The grotesque fiction of Travaglio and Caselli

Still entangled in his own contradictions, Marco Travaglio is now accusing those who criticised his obscene insinuation about Giovanni Falcone (intended to portray him as a half-mafioso) – including, naturally, the commentators at Il Foglio – of being idiots; he writes that they are “one-brainers” who failed to realise it was a joke. Coming to his rescue is Giancarlo Caselli, the distinguished but ultimately unsuccessful prosecutor of Andreotti, who also acknowledges the merits of Falcone’s work as Director of Criminal Affairs at the Ministry of Justice – with initiatives (which were, however, strongly contested at the time by the corporatist judiciary) – and resolves the issue of the alleged incompatibility with the ‘mafioso’ Giulio Andreotti by alluding to a ‘lapse of judgement’ on the part of the Christian Democrat statesman, accompanied by the metaphysical observation that ‘even Beelzebub can make a mistake’. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, as they say.

From Falcone – who was in some way implicated in Andreotti’s power structure in the first instalment of the Travaglio saga – we move on to a shrewd infiltrator within enemy lines who, thanks to the ‘distraction’ of colluding politicians, managed to engineer a reform of the anti-Mafia judicial system right under their noses, a reform that would lead to ‘that old fox Andreotti himself being put behind bars’. At this point in the pro-Ranucci soap opera, we therefore discover that the Andreotti government operated effectively and innovatively against organised crime, but without realising it. Thus, to make the numbers add up for his own monstrous deeds, the ‘old fox’ becomes a poor, unwitting fool. Now, amongst the countless accusations levelled at Andreotti, none had ever suggested he was incapable of understanding or inattentive. But to make a far-fetched, vulgar argument stick – and to accuse those who criticise it of understanding nothing – a fabricated image is constructed of an unwitting Andreotti as the indirect instigator of his subsequent legal troubles. One has to wonder who the real Beelzebub is in this affair, whilst we await the next upheavals.