“Falcone would not have had dinner with Lavitola”. Violante, Grasso and Ayala speak out

Rome. He mentions Giovanni Falcone and Aldo Moro. Then Piersanti Mattarella and Paolo Borsellino. They are all his brothers. This is what Sigfrido Ranucci writes on Facebook. And the government’s response is not long in coming: “Ranucci is delusional,” says Matteo Salvini. But here is how, beyond the knee-jerk reaction – and the outrage on the right – there are also those who watch the river flow from the other bank.

“I am a magistrate and I always wait before speaking,” former Senate President Pietro Grasso, an associate judge in the Cosa Nostra Maxi-trial and Chief Public Prosecutor in Palermo, tells Il Foglio. Grasso, who would prefer not to speak but then lets it slip. “There will always be,” he says, “those who use those names as a shield.” The names of the fallen. “I wait. But, to tell the truth, it’s nothing new.”

The former Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Luciano Violante – a former magistrate, chair of the parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission and a member of the commission of inquiry into the Moro case – does not wish to “play the moralising moralist”. If anything, he would like to “fully understand what happened” and “wait and see”. Yet, on this issue, even he does not beat about the bush: “Moro, Mattarella, Falcone and Borsellino would not have gone to dinner with Lavitola”. Full stop.

So, whilst on the left former magistrates and senior state officials watch the idol’s twilight, Valter Lavitola’s detention in prison has been confirmed. The risk is that of evidence tampering and the danger of him absconding. And his statements – even after five hours of questioning – are said to have been ‘vague’. Investigators from the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office may now summon Sigfrido Ranucci as a person with knowledge of the facts. The facts? An attack in Pomezia last October, “for his own good, to enable him to obtain a higher level of security detail, in light of the threats he had received”.

But what, then, is ‘protection’ for an investigative journalist? An indicator of credibility or a mark of distinction? Protection or a stigma in the long line stretching from Roberto Saviano to Sigfrido Ranucci today, and perhaps stumbling upon the self-inflicted attack by a young journalist from Vicenza?

Giuseppe Ayala responds to Il Foglio: “It has often been exactly as you say: an indicator of credibility.” Ayala, a public prosecutor in the Maxi-trial and Under-Secretary of State for Justice in the Prodi government, was Giovanni Falcone’s desk neighbour. And when asked about the appropriateness of such comparisons, he sighs. He would prefer not to discuss it. But perhaps more out of modesty than caution. “For those who know these stories well,” he says, finally, “it is a comparison that simply defies comment. Ranucci defies comment.” Why does he say that? “Because it is impossible to find the words. The sheer magnitude of those stories, when set against this affair, leaves me speechless.”

And even Sigfrido himself is left speechless on this journey to the end – or perhaps not – of Report. His lawyer, Roberto De Vita, explained yesterday that “he could never have imagined that a friend would go this far”. That the love was explosive, that is, almost as much as the comparison of the investigative journalist to Falcone and Borsellino. He could never have imagined, however, that someone had already made that brazen comparison. Or as Pietro Grasso puts it: “Nothing new”.