Rome - Nicola Gratteri, Chief Prosecutor of Naples and for years a leading figure in the Italian judiciary, also because of his constant media exposure, has once again found himself at the centre of controversy after a fresh clash with the press. The affair stems from one of his television appearances on In altre parole on La7, hosted by Massimo Gramellini, during which he repeated a false story - yet another false story - by attributing to the neo-melodic singer Sal Da Vinci a position on the referendum linked to the justice reform. During the broadcast, Gratteri claimed that the singer, winner of Sanremo with the song Per sempre Sì, would have voted No in the justice referendum. The claim was denied by the artist himself, who cleared the matter up by commenting on the meme circulating on social media from which the distortion had arisen.
At that point, a journalist from Il Foglio asked Gratteri to answer for this latest gaffe. The magistrate’s reply was extremely serious: “If you want to speculate and defame even over Sal Da Vinci, go ahead. It is not a problem. After the referendum, though, we at Il Foglio will settle accounts with you.” When the reporter then asked what exactly he meant, Gratteri escalated further: “I mean we will cast a net.” These are weighty words, spoken by a magistrate who exercises a role of enormous institutional importance and who knows perfectly well the public weight of his own statements.
What happened cannot be dismissed as a mere outburst. It is the latest act of intimidation directed at journalists by magistrates and powerful figures who use their position to strike at, frighten and put pressure even on those whose work is to report. In Gratteri’s case the matter carries even greater weight, because he is not a marginal figure within the judicial system but one of the best-known, most listened-to and most visible magistrates in Italian public life. When a man with this degree of power speaks of “settling accounts” with a newspaper and of “casting a net”, he sends a precise message: journalists are meant to understand that those who belong to a certain world possess the force to strike.
“‘After the referendum, we’ll settle scores with you at Il Foglio; we’ll cast a net’ prosecutor Gratteri told us during an interview. Words that sound like a warning. Does Gratteri want to cast the net he uses for his famous trawling expeditions, with hundreds of people investigated and arrested and then discharged or acquitted - complete with compensation for wrongful detention? By all means, let him come forward, prosecutor. In the meantime, we shall continue to report his exploits. Indeed, I would take this opportunity to recall some of them: the major anti-’Ndrangheta operation in Platì, in the Locride, in 2003, with 125 pre-trial custody orders (in the end only 8 people were convicted); Operation ‘Circolo formato’ in 2011, with the arrest of 40 people, including the mayor of Marina di Gioiosa Ionica and several councillors (the local administrators were later acquitted); the large-scale operation ‘Stige’, with 169 arrests (at trial 100 defendants were later acquitted - at the time of the arrests Gratteri described it as ‘the biggest operation of the past 23 years’ and ‘an investigation fit to be taken to the judicial training school’); the even better-known operation ‘Rinascita-Scott’, launched in 2019 with 334 people placed under precautionary measures (at first instance 131 defendants out of 338 were acquitted, practically one in three); the December 2018 investigation that shook Calabrian politics, with accusations of corruption and abuse of office against the then regional president, Mario Oliverio, later acquitted of all charges; the 2021 investigation ‘Erebo Lacinio’, with 8 people accused of criminal association for illegal waste trafficking (all later acquitted, but in the meantime the company went bankrupt); the investigation against Domenico Tallini, former president of the Regional Council of Calabria, accused and then definitively acquitted of the infamous charges of external participation in a mafia-type association and mafia-political vote trading (charges that also cost him a month under house arrest). Ecc..ecc.. Also because of Gratteri’s mass round-ups, Calabria has become the first Italian region for compensation paid out over wrongful detention. From 2018 to 2024 the State paid €78 million to compensate citizens who were victims of wrongful detention in Calabria, 35 per cent of national spending (€220 million). Today Gratteri is among the public faces of the No campaign against the Nordio reform, which he accuses of subordinating the public prosecutor to the executive (false: Article 104 of the Constitution will continue to guarantee autonomy and independence to the whole judiciary, judges and prosecutors alike). Yet Gratteri continues to be interviewed every day, without contradiction, by television channels and newspapers, to comment on the constitutional reform and to speak about ‘fair justice’. Him,” wrote Ermes Antonucci, a journalist with Il Foglio, on X.
The context in which all this is taking place makes the affair even more serious. The justice referendum, born out of the open clash over the Nordio reform, has brought back to the centre of public debate the issue that in Italy is systematically evaded: the excessive power of the judiciary and the absence of any genuine responsibility for its mistakes. On one side there is a judicial system that accumulates intolerable delays, prolongs investigations beyond any reasonable limit, bends the rules to logics of belonging and too often acts shielded from any consequence. On the other there are citizens and journalists forced to move in an increasingly intimidating climate, where those who are supposed to uphold the law end up using their office as an instrument of pressure.
In Italy, magistrates do not pay for the mistakes they make. Too often they act on motives that move away from the protection of the law and of citizens, operate within networks of relationships, protections and conveniences, force the limits of the legal order and turn judicial power into a power without control. Those who also pay the price are real journalists, not those who linger alongside magistrates in order to pick up handouts or bend certain relationships to their own score-settling, exposed every day to threats, harassment and delegitimisation campaigns, while Italy continues to fall in the press freedom rankings.
That is also why Gratteri’s words are so disturbing, all the more so in the silence that has accompanied them: no condemnation from the self-governing bodies of the judiciary, no intervention from the President of the Republic, who did not hesitate to speak out when Minister Carlo Nordio described, rightly, this system as para-mafia.
L.M.
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