Italian fixing scandal goes down to the wire
SAMUEL JOHNSON FAMOUSLY OPINED that “it is is better to suffer wrong than to do it and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust”. Johnson would have a hard time selling his argument in Italian football.
You may have thought that last spring’s influence-peddling scandal was the final instalment in Serie A’s cloak-and-dagger chicanery. Think again. Last week, it emerged that employees of Telecom, Italy’s equivalent of BT, were illegally wire-tapping hundreds of Italian public figures, including businessmen, politicians, actors and footballers.
At the heart of the inquiry is Giuliano Tavaroli, Telecom’s chief of security. According to magistrates, Tavaroli teamed up with Emanuele Cipriani, a private investigator whose company is registered in London, to sell the transcripts of the phone calls. They were also allegedly a one-stop surveillance shop: for a fee, Cipriani could arrange to have someone followed and even obtain bank records via his contacts in the Italian secret service.
The idea was simple: people who are famous, rich or powerful occasionally have skeletons in their closet. You may discover that someone is dodging his taxes or associating with criminals; or that he cheats on his wife or enjoys pornography in industrial quantities. Whatever the case, by invading their privacy you can gather sensitive information that can be used either to blackmail them or, if leaked to the press, damage their reputation.
The whole affair intersects neatly with the scandal that resulted in Juventus being relegated to Serie B and AC Milan, Fiorentina, Reggina and Lazio being slapped with hefty points penalties. Most of the evidence in the case was gathered via wiretaps.
And here is where the conspiracy theorists went to town. One club benefited more than any other from the scandal: Inter Milan. They were assigned last season’s scudetto — after Juventus were stripped of the title — and their rivals’ punishments forced them to sell players and weaken their squads.
Telecom’s majority shareholder, Marco Tronchetti Provera, holds a 13.9 per cent stake in Inter and investigators found that Cipriani had invoiced Inter for services rendered. Massimo Moratti, the owner of Inter, is scheduled to be heard by the Italian FA on this matter next week. One unnamed Telecom employeee told magistrates that Adamo Bove, Tavaroli’s right-hand man at Telecom, asked him to log the phone calls of a number of officials at Juventus and the Italian FA, as well as various referees. Bove committed suicide last July.
Some of the conspiracy theorists maintain that the summer’s scandal — in which Juventus and other clubs were found to have colluded with high-ranking officials at the Italian FA to influence the selection and performance of referees — was orchestrated by Inter, using their influence over Telecom and their access to phone records.
“Right now it’s hard for me to be objective,” Didier Deschamps, the Juventus manager, said. “So all I’m going to say is that, until a few weeks ago, people thought we were the only club who were rotten to the core. Now these same people have changed their mind and they’re starting to believe that everything that went on this summer was an organised and concerted effort to bring us down.”
One of the most staggering aspects of the affair emerged on Friday, when it was alleged that Tavaroli and Cipriani were spying on Tronchetti Provera, Telecom’s chairman, as well, which would suggest that he was not involved, thereby weakening the Inter link.
And as far as the invoice to the club, Inter claim that it was surveillance work carried out on Christian Vieri, the striker, whom they suspected was spending too much time in various nightclubs.
Either way, none of this changes the fact that the clubs punished in the scandal were found guilty based on wire-tap evidence, which is largely indisputable. True, it does matter how evidence is obtained, but the wire-taps that condemned Juventus and others were legally obtained by magistrates.
That said, the allegation that Inter were spying on their players is unsettling. Juxtapose the amount of money in football and the relatively paltry wages of phone company employees and the opportunity for wrongdoing is tempting.
By Gabriele Marcotti
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