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

GV: So you started to put people in prison to force them to talk.

ADP: Nothing could be further from the truth. And even the Corte di Cassazione {Supreme Court} confirmed this by turning down the appeals against the actions of the pool {the team of magistrates}. Almost all of our arrest requests had one characteristic: they were “ad horas” {for a number of hours}. Often the person under interrogation went to prison in the morning and was out by the evening. At the most they were in prison for a few days. Our arrests weren’t designed to keep them in prison for long. The motivation for them was that at that precise time the businessperson could do one of two things: He could disturb the evidence or he could come to us and confess. Once I had discovered that in your company you’ve got slush funds, once you know that I know your current account details, once it has been established that you have been part of a corruption mechanism for some time, you become a person who is socially dangerous because for years you have been carrying on this activity and you can thus take action to disturb the evidence.

GV: But why did you let people out after just a few hours?

ADP: Because, once there were there, we called for them and
we said: ‘This is the situation of the judicial investigation relating to you and these are the dangers that you could disturb the evidence needed to prove the case against you, this is clear, beyond discussion, because for twenty years you have been doing this activity and obviously you have relationships with many people who could be willing to do you a favour by hiding the evidence or by continuing this criminal activity.’
‘Oh no’ they said, ‘No? OK Explain why not. How can you convince me? Speak. Confess.’ Our objective was not to put people in prison to make them confess. It was to free them as soon as possible because after their statements, the corrupters under investigation were no longer in a credible position in the eyes of their accomplices. So by interrupting the chain of silence, we could justify the arrests. In this way we could demonstrate that there was no longer a danger that the evidence could be disturbed and that the crime would not be continued or repeated