on, I learned that Guido Borghi had confirmed Esposito’s words. This circumstance never emerged in the Italian press.

In July 2009, a source told me that Sordi’s name had also emerged in a double murder investigation in Varese. Several lines of investigations pointed in the direction of mafia-type criminal organizations. Organized crime? Murders? It seemed incredible. Also in this case, Sordi’s connection to the victims was a circumstance that the press didn’t know about.

“Sordi,” my source told me, “is a man who knows many things.”

I read the sentence of the trial against Isidoro Marai, the man accused of the murder of Emanuele Costa and Giuseppe Petralia, two entrepreneurs linked to the underworld. The sentence and other court documents confirmed what my source had told me. Sordi not only knew Costa, but he was also one of his close business partners. A line of investigation led to the Savignano clan, an Abruzzo-based criminal organization.

Abruzzo rang a bell with me.

It was the region where Dario Baldovino, Borghi’s partner and Warner Lambert’s right hand in Italy, worked as chairman of an important confectionery manufacturer; and, most important, it’s the home region and main constituency of Ottaviano Del Turco. I also learned that the remand in custody of Silvano Sordi in connection with the Newcompel affair had been found in Costa’s briefcase. The briefcase was found on the same car where Costa and his friend Petralia had been shot to death.

It’s only a coincidence, of course. But it’s a very intriguing one.

Several investigative leads remain open: the role of certain government employees; the Camorra; ‘Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra; the Abruzzo-Tunisia-Italian Socialist Party connection; the Swiss slush funds; the Spanish adventures of Sordi; toxic waste trafficking; the alleged involvement of Oliviero Diliberto and Ottaviano Del Turco, two former Italian ministers.

An offshoot of my investigation that also seems to yield promising results in the future is the “Fassio connection.” Giuseppe and Alberto Fassio are powerful people connected to Masonic lodges, political parties and business groups. In addition, I learned that Alberto Fassio had been the business partner of a prominent member of ‘Ndrangheta.

White-collar crimes are difficult to dig and hard to explain. They often feature a large and diversified cast of characters interacting on several levels. Opacity is a salient characteristic of these crimes. Links are often unclear, fading in a tangle of companies, figureheads, and transactions. It also partially explains why the media tend to ignore these crimes: they are challenging for readers and writers.

Another challenge was conveying the importance of my findings to the U.S. reader. I had to translate idiomatic expressions and highly tecnical terms from Italian to English. Word-by-word translation has been sometimes impossible. The old dictum “traduttore-traditore” (translator-traitor) is here absolutely appropriate. In addition, most of the institutions mentioned in this thesis do not exist in America or they exist under a different form. For example, the Italian labor unions have a particular history that makes them quite different from their American counterparts. I tried to solve the problem by including footnotes, a glossary, and a list of characters. If I had had more time, I would have also included some infographic (diagrams, photos), which I highly recommend in similar future studies on the topic.

White-collar crimes are often perceived as less dangerous than street crimes because the “violence” factor is virtually non-existent or muffled behind closed doors. Unfortunately, the consequences of white-collar crimes are tremendously real. The Enron scandal in the U.S., as well as the Parmalat bankruptcy in Italy, hit hundreds of thousands of investors and threatened to disrupt national economies.

I struggled to unveil the human stories behind this intricacy of shady financial operations. Among the stories that shook me most, it was the suicide of a Spanish union representative when Corporacion Ibmei decided to close down a factory in Bilbao (see chapter IV).

As the great historian Marc Bloch once wrote, “Behind the features of landscape, behind tools or machinery, behind what appear to be the most formalized written documents, and behind institutions, which seem almost entirely detached from their founders, there are men.”