ABSTRACT: a critical analysis of the bill of indictment pronounced by public prosecutor Armando Olivares against Enzo Tortora at the trial at the Court of Naples. The thesis supported by Olivares: "He was naive", "a victim of politics": therefore sentence him to six years of prison. As for justice, let it rest in the vale of slumber.

(Radical News n. 206 of 4 September 1986)

I read the bill of indictment pronounced by public prosecutor Armando Olivares (a name that would suit a Spanish viceroy) at the appeal trial against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, the Nco (1), another abbreviation in the jungle of abbreviations. A trial which is only apparently a trial, because it is not clear against whom these Neapolitan trials are directed at, rather resembling - in my opinion - a sort of self-trial against the administration of justice, its way of existing and of being applied.

I read the bill of indictment in the transcription of the recording done by the Radical Party: and there may perhaps be a few transcription mistakes, a word that was missed or misunderstood; but it is these little defects that I make the text difficult to read, possibly the most difficult text I have ever read in over half a century of exercise. The commas, the semi-colons, the colons, the question marks, the dashes, the brackets, the quotation marks that open and conclude quotations, are all missing. There are only full stops, or at least what seems like full stops. And it is only natural that those who transcribed the recording omitted these punctuation marks: it is impossible to understand where and when to place them. The uncertainties and the syntactic fractures of the speaker; his coming in and out of the papers and the facts listened as as if he were in a cage, looking for an escape route; his grasping a concept by the tail, ending up with the tail only in his hands: not one period has a premise, a de

velopment and a conclusion; all is but a single flood of words, of "construction material", from which we can dig out only a few scattered fragments, impossible to glue together.

When I used to go to school, and school was already quite a run down institution (but has there ever been a period in which it was not?) we used to hear an anecdote about an examination board in which a pupil, questioned on history, at a certain point says: "The Gauls were descended from the Alps"; at which the literature teacher placidly says: "if we should say so", thus arousing the indignation of the president, who cries: "to what point are we come!". The problem is no longer a mistaken use of auxiliary verbs, which somehow still allowed people to understand the meaning of the sentence: the problem here is that of not finding the subject, the concept amid the flood of words. Words are volatile indeed; and continue to fly without an identity - like UFOs - when we try to catch them and put them down on paper. Subjunctive or conditional mode may be correct, but what is missing is the clarity of what we want to communicate. This is the impression I had when I attended a hearing of the the maxi-trial of Palerm

o one morning, when Buscetta (2) was testifying: and the only thing I understood clearly was what Buscetta was saying. Not, I believe, because Buscetta was capable of speaking a better Italian, but because he knew exactly what he wanted to say and what he didn't want to say, because he had thought about it, because he needed caution, acumen, precision. This is the core of the problem: to know the subject, to have an opinion about it, to give a judgement: and to support that opinion, that judgement, with the preciseness that makes it entirely convincing. Without realizing it, we can even start from a faulted ring of the chain: but there must be a chain of some sort.

And to return to the bill of indictment of the public prosecutor Olivares, I will quote an excerpt, an example: "I would like to borrow, for a moment, the position of those who turned themselves into jurists, operators of justice or whatever, but who were in fact politicians, giving out judgements that were fundamentally in defence of of a dogma, in order to say that Tortora was not a politician, that he never was a politician, that he was perhaps used by politics, that he was probably a victim of politics, but he was not a politician, not even today that he presides a party that has representative in Parliament; this is my opinion, I may be mistaken perhaps, but this is how I viewed Tortora from the first moment; why then, would Tortora have been chosen as a coverage? because he is a popular man? Yes he was popular, because at that moment he was conducting a television program, he was therefore extremely popular, but he certainly was not a politician, and for this reason he could not have been chosen to cov

er up a State scandal. I could imagine, i could suppose a similar operation to be done for Negri (3), for example, because Negri was a real politician, with revolutionary purposes. I could also imagine the existence of completely politicized magistrates, because undoubtedly the acquiescence of these persons was necessary to organize a coverage of this kind, in this case it would have been possible to attempt a coverage by exploiting the fact, but with Negri, not with Tortora, who has nothing to do with it, and whom I remember solely as the likeable conductor of a popular television program, Portobello, featuring a flea market and a parrot, nothing else. I repeat: I did not consider Tortora a politician, and I still believe he was a victim of politics, but surely not a politician; I hope he will forgive me, but this is my true opinion, even if I might be wrong".

What Olivares (whose prose I took the liberty of purging of some repetitions and of improving with a few punctuation marks) wants to say is this: that it is not true that "repentant criminals" and magistrates have chosen Tortora - a popular person, but not a politician - to cover up the Cirillo affair. What he did not want to say, and that he says, in a univocal sense, is that Tortora is a victim of politics. In what sense can he be defined a "victim of politics", if not in the fact that his becoming a politician, his candidature and election in the lists of a political party, the assumption of his case to a political problem concerning justice in Italy, caused irritation and hatred against him, regardless of the terms of law that should have been used to judge him?

The reasons for which Tortora is a "victim of politics" before the laws that must judge him, in the evaluation of the evidence and of the charges against him, are obscure. But public prosecutor Olivares stubbornly insists on this idea. In conclusion, Tortora was a good fellow, who was perhaps blackmailed, involved in the drug traffic: then ruined by politics. "He was naive": therefore, sentence him to six years of prison. As for justice, let is rest in the vale of slumber.

Translator's notes

(1) NCO: Criminal association operating chiefly in the Campania region.

(2) Tommaso Buscetta: mafia boss who decided to cooperate with justice.

(3) Toni Negri: exponent of an extreme left group, arrested and detained in prison for five years awaiting to be tried. Was discharged after having being elected member of parliament for the Radical Party. Currently living abroad.