Di Pietro, Antonio (b. 1950)

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DI PIETRO, ANTONIO (b. 1950)

Italian magistrate and politician.

The Italian magistrate and politician Antonio Di Pietro was born in Montenero di Bisaccia. Having served in the police force at the Ministry of the Interior and then entered (1981) into the Magistracy, he came to the Public Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Milan in 1985 as an assistant district attorney specializing in organized crime as well as crimes against the public administration and information technology. After achieving satisfactory results in various investigations, he launched the Mani Pulite (clean hands) probe in 1991. Mani Pulite unfolded in the broader context of the "Tangentopoli" (bribesville) scandal and was intended to reveal the extensive and continuous series of crimes committed by public officials and business leaders. Mani Pulite began from an apparently marginal investigation of a Socialist executive, Mario Chiesa, president of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, a retirement home. Chiesa was caught red-handed on 17 February 1992, immediately after having pocketed an envelope containing seven million lire, a portion of the kickback that a cleaning service had paid to win its contract. (The agreement stipulated a payment of 10 percent on a contract worth one hundred forty million lire.) Following the interrogation of Chiesa (who was expelled from the PSI, or Italian Socialist Party), the investigation spread and uncovered the full extent of the phenomenon, which served to finance political parties. Over the following months subpoenas were issued to various Italian political figures for corruption and violations of the law on party-financing. The suspects included the exmayors of Milan, Carlo Tognoli (b. 1938) and Palolo Pillitteri (b. 1940); the minister of transport, Carlo Bernini (b. 1936); and the Socialist ex-foreign minister Gianni De Michelis (b. 1940), who was investigated for corruption relating to a series of contracts in the Veneto region.

In light of the rapidly growing scope of the inquiry, the heads of the prosecutor's office of Milan, Gerardo D'Ambrosio and Saverio Borrelli, decided in April to flank Di Pietro with assistant district attorney Gherardo Colombo, first, and then Pier Camillo Davigo. The so-called pool of Mani Pulite was born. On 15 October 1992 the administrative secretary of the PSI, Vicenzo Balzamo (who would die eleven days later of a heart attack), confirmed the rumors of a formal indictment for corruption and violation of the law on party-financing, while in December, even Bettino Craxi (1934–2000) was accused (the alleged crimes included complicity in corruption, receiving stolen goods, and violation of the law on party-financing). Tangentopoli provoked the crisis and collapse of several parties—causing the dissolution of the PSI, the DC, or Christian Democrats, and PSDI, or Italian Social Democratic Party—and the so-called end of the First Republic.

In 1992 dramatic events unfolded in the course of the investigations: the suicides of Renato Amorese, secretary of the PSI at Lodi, and the deputy Sergio Moroni, a regional-level party leader, were followed by those of Gabriele Cagliari, ex-president of the ENI (National Hydrocarbon Agency), and Raoul Gardini, head of Enimont, from the Ferruzzi group. The year 1993 saw the trial of Sergio Cusani, a Socialist financier, for the Enimont "super-kickback," billions of lire distributed to the various political parties in proportion to their size and importance (of which two hundred million went to the justice-loving Lega Nord). Members of the PCI/PDS (Italian Communist Party) were also implicated. On 6 December 1994, availing himself during the judicial audience of an innovative computerized system, Di Pietro concluded the "Enimont" investigation, which would result in the condemnation (on 27 October 1995) of Craxi, Claudio Martelli and De Michelis (PSI), Arnaldo Forlani and Paolo Cirino Pomicino (DC), Renato Altissimo (PLI, or Italian Liberal Party), Umberto Bossi (Lega Nord), and Ugo La Malfa (Italian Republican Party). After resting the prosecution's case Di Pietro announced his resignation from the magistracy, which he made official on 2 May 1995.

On 7 May 1995 he was placed on the list of those under investigation, charged with embezzlement by the head of the financial police (Guardia di Finanza), Giuseppe Cerciello (himself accused of corruption and condemned on 9 November with other leaders of the Financial Police). On 22 February 1996 Di Pietro was absolved of all accusations in a preliminary hearing. In May 1996 he was named minister of public works in the administration of Romano Prodi (17 May 1996–9 October 1998), a position he resigned on 14 November.

In November 1997 Di Pietro was elected Senator of the Republic. On 21 March 1998, he founded the Italy of Values (L'Italia dei Valori) movement, whose first priority was the collection of signatures for the referendum on the abolition of the proportional quota. On 19 February 1999 the Italy of Values movement joined the movement of the Democrats (i Democratici). On 13 June 1999 Di Pietro was elected to the European Parliament, and on 2 February 2000 he became the head of the Senate faction of the Democrats. On 9 February he joined a Senate constitutional-affairs commission on Tangentopoli, charged with establishing the parameters of a law sanctioning a commission of inquest on Tangentopoli. In February 2000 he created "The Observatory on Legality and the Issue of Morality," to promote the issue of morality in Europe as the ethical underpinning of a restored political framework. On 3 May 2000 he founded his own autonomous movement, the "Lista Di Pietro—Italia dei Valori," in both the Senate and the European Parliament, which he represented in the elections of April 2001 (winning 1,443,057 votes for the House and 1,139,566 for the Senate).

On 7 February 2002 he was elected president of the delegation of the European Parliament at the commissions for cooperation with Asiatic countries (EU-Kazakhstan, EU-Kirghizistan, EU-Uzbekistan) and as a member of the delegation for the relations with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Mongolia. In June 2002 he published the book Mani pulti. La vera storia (Clean hands. The true story). In addition to his contributions to daily papers and national and foreign magazines, Di Pietro has published various works in the fields of law and information technology as well as civic-education texts for use in secondary schools, such as Diventare grandi, Costruire il futuro (1995).