The absurd story of Cosimo di Gesù, a general in the Guardia di Finanza. Innocent

No good deed goes unpunished. The lesson is always the same, and it is a hard pill to swallow for those who believe that doing one’s job is not only a way to earn a living, but also that work has an ethical dimension relating to the common good. The problem with justice in Italy – amongst others – is precisely that no good deed goes unpunished. And so, here it is: a true story, absolutely true and very recent too. There is a general in the Guardia di Finanza called Cosimo Di Gesù. Camus said that ‘a man is a man when he stands tall’. Someone who does not bow to flattery or bribery. As well as being imposing, Di Gesù stands straighter than a plumb line. Incorruptible, but above all committed to doing what is right. Not merely by formally doing what is right, but by acting in substance to do what is right. An important distinction: in a world often characterised by formalities that are fundamentally flawed, he has always acted with integrity.

In 2020, while Covid was raging in Lombardy, the then president of Fondazione Fiera, Enrico Pazzali – who had met Cosimo Di Gesù in Rome when, as CEO of Eur, he was completing the Nuvola project – called the senior officer of the Guardia di Finanza and asked him to carry out an audit of the companies working on the record-time construction of the Ospedale in Fiera. There was no time for tenders or lengthy bureaucratic procedures. The Public Procurement Code had been suspended. There was work to be done, and it had to be done quickly. So Di Gesù sprang into action and carried out checks, accessing the Serpico database. Years later, the Equalize scandal broke. And the public prosecutor’s office also investigated Cosimo Di Gesù, who – naturally – had asked for nothing in return for those checks, nor had anything been promised to him, and who, above all, was not even aware of Equalize’s existence. He accused the Finance Police general of having illegally accessed the database.

According to the defence brief that led to the case being dismissed, the prosecutors seized all of Di Gesù’s devices and copied everything. He was treated like a criminal. This is where the oddities begin: during his questioning, the magistrates asked Pazzali a few questions about Di Gesù. The former president of Fondazione Fiera replied that he had not only “approached” Di Gesù, but had also “contacted, for exactly the same purpose, the magistrates at the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office, namely the then Public Prosecutor, Dr Francesco Greco, and the Deputy Public Prosecutor, Dr Alessandra Dolci, again with the aim of obtaining support in verifying that the contractors had no links to organised crime”. There is even a draft protocol. It remains unclear whether Greco and Dolci took any action, but Di Gesù certainly did: for the common good, he checked that the company building the hospital was not listed as a high-risk enterprise.

The whole affair is starting to take on a surreal air. Di Gesù is being dragged before the ‘people’s court’ – in other words, the investigations against him are being splashed across the newspapers. Cosimo Di Gesù is also the commander of the Guardia di Finanza’s most prestigious training school, the one in Bergamo. He took up the post in 2024, and it is a position he holds dear, the crowning achievement of his career. Naturally, there are those who are questioning – sometimes explicitly, sometimes maliciously – whether a member of the Guardia di Finanza can continue to teach young cadets whilst facing allegations of having favoured (alleged) spies. In short: Di Gesù’s position in Bergamo is teetering under the weight of the investigation.

At a certain point, however, the Milan public prosecutors sent the case files to Rome: they realised that Di Gesù had absolutely nothing to do with the main strand of the Equalize investigation. This was research carried out for the ‘Ospedale in Fiera’ hospital during the Covid pandemic, and for purposes entirely consistent with the final mission of the Guardia di Finanza. In Rome, the judges decided that was enough; the case could be closed. Cosimo Di Gesù was definitively cleared of any involvement in the investigation. One wonders, however, what remains in the wake of this. Firstly, years of a civil servant’s life have been tarnished. And secondly, a warning to everyone else: if anyone asks you to take concrete action during an emergency, to try to do things properly and prevent infiltration, the best course of action is to stick to bureaucratic procedures. Perhaps someone will die because things aren’t completed in time, but at least your career will have been successfully saved.