Ranucci’s ‘disturbing’ dual register

It’s not as though we’d missed it, let alone needed it to help us interpret the facts correctly, but it was in the air and, in a way, inevitable. Roberto Saviano has arrived, with a lengthy, site-specific video documentary for his YouTube channel. He introduced it as follows: “I’ve read the entire three hundred pages of the investigation into the bomb at Sigfrido Ranucci’s home… A reconstruction based on the investigation files, to understand what happened”. And at the end of the video, Saviano arrives at – could we have doubted it? – the famous, ever-present ‘second level’: “Take note: what you’ve heard so far is merely the ground floor of this story, because these five are just the foot soldiers. Above them are those who hired, paid and instructed them”.

The usual script, but if there is one thing that is curious – or ‘disturbing’ – it is that this narrative of a hidden agenda, of the ‘higher-ups’, is the very same one that Ranucci has been playing out since the day of the attack, with a ‘double standard’ that has even intrigued the investigators. His first official statements following the arrest of the perpetrators were those of a hero standing against sinister plots: “I am disturbed by the criminal depth of the gang; they wanted to make history.” But just four days after the arrest, on the night of 4 July, Ranucci spoke on the phone with Valter Lavitola – who had just been searched as the instigator of the attack – and instead referred to the attackers as “those scoundrels”. Lavitola and Ranucci – the instigator and the victim – spoke cautiously via an app that could not be intercepted; yet their conversation was accidentally recorded by an ambient bug in Lavitola’s car. Beyond the ‘grand scheme’ imagined by Saviano, there is, in short, a more mundane and disturbing dual narrative. The private narrative, in which Ranucci refers to the attackers as “scoundrels” when speaking to Lavitola, and a completely opposite public narrative: “the scale of the crime unsettles me”. A charade in which one might imagine that everyone, more or less aware of the entire script, was playing their part. Perhaps Saviano will explain this to us in the next episode.