Toti as Mimmo Lucano: when wiretapping serves the political process

The Toti system and the Riace model, two different stories, but one common denominator: the abuse of wiretapping as a key to reaching politicians. There is the governor of Liguria, Giovanni Toti, not yet tried but already convicted by a Trojan spy, for having worked as a perfumer with businessmen who sent funds to the party as donations, in accordance with the law. Payments regularly declared by Toti’s own electoral commission although, for the Public Prosecutor’s Office, this money would be compensation because the Trojan, in more than 27 thousand hours of recording, states that the president of the Region had obtained the money in exchange for favors, for resolutions signed by other officials, not under investigation. In practice, Toti would have spent a lot on interceptions, certainly in words. An already seen script, that of dialectical investigations. The most striking case is that of the beloved mayor of Riace, Mimmo Lucano, candidate for the European elections with Avs, but who ended up in the meat grinder of wiretapping, on the basis of which the Court of Locri inflicted an exemplary sentence on him: 13 years and two months. And not because of “ideological” corruption, but because of a series of crimes in the management of migrant reception projects, which ranged from criminal association to fraud, from embezzlement to forgery, to abuse of power. It must be said that Lucan signed some delicate acts, if nothing else, driven by the ideal of true hospitality. Given the amount of evidence brought to the first instance, the Court considered that Lucano was a criminal because, as stated in the conviction of December 17, 2021, “everything is proven by unequivocal environmental interceptions, often recorded on video and of his own making” . accusing nature”. So unequivocal that, last October, the former mayor of Riace was acquitted on appeal of the charges, especially those based on collections, with only forgery remaining, a crime that cost Lucano a sentence of eighteen years and months in prison, with a suspended sentence.

An incredible story, but even more surprising are the reasons for the sentence, which takes the form of a true warning against the abuse of wiretapping. The decision of the Court of Appeal of Reggio Calabria, handed down a month ago, contains a warning to all magistrates not to base their investigations solely on telephone tapping, which lends itself to different interpretations and may even contain errors in the transcriptions, such as altering their meaning. Among the 300 pages of the acquittal, the judges report the most emblematic circumstance: a conversation between the then mayor and Fernando Capone, president of the Città Futura association, only on paper, because according to the unfounded accusations, the true dominus of the association was in fact Lucan , whose only objective was political consensus. During the interception, the mayor suggested that false statements be made about the expenses incurred: «(We tell you, ed.): we are going to do something that is useful for integration and that is useful for everyone. It’s for the refugees, you have to tell them.” The defense expert, on the contrary, demonstrated that “we tell him” and “you have to tell him”, transcribed by the investigators, were never uttered on the recording, but they were added to the documents, fed to public opinion that could not hear the tapes, those expressions “valued by the court in the belief that the two were preparing a pre-established line of defense to escape their responsibilities” were not. precisely these, we read.

Not to mention that, in several crimes that contributed to the conviction, “the evidence is constituted predominantly, if not comprehensively, by the results of the technical interception activity” and that “the usability of interceptions ordered for another crime is still subject to condition that the new crime can, in turn, be authorized, highlighting a limit imposed by law and certainly not subject to “jurisprudential creation””. In short, judges beat magistrates who, in order to continue with telephone tapping, constitute more serious crimes, such as the mafia tendency in Liguria, and then cause these same dialogues to enter into lighter disputes, for which telephone tapping does not could have been authorized. A kind of drag, which led to Lucano being placed under house arrest, in a pillory that lasted for years. And this seems to be repeating itself with Toti.