29 May 2006

11 - Suicides

I’m continuing to publish some questions and answers from the book "Intervista su Tangentopoli" published by Laterza and edited by Giovanni Valentini.

GV: You’ve said that during the Mani Pulite {Clean Hands} investigation you didn’t make use of abuse or threats but unfortunately some people did commit suicide. The first one was the socialist parliamentarian, Sergio Moroni, then the president of ENI, Gabriele Cagliari and finally Raul Gardini. Do you not feel that you had some responsibility for all this? Have you never felt any remorse for these suicides?

ADP: This story of suicides is very delicate. Let’s consider these three cases. It’s in examining these three cases that we can see how such tragic, serious and desperate facts were used to delegitimise Mani Pulite.
Bettino Craxi started off in relation to Moroni. Let’s read the letter that Moroni wrote before taking his own life. That letter did nothing to save the party.
What did Moroni say? In essence he said: ‘I’m committing suicide because I’ve got into a tangle in such a way that I can’t understand anything any more; because I’ve finished up in a mechanism in which I feel I’m being squeezed; because I feel oppressed by the party system and the investigation system…’
But for all that you cannot blame the investigator, anyone doing their duty as a magistrate. Be careful: Moroni was not in prison, nor was he about to go to prison. He found out that there were investigations relating to him and he collapsed, not because anyone was holding him, but because he realised that his name had come out in the open.
The truth is that inside the parties, certain people were used in such a way that at the end, it was they who felt shame. They felt the weight of their responsibility to such a point that they had to finish it. No one was accused for vendetta. No one has suffered threats or violence.

GV: However, Gabriele Cagliari was in prison when he committed suicide…

ADP: The Cagliari case was even more incredible, because his suicide has always been put down to Di Pietro and the team of magistrates; but at that time Cagliari was not being held in prison by us.
He was part of the Mani Pulite investigation, but we had already released him. Cagliari was in prison because he was responsible for crimes of corruption and other crimes that had plenty of evidence. No further action was taken on those after his death for that very reason.
But he wasn’t innocent and in fact his wife then returned the money that he had hidden in secret current accounts in Switzerland. We had found them and we had blocked them when the money was still deposited abroad. There’s proven evidence of his guilt.
Then, however, we freed him, because the needs for precaution were no longer there. In the meantime other restrictive measures were applied to him by other judges and he had to stay in prison. Those crimes too had much associated evidence and his accomplices were then also found guilty.
When Cagliari died he was no longer detained as a result of the action of the Mani Pulite team!

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Interview about Tangentopoli