It is notable to observe how these hardline moralists suddenly discover the importance of due process.

For the international community of hardline moralists on permanent active duty, this is not an easy time to cope with, and for this reason we would like to express our most sincere solidarity with them. It is not an easy time for Ranucci-style moralism, now forced to defend itself against the ‘Report’ method being applied to his life, nor is it easy for his die-hard followers, such as Travaglio, who now find themselves demonising the decisions made by the judges who refused to reinstate Ranucci at Rai, after having spent years demonising anyone who dared to criticise the actions of the judiciary.

It has not been an easy season for Davigo-style moralising, which, having previously branded every individual involved in legal proceedings as a criminal until proven otherwise, is now forced to perform legal acrobatics to demonstrate that the conviction handed down is the result of a judicial conspiracy. 

It is not an easy time for Travaglio-style moralising; having delighted Italy with his scoops from Uruguay on the Minetti case, he has prudently chosen to remove all coverage of that story after realising that Jacobinism without evidence can be risky in a courtroom.

However, this is not an easy time for another prince of moralising, whose story would have been difficult to write – given its sheer implausibility – even for any sworn enemy of the ‘mozzorecchi’ sold by the kilo. The protagonist of this story is called Roberto Scarpinato.

He is a senator for the Five Star Movement; he was one of the magistrates at the Palermo Public Prosecutor’s Office during the years of Falcone and Borsellino; and for months he has been embroiled, as they say, in a story that is shaking the very foundations of moralism in both the Five Star Movement and post-Five Star Movement eras. The story is simple. For years, the Caltanissetta Public Prosecutor’s Office has been investigating the theory that one of the reasons behind the 1992 massacres was Falcone and Borsellino’s interest in the famous ‘Mafia-contracts’ inquiry – the investigation into the links between Cosa Nostra, businesses and major public works projects. In the course of those investigations, Gioacchino Natoli, a former public prosecutor in Palermo, came under investigation; he was accused, alongside Giuseppe Pignatone, of aggravated aiding and abetting in connection with the handling of a strand of the Mafia-appalti case. In recent years, the public prosecutor’s office has failed to find sufficient evidence to identify new perpetrators of the massacres and has requested that the case be dismissed, a decision subsequently granted by the investigating magistrate. However, during the investigations, a number of interesting facts have emerged which should have a certain impact on a moralist accustomed to regarding every detail in court documents as the truth.

Whilst Natoli was under surveillance, the public prosecutor’s office recorded 33 conversations between Natoli and Scarpinato, who was not and is not under investigation. Some of these concerned the hearing that Natoli was due to attend before the parliamentary Anti-Mafia Committee, of which Scarpinato is a member. The telephone calls reveal that, prior to the hearing, the two discussed certain issues that would subsequently be addressed before the committee. Scarpinato maintains that he simply asked Natoli to publicly report true facts that Natoli himself had already told him. The investigating judge, Santi Bologna, however, in the order with which he dismissed the ‘Mafia-contracts’ case, wrote very harsh words about Scarpinato’s behaviour, referring to ‘misleading tactics’ directed at Natoli.

Scarpinato vehemently disputes this account and points out that he has never been under investigation and was therefore unable to defend himself against those allegations in court. The contradiction is right there before our eyes. Faced with wiretaps, transcripts, allegations contained in court documents and political calls for resignation, Scarpinato and the M5S – who for years have taught their voters to regard every suspicion as evidence, every inference as a certainty, and every word from a magistrate as the truth – suddenly rediscover a vocabulary familiar to defenders of due process: the protection of private conversations, the prerogatives of MPs, the right to a fair hearing, the right to defend oneself before being judged, the danger of a media trial, the political use of the public prosecutor’s office, a campaign to discredit, and the anomaly of seeing a judge who, in a judicial document, hands out moral, ethical and evaluative judgements to a person not under investigation, thereby smearing them.

The issue with Scarpinato’s defence is not just about the story emerging from the Caltanissetta Public Prosecutor’s Office’s investigations. It concerns a more interesting political reality. When you educate your voters to demand absolute transparency from the political class, when you explain to your voters that any suspicion must be treated as proof of guilt, when you wage political battles under the banner of ‘release the chats’, remember the Del Mastro case – for the sake of consistency, you should ask your own MP not to resort to the rhetoric of due process but to publish the chats with the public prosecutor who had been under investigation, Natoli, along with the conversations, wiretaps and recordings of communications. Scarpinato, on the other hand, maintains that his thirty-three intercepted conversations with Natoli – given that Scarpinato is a senator – could not have been used or passed on to the Anti-Mafia Commission without the Senate’s authorisation. He also says that those conversations must be read ‘in their context’. He claims there is a ‘smear campaign’ against him. He goes so far as to denounce the ‘under-the-table’ leaking to the media of wiretaps which he claims were subject to confidentiality. He links their dissemination to a political “campaign to discredit” him. He even goes so far as to suggest that the public disclosure of the charges brought against him by the investigating magistrate of Caltanissetta before the Anti-Mafia Commission – to which those documents were transferred – may have greatly increased the risk of him being subjected to a harsh “media trial”.

In his defence – which is entirely legitimate – Scarpinato must not have realised how the smear campaign waged against him, involved wiretaps used for political ends, with conversations recorded in an unorthodox manner – possibly in breach of the constitutional safeguards to which a Member of the Italian Parliament is entitled – and public shaming resulting from a moral judgement made by an investigating magistrate, whose words carry the weight of a boulder, not least because of the absolute power that certain political parties have, in recent years, conferred upon magistrates, is precisely the method on which ‘Grillism’ and ‘post-Grillism’ have thrived for many years.

This applies to him, an M5S MP with a background as a magistrate who is discovering first-hand the damage caused by the media-judicial circus, just as it did for Ranucci: experiencing the ‘Report’ method at first hand and only realising the importance of due process when it is one’s own skin, rather than someone else’s, that is on the chopping block. Beppe Grillo, as we know, is there, watching from the sidelines, trying to work out whether there is any scope for him to return as a spoilsport in the political arena. It is difficult to predict what will happen. It is easier to acknowledge a reality: among the many reasons complicating his return to the political arena, there is one significant factor concerning the presence of the heirs to ‘Grillism’ who, with their far-fetched ‘fuck you’ to the ‘justicialist’ movement – from Scarpinato to Ranucci – have tragically become even more comical than he is. Yesterday, among the ‘Mozzorecchi’, the refrain was ‘kick them out of the chat’. Today, among the ‘Manettari’, the slogan has become ‘kick out the punitive justice advocates’. Popcorn.