The Italian paparazzi have long targeted movie stars and models. But when one photographer turned to political blackmail, Italy’s unruly elite fought back.
April 2007 may yet prove to be a critical point in Italian history. In the Camera, the lower house of parliament, 447 of the country’s most powerful representatives displayed a consensus almost unprecedented in Italy. A bill protecting the privacy of individuals flew through parliament with no opposing votes.
The reason for such decisive political action became clear later that same day. A million copies of a glossy magazine called Oggi hit the newsstands with what was, for Italy, a shocking cover. “Berlusconi’s Harem”, it said. The words were emblazoned on photographs of Silvio Berlusconi surrounded by young girls.
The photographs were relatively innocent, albeit suggestive: they showed the girls holding hands with the former prime minister or sitting on his lap. The images themselves weren’t shocking – the fact that they had been published at all was sensational. Almost 50 years after inventing the “paparazzo”, the press had finally decided that politicians – not just show-business celebrities – were fair game.
Both events were stark examples of the war now being waged between Italy’s press and its politicians. The stakes could barely be higher: thanks to a scandal that has become known as “Vallettopoli”, or “Showgirlgate”, journalists have recently gained access to explicit phone taps and photographs that reveal the indiscretions and intimacies of the Italian elite. Among the victims are Silvio Berlusconi’s daughter, Romano Prodi’s spokesman, top professional footballers and a scion of the Agnelli empire – Lapo Elkann.
At the centre of the story are two men from the furthest reaches of Europe: one, a photographers’ agent called Fabrizio Corona, is a Sicilian now languishing on remand in prison in Milan. The man who put him there is a Somerset-born maverick and public prosecutor called Henry John Woodcock. And somewhere – nobody is quite sure where – lies an embarrassing treasure-trove of explicit archive photographs that have yet to see the light of day.
Corona’s original enterprise appeared simple enough. Having founded his photographic agency, Corona’s, in 2004, he attended the right celebrity parties in Milan, Rome and Sardinia. Tall, tanned and good-looking, he mixed in easily and was popular with his subjects; his own life reflected theirs – he is married to the Croatian glamour model Nina Moric. This wasn’t telephoto work, more close up and intimate. His job was ostensibly to promote the images of many of the country’s busty calendar girls who were on the books of Lele Mora, a super-manager of models, VIPs and television stars. (The two men even had offices on different floors of the same building.)
So far, so legal. But was there a lucrative, murkier operation underneath? Controlling his team of 35 paparazzi, Corona began to hunt down indiscretions and make a fast buck by selling snaps back to people who had been caught in less flattering positions: picking up a transvestite, participating in an orgy, having open-air sex and so on. Even minor embarrassments – like a footballer smoking or someone picking their nose – became occasions to make money on the side. “Buy this,” said Corona, “and it will never go public.”
Business boomed: Adriano, the Inter Milan striker, paid e40,000 to keep private an image of himself smoking and cavorting with girls. David Trézéguet, the Juventus striker, paid e25,000. Alberto Gilardino, the AC Milan striker, paid e7,000. Both had been photographed in intimate positions with women they weren’t supposed to be with. Where there was muck, Corona found brass. Even Berlusconi was forced to pay e20,000 to remove from circulation a photograph of his daughter Barbara. She had been caught on camera enjoying a moment of passion with a man outside a Milan nightclub. Most daringly, Corona is alleged to have tried to extort e200,000 from Lapo Elkann, the grandson of Gianni Agnelli of the Fiat empire. Corona claimed to have photographs from the night Elkann fell into a cocaine-induced coma after partying with a transvestite called Patrizia. The Agnelli family refused to succumb to the blackmail, and the photographer who was present that fateful evening now denies that he ever took any photographs.
Corona’s apparent technique involved classic, old-school blackmail. But he added a twist. He needed women to get the action started. Rather than wait for things to happen, Corona allegedly took a more active approach to his job (his favoured job description was “gossip producer”). The accusation for which he will stand trial isn’t only extortion, but also profiteering from prostitution. Corona represented showgirls who were desperate to get onto television and into the pages of the glossy magazines that Corona was supplying. The gateway into that world was sexual favours.
The case of one blonde beauty, Silvia Abbate, has highlighted the practice. She is known as La Pupa (the Doll) because she stars in a television show called The Doll and the Geek (the Italian version of Beauty and the Geek). According to the judge in charge of preliminary investigations, Corona and his business partners hired “the Doll” out for e1,000 a night on the shores of Lake Como. The Venezuelan model Aida Yespica, Corona boasted, was worth even more, at e5,000 a night. In a pre-trial document, the judge wrote that Corona was “always ready to commercialise anyone and anything”. Two campaigning in the media for his release.
In all, 18 people are under investigation, including some big names. Riccardo Schicchi, Italy’s pornographer-in-chief, is under house arrest. For decades, Schicchi has been a talent scout for some of the least inhibited girls on the peninsula; he’s launched the careers of dozens of porn stars, including the sometime Italian MP La Cicciolina. Many others are also under investigation, accused of offences that range from extortion to exploitation of prostitution and intent to supply class-A drugs.
Whenever scandals like this break, the real story involves finding out who’s responsible for the regia occulta – the hidden direction. It’s always assumed there’s a powerful man who has been pulling the strings of the lucrative operation. Various people have been mentioned as the possible puppeteer. Lele Mora, a man who rose from being the butler to Loredana Berte (the beautiful singer of the 1980s and the former wife of Bjorn Borg) to become the most powerful man in Italian show business, worth an estimated e20m. Among his clients were some of the highest-paid stars of the small screen (they left him in droves as the scandal broke): Valeria Marini, Sabrina Ferilli, Manuela Arcuri – women who are now the mainstays of Italian television. Mora himself owns a private Cessna light aircraft, a huge apartment in Milan, two villas in Sardinia and a fleet of luxury cars.
Mora denies the charges of criminal conspiracy and extortion, but the facts make interesting reading. Through the Luxembourg holding company Feva Investments, Mora has a 10% share of Billionaire, the company that runs the sumptuous club in Sardinia through which all aspiring showgirls have to pass.
In many ways the scandal seems a slightly sordid retelling of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita – all that ennui and titillation as the press chase the stars. But there’s something new about this latest scandal: despite all the stereotypes about Italy being the land of love, covering sex scandals has never been part of a newspaper’s business. Until recently, Italy had been more like France with regard to the reporting of indiscretions: the privacy of the public servant took legal precedence over the right to publicise their private vices. Vallettopoli appears to have ended that entente cordiale. The Italian press, normally fantastically cultured but dry as a stale cracker, have discovered the thrills of tabloid journalism.
More than that, newspapers have begun using private lives to score political points. Towards the end of March, a whispering campaign began in right-wing newspapers like Il Giornale (owned by Berlusconi’s brother), Il Foglio (owned by Berlusconi’s wife) and Libero, alleging that Romano Prodi’s spokesman had been snapped as he tried to pick up a transvestite. The photograph was duly published: from behind you can see the driver leaning between headrests to talk to a scantily clad transvestite. The pictures of Berlusconi and his “harem” were published by Oggi and Corriere della Sera, both owned by the RCS publishing group that has been notoriously hostile to the former PM.
Although Berlusconi immediately declared that he would sue the magazine for defamation, it is he who is, in many ways, inadvertently responsible for the press’s new appetite for political scandal. Ever since Berlusconi stormed onto the political scene in the mid-1990s, Italian politics has become indistinguishable from show business. For almost 15 years now the two have converged: the television studio is as powerful as parliament, and parliament itself has become home to television showgirls like Mara Carfagna who become MPs. There’s suddenly a similarity of lifestyle and habits: the Sardinian holidays, the romantic liaisons, the consumption of illegal drugs (a police investigation a few years ago traced a consignment of cocaine directly to a government ministry). If the press are suddenly spying on MPs as much as on the stars, it’s down to the questionable activities of the politicians – dodgy even by Italian standards.
Nor is the arrival of UK-style tabloid journalism entirely a coincidence. The most intriguing character in this morality tale is an Anglo-Italian called Henry John Woodcock. The country has never seen anything like him. His mother is Neapolitan, his father is an English naval officer, and Woodcock himself was born in Somerset. He looks like a character from Starsky and Hutch: he often rides on a motorbike, wearing a leather jacket with a furry collar, sporting sideburns and a 1970s hairstyle.
Still only 40, Woodcock has been the public prosecutor in Potenza – a rocky outpost on the arch of the Italian boot – since 1999. He has investigated some of the most powerful politicians and lawyers of the deep south: the owner of Potenza Calcio, the local football team, an appeal-court judge, two government ministers, the directors of an oil company, politicians from most of the big parties, even the vice-president of the Basilicata region. One of his colleagues once joked that if the Pope came through Potenza, Woodcock would lock him up. And yet, despite the media interest he creates, Woodcock is unique among magistrates in not granting interviews and in shunning the media. “My cases speak for themselves,” is all he says. Woodcock first hit the national headlines last summer when investigating prostitution and illegal gambling. A series of phone taps revealed a network of powerful men (politicians and television executives) who enjoyed sharing and comparing the sexual abilities of young girls. As with Corona, these men offered the girls stardom in return for their favours.
There was nothing particularly surprising about the revelations, everyone had suspected as much for years, but what was noticeable was the fearlessness with which Woodcock pursued his prey. He even arrested the son of the last king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele, and had him thrown into prison in Potenza. The irony was that for almost six decades, the heir to the abolished throne of Italy had been banned from entering Italian territory; within years of finally being allowed back into the country, his passport was confiscated and he was banned from leaving. Lele Mora had been employed by Vittorio Emanuele as a consultant at his casino; it was Woodcock’s initial investigation into Vittorio Emanuele that led him, via Mora, to Corona and his alleged blackmailing scam.
To his admirers, the public prosecutor is a man who is finally bringing a sense of social responsibility to public officialdom. British civic virtues are still highly esteemed in Italy, and many see Woodcock as the longed-for Anglo-Saxon redeemer. But to others he is a dangerous, delusional man. He has been nicknamed by his enemies Il Picchiarello (the Woodpecker), and Voodoo by those who can’t pronounce his name. Since he arrived in Potenza (really not the kind of place you should go to pick a fight), he has specialised in the crime of “criminal conspiracy”. It means he often orders mass arrests – once ordering, for example, the arrest of 78 suspects in one go – which generate huge headlines but which often collapse under the scrutiny of a court. Woodcock has also used phone taps so relentlessly that he now reportedly has the equivalent of 109 years of taped conversations. Woodcock himself is tight-lipped, but his investigations are often accompanied by spectacular leaks.
By now Woodcock has many enemies. One of his rivals in the legal profession even appears to have faked a leak from Woodcock’s most recent investigation. The fake leak hinted heavily at the misdeeds of a particular politician (none other than the minister for justice), precisely in the hope that that politician might tighten the leash of the relentless prosecutor. The ministry of justice has duly dispatched an Italo-Scottish lawyer, Arcibaldo Miller, from Rome to see if Woodcock is guilty of any wrongdoing.
Although the prosecution believes it has a strong case, Corona still holds some trump cards. Tipped off (by the AC Milan striker) about Woodcock’s investigation into his business dealings, Corona moved an archive of photographs before police searched his premises and Swiss safe deposits. Some of the archive was later recovered at another address in Milan, but much of it is thought to be still at large. If he does have any more snaps up his sleeve, there is little doubt that Corona knows how to use them to his advantage.
Public opinion, too, appears to be swinging back towards Corona. Reviled when he was arrested in mid-March, he has been able to use his many friends in the media to paint himself not as a bully but as a victim. Rather than a dog handler, Corona now portrays himself as the victim of an unmuzzled media.
As always with Italian scandals, after a few weeks it becomes difficult to work out who the goodies and baddies are. Many people are genuinely worried about the frullatore, the press “blender” in which innocent people, even those who work in the media, are torn to shreds. A disturbing pattern has been repeated in all the scandals of the past 12 months, from Telecomopoli (regarding illegal phone taps) to Calciopoli (Footballgate): juicy transcripts of conversations pass in a flash from a public prosecutor’s office onto the front pages of newspapers. It’s as if the country’s huge sense of injustice and grievance is briefly allayed by finding scapegoats and vilifying them. Reputations are ruined years before any judicial sentence might offer redress.
Most of all, Corona is favoured by the political climate. Decision-making in Italian governments is normally tortuous, especially when, as now, there is a wafer-thin majority in parliament. But the privacy issue has suddenly united all parties as never before. The proposed legislation regarding privacy is draconian: the press would be unable to report any recorded dialogues until the handing down of the final sentence from an appeal court, something that in Italy only happens years or even decades down the line. The entire establishment seems to be swinging behind this clampdown on press freedom. At the height of the scandal, the garante della privacy, the privacy guarantor, issued a stern edict threatening two years’ imprisonment for anyone publishing information about “the facts and conducts” of private lives. The president of Rai, the state broadcaster, spoke of wanting to “eliminate gossip” and of his desire to replace colourful news with “cronaca bianca” – white reports.
Only a few people appear to have realised the dramatic implications of the new bill. Furio Colombo is a former editor of L’Unita newspaper and is now a senator sitting on the government benches. He is, however, intending to vote against the new bill when it comes to the Senate. “This is a bill,” he says, “that protects powerful people. It’s unacceptable in a free country. For example, a few months ago, Italy faced a huge and dramatic scandal in the banking world. Had this bill been law at that time, we would still be without any news about it, without even a hint of it. This is all a result of the deep-rooted antagonism professional politicians have against the judiciary and against the press.”
Interestingly enough, the man at the centre of the scandal, Prodi’s spokesman Silvio Sircana, has also defended an investigative press. Instead of whispering through gritted teeth about restricting the power of the media, he bravely urged the press to publish whatever images they had. In a letter to the editor of the newspaper La Stampa, he wrote: “Despite the deep and unmitigated sadness that this incident has provoked, one cannot inhibit the press from conducting investigations, from gathering information and publishing photographs.”
In a country in which press freedom has always been fragile, however, theirs are likely to remain isolated voices. The last thing Italian politicians want is to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny endured by their British or American counterparts. The irony is that Corona, the agent who lined up his paparazzi like toy soldiers, might yet manage to convince a court that he himself is a victim of press and judicial intrusion. The man who spied on other people’s private moments may yet get the chance to do so again if the new legislation deems that phone taps and journalistic leaks were invasions of his own privacy. If that’s the case, Vallettopoli will be remembered not as the start of tabloid journalism in Italy, but as its curtain call.
By Tobias Jones
April 2007 may yet prove to be a critical point in Italian history. In the Camera, the lower house of parliament, 447 of the country’s most powerful representatives displayed a consensus almost unprecedented in Italy. A bill protecting the privacy of individuals flew through parliament with no opposing votes.
The reason for such decisive political action became clear later that same day. A million copies of a glossy magazine called Oggi hit the newsstands with what was, for Italy, a shocking cover. “Berlusconi’s Harem”, it said. The words were emblazoned on photographs of Silvio Berlusconi surrounded by young girls.
The photographs were relatively innocent, albeit suggestive: they showed the girls holding hands with the former prime minister or sitting on his lap. The images themselves weren’t shocking – the fact that they had been published at all was sensational. Almost 50 years after inventing the “paparazzo”, the press had finally decided that politicians – not just show-business celebrities – were fair game.
Both events were stark examples of the war now being waged between Italy’s press and its politicians. The stakes could barely be higher: thanks to a scandal that has become known as “Vallettopoli”, or “Showgirlgate”, journalists have recently gained access to explicit phone taps and photographs that reveal the indiscretions and intimacies of the Italian elite. Among the victims are Silvio Berlusconi’s daughter, Romano Prodi’s spokesman, top professional footballers and a scion of the Agnelli empire – Lapo Elkann.
At the centre of the story are two men from the furthest reaches of Europe: one, a photographers’ agent called Fabrizio Corona, is a Sicilian now languishing on remand in prison in Milan. The man who put him there is a Somerset-born maverick and public prosecutor called Henry John Woodcock. And somewhere – nobody is quite sure where – lies an embarrassing treasure-trove of explicit archive photographs that have yet to see the light of day.
Corona’s original enterprise appeared simple enough. Having founded his photographic agency, Corona’s, in 2004, he attended the right celebrity parties in Milan, Rome and Sardinia. Tall, tanned and good-looking, he mixed in easily and was popular with his subjects; his own life reflected theirs – he is married to the Croatian glamour model Nina Moric. This wasn’t telephoto work, more close up and intimate. His job was ostensibly to promote the images of many of the country’s busty calendar girls who were on the books of Lele Mora, a super-manager of models, VIPs and television stars. (The two men even had offices on different floors of the same building.)
So far, so legal. But was there a lucrative, murkier operation underneath? Controlling his team of 35 paparazzi, Corona began to hunt down indiscretions and make a fast buck by selling snaps back to people who had been caught in less flattering positions: picking up a transvestite, participating in an orgy, having open-air sex and so on. Even minor embarrassments – like a footballer smoking or someone picking their nose – became occasions to make money on the side. “Buy this,” said Corona, “and it will never go public.”
Business boomed: Adriano, the Inter Milan striker, paid e40,000 to keep private an image of himself smoking and cavorting with girls. David Trézéguet, the Juventus striker, paid e25,000. Alberto Gilardino, the AC Milan striker, paid e7,000. Both had been photographed in intimate positions with women they weren’t supposed to be with. Where there was muck, Corona found brass. Even Berlusconi was forced to pay e20,000 to remove from circulation a photograph of his daughter Barbara. She had been caught on camera enjoying a moment of passion with a man outside a Milan nightclub. Most daringly, Corona is alleged to have tried to extort e200,000 from Lapo Elkann, the grandson of Gianni Agnelli of the Fiat empire. Corona claimed to have photographs from the night Elkann fell into a cocaine-induced coma after partying with a transvestite called Patrizia. The Agnelli family refused to succumb to the blackmail, and the photographer who was present that fateful evening now denies that he ever took any photographs.
Corona’s apparent technique involved classic, old-school blackmail. But he added a twist. He needed women to get the action started. Rather than wait for things to happen, Corona allegedly took a more active approach to his job (his favoured job description was “gossip producer”). The accusation for which he will stand trial isn’t only extortion, but also profiteering from prostitution. Corona represented showgirls who were desperate to get onto television and into the pages of the glossy magazines that Corona was supplying. The gateway into that world was sexual favours.
The case of one blonde beauty, Silvia Abbate, has highlighted the practice. She is known as La Pupa (the Doll) because she stars in a television show called The Doll and the Geek (the Italian version of Beauty and the Geek). According to the judge in charge of preliminary investigations, Corona and his business partners hired “the Doll” out for e1,000 a night on the shores of Lake Como. The Venezuelan model Aida Yespica, Corona boasted, was worth even more, at e5,000 a night. In a pre-trial document, the judge wrote that Corona was “always ready to commercialise anyone and anything”. Two campaigning in the media for his release.
In all, 18 people are under investigation, including some big names. Riccardo Schicchi, Italy’s pornographer-in-chief, is under house arrest. For decades, Schicchi has been a talent scout for some of the least inhibited girls on the peninsula; he’s launched the careers of dozens of porn stars, including the sometime Italian MP La Cicciolina. Many others are also under investigation, accused of offences that range from extortion to exploitation of prostitution and intent to supply class-A drugs.
Whenever scandals like this break, the real story involves finding out who’s responsible for the regia occulta – the hidden direction. It’s always assumed there’s a powerful man who has been pulling the strings of the lucrative operation. Various people have been mentioned as the possible puppeteer. Lele Mora, a man who rose from being the butler to Loredana Berte (the beautiful singer of the 1980s and the former wife of Bjorn Borg) to become the most powerful man in Italian show business, worth an estimated e20m. Among his clients were some of the highest-paid stars of the small screen (they left him in droves as the scandal broke): Valeria Marini, Sabrina Ferilli, Manuela Arcuri – women who are now the mainstays of Italian television. Mora himself owns a private Cessna light aircraft, a huge apartment in Milan, two villas in Sardinia and a fleet of luxury cars.
Mora denies the charges of criminal conspiracy and extortion, but the facts make interesting reading. Through the Luxembourg holding company Feva Investments, Mora has a 10% share of Billionaire, the company that runs the sumptuous club in Sardinia through which all aspiring showgirls have to pass.
In many ways the scandal seems a slightly sordid retelling of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita – all that ennui and titillation as the press chase the stars. But there’s something new about this latest scandal: despite all the stereotypes about Italy being the land of love, covering sex scandals has never been part of a newspaper’s business. Until recently, Italy had been more like France with regard to the reporting of indiscretions: the privacy of the public servant took legal precedence over the right to publicise their private vices. Vallettopoli appears to have ended that entente cordiale. The Italian press, normally fantastically cultured but dry as a stale cracker, have discovered the thrills of tabloid journalism.
More than that, newspapers have begun using private lives to score political points. Towards the end of March, a whispering campaign began in right-wing newspapers like Il Giornale (owned by Berlusconi’s brother), Il Foglio (owned by Berlusconi’s wife) and Libero, alleging that Romano Prodi’s spokesman had been snapped as he tried to pick up a transvestite. The photograph was duly published: from behind you can see the driver leaning between headrests to talk to a scantily clad transvestite. The pictures of Berlusconi and his “harem” were published by Oggi and Corriere della Sera, both owned by the RCS publishing group that has been notoriously hostile to the former PM.
Although Berlusconi immediately declared that he would sue the magazine for defamation, it is he who is, in many ways, inadvertently responsible for the press’s new appetite for political scandal. Ever since Berlusconi stormed onto the political scene in the mid-1990s, Italian politics has become indistinguishable from show business. For almost 15 years now the two have converged: the television studio is as powerful as parliament, and parliament itself has become home to television showgirls like Mara Carfagna who become MPs. There’s suddenly a similarity of lifestyle and habits: the Sardinian holidays, the romantic liaisons, the consumption of illegal drugs (a police investigation a few years ago traced a consignment of cocaine directly to a government ministry). If the press are suddenly spying on MPs as much as on the stars, it’s down to the questionable activities of the politicians – dodgy even by Italian standards.
Nor is the arrival of UK-style tabloid journalism entirely a coincidence. The most intriguing character in this morality tale is an Anglo-Italian called Henry John Woodcock. The country has never seen anything like him. His mother is Neapolitan, his father is an English naval officer, and Woodcock himself was born in Somerset. He looks like a character from Starsky and Hutch: he often rides on a motorbike, wearing a leather jacket with a furry collar, sporting sideburns and a 1970s hairstyle.
Still only 40, Woodcock has been the public prosecutor in Potenza – a rocky outpost on the arch of the Italian boot – since 1999. He has investigated some of the most powerful politicians and lawyers of the deep south: the owner of Potenza Calcio, the local football team, an appeal-court judge, two government ministers, the directors of an oil company, politicians from most of the big parties, even the vice-president of the Basilicata region. One of his colleagues once joked that if the Pope came through Potenza, Woodcock would lock him up. And yet, despite the media interest he creates, Woodcock is unique among magistrates in not granting interviews and in shunning the media. “My cases speak for themselves,” is all he says. Woodcock first hit the national headlines last summer when investigating prostitution and illegal gambling. A series of phone taps revealed a network of powerful men (politicians and television executives) who enjoyed sharing and comparing the sexual abilities of young girls. As with Corona, these men offered the girls stardom in return for their favours.
There was nothing particularly surprising about the revelations, everyone had suspected as much for years, but what was noticeable was the fearlessness with which Woodcock pursued his prey. He even arrested the son of the last king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele, and had him thrown into prison in Potenza. The irony was that for almost six decades, the heir to the abolished throne of Italy had been banned from entering Italian territory; within years of finally being allowed back into the country, his passport was confiscated and he was banned from leaving. Lele Mora had been employed by Vittorio Emanuele as a consultant at his casino; it was Woodcock’s initial investigation into Vittorio Emanuele that led him, via Mora, to Corona and his alleged blackmailing scam.
To his admirers, the public prosecutor is a man who is finally bringing a sense of social responsibility to public officialdom. British civic virtues are still highly esteemed in Italy, and many see Woodcock as the longed-for Anglo-Saxon redeemer. But to others he is a dangerous, delusional man. He has been nicknamed by his enemies Il Picchiarello (the Woodpecker), and Voodoo by those who can’t pronounce his name. Since he arrived in Potenza (really not the kind of place you should go to pick a fight), he has specialised in the crime of “criminal conspiracy”. It means he often orders mass arrests – once ordering, for example, the arrest of 78 suspects in one go – which generate huge headlines but which often collapse under the scrutiny of a court. Woodcock has also used phone taps so relentlessly that he now reportedly has the equivalent of 109 years of taped conversations. Woodcock himself is tight-lipped, but his investigations are often accompanied by spectacular leaks.
By now Woodcock has many enemies. One of his rivals in the legal profession even appears to have faked a leak from Woodcock’s most recent investigation. The fake leak hinted heavily at the misdeeds of a particular politician (none other than the minister for justice), precisely in the hope that that politician might tighten the leash of the relentless prosecutor. The ministry of justice has duly dispatched an Italo-Scottish lawyer, Arcibaldo Miller, from Rome to see if Woodcock is guilty of any wrongdoing.
Although the prosecution believes it has a strong case, Corona still holds some trump cards. Tipped off (by the AC Milan striker) about Woodcock’s investigation into his business dealings, Corona moved an archive of photographs before police searched his premises and Swiss safe deposits. Some of the archive was later recovered at another address in Milan, but much of it is thought to be still at large. If he does have any more snaps up his sleeve, there is little doubt that Corona knows how to use them to his advantage.
Public opinion, too, appears to be swinging back towards Corona. Reviled when he was arrested in mid-March, he has been able to use his many friends in the media to paint himself not as a bully but as a victim. Rather than a dog handler, Corona now portrays himself as the victim of an unmuzzled media.
As always with Italian scandals, after a few weeks it becomes difficult to work out who the goodies and baddies are. Many people are genuinely worried about the frullatore, the press “blender” in which innocent people, even those who work in the media, are torn to shreds. A disturbing pattern has been repeated in all the scandals of the past 12 months, from Telecomopoli (regarding illegal phone taps) to Calciopoli (Footballgate): juicy transcripts of conversations pass in a flash from a public prosecutor’s office onto the front pages of newspapers. It’s as if the country’s huge sense of injustice and grievance is briefly allayed by finding scapegoats and vilifying them. Reputations are ruined years before any judicial sentence might offer redress.
Most of all, Corona is favoured by the political climate. Decision-making in Italian governments is normally tortuous, especially when, as now, there is a wafer-thin majority in parliament. But the privacy issue has suddenly united all parties as never before. The proposed legislation regarding privacy is draconian: the press would be unable to report any recorded dialogues until the handing down of the final sentence from an appeal court, something that in Italy only happens years or even decades down the line. The entire establishment seems to be swinging behind this clampdown on press freedom. At the height of the scandal, the garante della privacy, the privacy guarantor, issued a stern edict threatening two years’ imprisonment for anyone publishing information about “the facts and conducts” of private lives. The president of Rai, the state broadcaster, spoke of wanting to “eliminate gossip” and of his desire to replace colourful news with “cronaca bianca” – white reports.
Only a few people appear to have realised the dramatic implications of the new bill. Furio Colombo is a former editor of L’Unita newspaper and is now a senator sitting on the government benches. He is, however, intending to vote against the new bill when it comes to the Senate. “This is a bill,” he says, “that protects powerful people. It’s unacceptable in a free country. For example, a few months ago, Italy faced a huge and dramatic scandal in the banking world. Had this bill been law at that time, we would still be without any news about it, without even a hint of it. This is all a result of the deep-rooted antagonism professional politicians have against the judiciary and against the press.”
Interestingly enough, the man at the centre of the scandal, Prodi’s spokesman Silvio Sircana, has also defended an investigative press. Instead of whispering through gritted teeth about restricting the power of the media, he bravely urged the press to publish whatever images they had. In a letter to the editor of the newspaper La Stampa, he wrote: “Despite the deep and unmitigated sadness that this incident has provoked, one cannot inhibit the press from conducting investigations, from gathering information and publishing photographs.”
In a country in which press freedom has always been fragile, however, theirs are likely to remain isolated voices. The last thing Italian politicians want is to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny endured by their British or American counterparts. The irony is that Corona, the agent who lined up his paparazzi like toy soldiers, might yet manage to convince a court that he himself is a victim of press and judicial intrusion. The man who spied on other people’s private moments may yet get the chance to do so again if the new legislation deems that phone taps and journalistic leaks were invasions of his own privacy. If that’s the case, Vallettopoli will be remembered not as the start of tabloid journalism in Italy, but as its curtain call.
By Tobias Jones
Buy on AliExpress.com
