11 June 2006

15 -Craxi

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

GV: How many times did you meet Craxi before the trial? Is it true that there was a certain “feeling” between you and him?
ADP: I had 4 or 5 investigational interviews with Craxi. Let’s call them interrogations as they were all recorded and they took place in the presence of his lawyers. At first they were conducted in Amato’s home. Not President Amato but Nicol� Amato, the former director of the prisons who having become a lawyer had taken on his defence. Later they were carried on in a building of the Secret Services in Rome.

It was there that Craxi told me about his information in relation to the financing of the PCI by the Soviet Union. It was there that he told me about a recording, made shortly before in his office relating to the lawyer avvocato Pezzi who is now dead. At the time of the recording Pezzi was the defence lawyer for Luigi Carnevale who was a leading member of the PCI in Milan he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Milan Metro and had confessed to bribes that had circulated in that environment.
I used Craxi’s information to proceed against the members of the Communist Party, but the “soviet” documentation referred to distant financing that was so far back in time that it was already irreversibly “prescritto”.
In relation to that it would be interesting to understand why Craxi, when he was President of the Council, and thus a public official, why he didn’t hand over those documents to the magistrates. At that time the facts could have been followed up. Ah, the blessed first Republic!
Even the recording of the interview with avvocato Pezzi didn’t contain important information about specific people. It turned out that Pezzi had told Craxi generic facts received from Carnevale, according to whom even the PCI was involved in bribes.
But even we knew this, and we had arrested Carnevale and had interrogated a number of his party companions. And then we certainly couldn’t use the tape, recorded secretly, that contained declarations made by a lawyer about one of his clients.

GV: On a more personal level, how do you remember those meetings with the socialist leader?
ADP: I still remember that Craxi was smoking. He smoked and smoked. There were hours and hours of dialogue, of confrontations, of discussion about soviet funds to the Italian Communist Party (the PCI) and how the PCI was involved in the bribes.
He went round and round on these topics like a falcon on the prey. However he never came down to capture it. He never came down to concrete facts. He didn’t give names, dates, circumstances, provide evidence, except for topics that were so far back in time that it was no longer possible to follow them up as crimes.
More than talking to me, I had the impression that he was intending to send messages to the political world. I couldn’t allow myself to be involved in his game of suspects. After a bit, his minuet finished.
Craxi realised that I was not useful to his tactic and that I wouldn’t follow him in his performance. And so he started to say that not even I wanted to investigate the communists and that the Milan Prosecution operated double standards.
But blessed Craxi (his name was Benedetto and he certainly seems to have been blessed)! If you knew something about facts that could still be brought to trial, why didn’t you say loud and clear? Then I would have been able to show you how I could carry out investigations!

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Interview about Tangentopoli