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Interview with Gherardo Colombo by Gaetano Savatteri for the Noirfest 2007 catalogue |
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| 07/12/2007 |
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A hasty farewell, a letter of resignation and he was gone – without any public scenes or melodrama. In February 2007, Gherardo Colombo resigned from the magistrature, after 30 years spent working in one of Italy’s most renowned halls of justice: in Milan. He was behind some of the most tempestuous investigations of contemporary Italian politics: the P2 Freemason Lodge scandal, the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli, Mani Pulite and the Imi-Sir/Lodo Mondadori/Sme trials. Colombo left exactly 15 years after the beginning of the Mani Pulite investigation, which revolutionized the party system, revealing corruptors and the corrupted, bribes and kickbacks, and illegal dealings between businessmen and politicians.
He left with bitterness and a dream. Bitterness over that fact that “in Italy, the relationship between the citizen and legality is a difficult one: the culture of this country of corporations is based above all on cunning and privilege. Between ordinances and laws that are modified or repealed, we have arrived at an overall rehabilitation of the corrupt.” And a dream: “I want to meet young people and explain to them the sense of justice. I’m convinced that as long as jurisdiction works there must necessarily exist a general culture divided with respect to the rules.”
This is what Colombo told the Corriere della Sera on March 17, 2007. And now, a little less than year later?
“I’m still meeting young people. In Calabria, Naples, Salerno. In the schools. And I’m discovering there’s another Italy, which is inadequately represented. I’m discovering that there exist schools that are doing an excellent job with regards to the law. Even on the issue of involvement, to find a system of life that will improve all our lives, through rules as well.”
You must have realized that there still exist two Italies…
“There are territories in some parts of our country that are controlled by criminal organizations. There are neighborhoods, cities, entire regions that do not fall under the control of institutions. Crime pays in these areas because it’s difficult to name the guilty.”
Those are the areas in which a victim killed in a shoot-out no longer makes the news…
“That’s true. But I don’t think that’s due only to a different sensibility from the press and the information sources on what is happening in those areas. It’s something else, it goes beyond that. It becomes taken for granted, almost as if it were normal. I would like to reflect upon how this lack of information ends up playing criminality’s game. Perhaps it’s more than just inurement.”
You resigned before the phenomenon of the rehabilitated corrupt. And yet lately it does look as if some things are changing. The current resignation seems to be giving way to indignation. Isn’t that a sign of hitting rock bottom?
“I’m afraid that indignation in Italy isn’t very enduring. I’m over 60 and I’ve seen this wave of indignation many times, even for extremely serious situations. I can think of the indignation and emotion that followed the killings in which judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were murdered. Even then, once the emotional reaction passed, the indignation subsided.”
Perhaps indignation is always destined to subside…
“I often wonder if there is a personal or private interest in not getting worried, in not reacting.”
Meaning?
“I’ll give you a concrete example. I think that Mani Pulite ended the moment that people many could identify with those who fell under the scope of the investigation. That is, as long the only ones involved were the powerful, the untouchables, everyone could sit and watch and even feel a certain satisfaction in seeing these people fall. Then, when the investigation extended to the shopkeeper who bribed the traffic cop, the corrupt officer of the Revenue Guard Corps or the public worker who favored those offering kickbacks, everyone began identifying with these people because they were, ultimately, office co-workers, friends, relatives. Thus, many distanced themselves from the investigation in that phase because it touched people close to them or in some way like them.”
You stepped down from your duties because you feel that the attitude towards the law must change outside the halls of justice as well. I’d like to read something written by one of your peers, Scott Turow, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago, who prosecuted several corruption cases: “The law is unable to get to the truth or administer justice with the reliability it is forced to feign. Its rules never fully penetrate the dark sides of moral ambiguity, and can neither comprehend nor provide answers to the complexity of human motivations and intentions. Punishment alone does not transform the world around us into the one in which we would like to live. In light of the cruelty we inflict upon one another the sense of a shared objective and community must come from outside the law.”
“I agree and support that. I believe the word ‘legality’ is a neutral word. Even the word ‘law’ is neutral. The content of the laws is evaluated by referring to the concept of justice, although even the term ‘justice’ is not univocal. I’ll give you an example: when slavery was legal, it was illegal to try and free someone else’s slaves, it was illegal to acknowledge their equality. It was a very different kind of legality that the one we refer to now. I’m afraid that the world is moving towards the acknowledgement of rules that are analogous to the past, which allow for discrimination, abuse of power, inequality.”
With regard to the times and places of legality: in the United States, the death penalty is prescribed by law. Turow, who wrote an essay on limiting its application, was appointed to a commission considering the reform of the [state of Illinois’] death penalty. At the time, he had no set ideas for or against the death penalty, he claimed that not even the principle of the sacredness of life was diriment because it is founded on a religious postulate. In the end, however, Turow decided against the death penalty, beyond any religious or moral conviction…
“I agree with Turow. I don’t believe that negating the legitimacy of the death penalty comes from a religious credo but, rather, through the value and dignity of the human being. I refer not only to our Constitution, but also to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the result of considerations made following the massacres and the Holocaust of WWII. The Declaration established the principle of the dignity of the human being, who until had been considered an instrument. This is reason enough to negate the legitimacy of the death penalty. There is a second reason, which is very concrete: statistics and experience have by now proven that the death penalty does not work as a method of general prevention and deterrence against crime. Lastly, conceiving of the death penalty as a vendetta against the guilty means abdicating the principles of Enlightenment that are part of our history.'
On the other hand, Italy is a country in which no one or hardly anyone serves a jail sentence…
“That’s true, although not entirely. Those who are caught in the act of committing a crime, often foreign citizens, serve their sentence, and without any minimum guarantees with respect to others There are those who remain in jail for the entire period of preventative detention and serve their entire sentence, before the three phases of justice are carried out even and before the final sentence is delivered. Simultaneously, for other crimes, for example those impossible to catch in the act, it may be that no sentence is served: it almost goes without saying that these are almost always the so-called white-collar crimes. However, I am primarily interested in a contemplation of the sanctioning system. Prison produces habitual criminals: two out of three people return to committing crimes upon being released from jail. Therefore, we need to understand whether the prison system is useful in preventing other crimes and if the provision of the Constitution that states that a sentence is intended to re-educate the convicted criminal has been achieved and is achievable.”
Do you read noir literature, legal thrillers?
“For many years, I read legal documents and wrote rulings. But, of course, I do read crime novels from time to time. I recently read the latest book by Piero Colaprico….”
In the past they used to say you couldn’t write crime novels in Italy because the culprit would never have been arrested. Actually, many are written precisely because the guilty often go unpunished, in life just as in novels…
“But this doesn’t happen just in Italian noir. Literature is full of people who go unpunished, the world has often been like this. A person’s punishment and guilt used to be evaluated on the basis of the crime and, above all, on his/her social position. In Italy, in areas where organized crime is strong and deeply rooted, the criminal is probably never even identified. As for Commissioner Montalbano, it seems to me that he gets the criminals in the end.”
You dedicate your time to speaking with young people. Beyond the rhetoric, do you truly believe that young people will be able to change things or are even they resigned to the worst?
“There are young people committed to finding a job, young people in difficult living conditions. But I think it’s important to help young people not lose hope. Often, we adults contribute to killing young people’s hopes. We need to be more careful, we need to make more room for their energy, their desire to do things and even their utopias. Utopias remain utopias if they are destroyed by those who have no faith or hope in them. If young people find answers from adults, they will be able to have faith in the future, and so will we.” |
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