When Giovanni Brusca was arrested, in 1996, Gian Carlo Caselli was prosecutor of Palermobut even before, in the contrast of the red terrorism of the seventies and eighties in Turin, he had known the difficulty for the state and the importance of unleashing the pact between the organizations and their followers.
Dr. Caselli, about collaboration with justice, are there analogies between terrorism and mafia?
«Terrorism and mafia are starry phenomena, but on the level of the contrast they pose the same problems more or less. In particular, being the one and the other organizations built on the secret, to have some probability of success these secrets you have to know them, someone must tell you. Only those who, having been a terrorist or mafia and therefore within the organization, by committing crimes on crimes, those secrets knows them, can do it. Revealing them, it provides the team with a grimaldello that allows him to penetrate the organization with good prospects of disarticulating it. Otherwise he turns around, managing to the best of chiping something on the surface. Paraphrasing what Falcone said with reference to 416 bis, without repentant thinking of defeating the mafia (or terrorism) is like deluding himself to be able to stop a tank with a deer ».
The word “repentant” is used in current language, how much does it risk to mislead?
“There is no doubt that the word “repentant” is inadequate. When the phenomenon began to loom. The magistrates tried to impose a more correct, but in vain term. The repentant word, even if relating to an internal hole foreign to the process, for communication needs had the upper hand, also with respect to “collaborator”, a more appropriate word on the investigative-judicial level. But there is a big difference between repentant of terrorism and the mafia. The terrorists are repenting, all, before the issue of a law in their favor. When Patrizio Peci on 1 April 1980 regrets, kicking off a real Slavine of repentant who will cause the BR’s collapse, he declares from the beginning that he wants to collaborate because he no longer believes in the armed struggle, because he wants to prevent there are other deaths, because he wants to make up for a lifetime, because the general from the Church (with whom he had had relationships as a confidant authorized by the judicial authority) had given him the possibility of a law. In other words, terrorists are repenting because they have “burst” from a psychological and political point of view. The mafia, on the other hand, are repenting on the basis of a calculation of convenience. After the massacres of 1992, the strong reaction of the state convinces many mafia to “change flag”, abandoning a mafia that was losing. Without forgetting Falcone’s teaching: you regret the mafia only when you have confidence in the state, because the repentant of the mafia delivers itself and the family willing to follow him to the protection of the state. And the history of the mafia is also infinite history of reprisals against the repentant and their family members ».
Long have been discussed of ethical impacts: the collaboration of Santino di Matteo was paid at a very dear price by his child. What reflection can you do?
“It can happen (as in the case of the repentant Brusca) to deal with a criminal guilty of having committed an infinite number of horrendous events, up to the kidnapping for 779 days and then the murder with dissolution in the acid of the little Giuseppe di Matteo, guilty only to be the son of his father, the first repentant of the massacre of Capaci to whom he had materially participated. In these cases the ethics of the result helps. The one who at the time of terrorism had to teach me my boss, Mario Carassi, when the Cassation assigned the trial for the murder of the general prosecutor of Genoa Coco and his escort in Turin. It was the first time that the BR deliberately killed. The file ended up on my table for connection with others I already had. My boss Mario Carassi called me and said to me: “Caselli, you will do this process because you should now understand something about it, but you will not do it alone. The BR have begun to kill; if you are alone and they kill you all ends. Instead if you are three and kill one others can go on”. Here is precisely the ethics of the result: not to settle for a bureaucratic approach but tend to a useful result in compliance with the rules. Thus was born the first pool of investigative judges (Caselli, Luciano Violante, Mario Ballo) to whom Nino Caponnetto (who tells him in his autobiography) for the Paletto pool “was also inspired”.
I ask a judge who know Cristiano: the word “repentant” could evoke a moral sphere, but the right asks for other things. What is the difference?
“As for the “Christian” judge, the contamination between faith and profession must be avoided. These are elements that must remain distinct, otherwise there is the risk of a contacircuting, which for a magistrate would entail the replacement of the code with the Gospel. It is necessary to distinguish, but distinction means the right distance, not separation. It means that judicial work remains autonomous, because it is obvious that technical solutions cannot be found in the Gospel. But the law must be at the service of man and not against man, in the name of a justice that refuses any vindictive logic and allows to interpret and play the role of magistrate by committing himself as much as possible for others ».
The victims suffer from Brusca’s liberation, ask themselves: what is justice?
“For the Christian magistrate Anti -terrorism or Anti -Mafia, the evangelical precept” Hunger and thirst for justice “also means giving justice the strength to win evil with good. Before there was the law of the taglione, to return to the evil received equally badly. Now the indication is to win the evil with good. ATTENTION: this does not mean to diminish evil. Evil remains bad, therefore no goodism, forgiveness, justificationism. It would be vanified justice. The problem is to try, however difficult it is, to invent forms of response capable of recomposing a wounded fraternity, divided by deep enmities. Then here is the theme of non -“bureaucratic” justice, that is, sensitive to the needs and specificities of people, not only the victims but also those who have made a mistake. In this attention to the needs of the people involved time in vault in judicial problems, there is the meaning of a “right justice”: that the victim is expanding and “compensating” the victim, but while avoiding logic – so to speak – of “secular mercy”, compatible with the legal system) that you fade on the culprit until you crush it and prevent him from changing.
