A personal account of the corruption evident in the Diaz verdict, recapping some of the major aspects of the raid, the ensuing investigation and the trial; while also reflecting upon some of the wider resonances of the judgement.
It was shortly after 9pm last Thursday evening when Judge Barone finished his pronouncement. “Vergogna, vergogna,” “shame, shame,” was the chant that quickly began to resound from sections of the crowd packed into the Basement Court in Genova’s Palazzo Di Guisticia.
And so the Diaz verdict is in; and with it the extent of Italy’s problems becomes all too apparent.
The raid on the Diaz school took place on the night of the 21st July 2001 and resulted in 93 people being illegally arrested and falsely accused, with 61 of those beaten so badly during the raid that they required hospital treatment. Of the 29 Italian police officers accused for these crimes, 13 have been convicted and 16 acquitted. It may not surprise you to hear that those convicted are mainly rank and file, from the first unit to enter the building, while none of the more senior officers accused were found guilty.
Haidi Giuliani, the mother of murdered demonstrator Carlo Giuliani, who has also never seen any form of justice, said that the verdict showed a “lack of dignity and courage”; while Sky (Mark Covell), the London based Indymedia journalist who received at least four severe beatings at the hands of Italian police before they entered the school, said “The evidence was overwhelming. There is no justice here. I feel sorry for Italy.”
From the crowded and chaotic courtroom scenes, crammed with television cameras, documentary makers and print journalists, there to record the announcement of this verdict, to the smug grandstanding of the defence lawyers beforehand, as they delivered their closing arguments, the level of political pressure applied to Italy’s judiciary appears unsubtle in the extreme.
It is the kind of thing you have always known to be true and yet on some level when you see it happen before your eyes, you cannot quite believe it. The open confirmation of our deepest suspicions: the intrinsic and systemic corruption of representative democracy.
THE RAID.
As a brief recap, in 2001, at the end of the mobilisations against the G8’s meeting in Genova, the Italian police launched a violent raid on the Diaz school complex, where the IMC media centre was based. In particular the raid focused on the Pertini building opposite the media centre, where demonstrators were sleeping. This was where 93 people were beaten, illegally arrested and falsely accused with ‘aggressive resistance to arrest’ and ‘conspiracy to cause destruction’.
This took place in an environment where the Italian police were receiving vociferous public and media criticism for the way they had policed the mobilisations. There were two main criticisms, the levels of ‘destruction’ to Genova and the small number of arrests made.
The raid was in part an attempt to address this second criticism. There is also the fact that the police officers taking part in the raid were to some extent manipulated into seeing it as an act of revenge; having apparently been told that the school contained the infamous black bloc who had been blamed for much of the damage across the city.
The medical reports of the injuries sustained by demonstrators during the raid do not make for pleasant reading. There were skull fractures, teeth knocked out, several people hospitalised for more than ten days and over ten incapacitated for upwards of forty days while also being discharged with the need for further medical assessment. Pretty much everyone received injuries from baton blows and kicks; while the number of fractured arms, hands, legs, ribs, the haematomas and the lacerated bruises, they tell their own particular story about the police ferocity during the raid.
THE INVESTIGATION.
Despite such details it has been extremely hard to piece together an accurate picture of exactly what happened on that night. The police involved have given contradictory and confused statements to back up their version of events. This version very much included the false accusations, which were based upon two fabricated stories.
There was the police officer who claimed he was stabbed in the school by an unidentified assailant, but was in fact found to have stabbed himself; then there were the two Molotov cocktails. Police had found them elsewhere in the city earlier that day, and they were then planted in the Diaz Pertini building during the raid. These two fabrications also formed the basis of police justifications for the extreme violence used during the raid.
However, after three and a half years of painstaking forensic video analysis, investigating the events of the raid on the Diaz school that night, the Genova Legal Forum, from it’s Genova and London offices, has produced convincing and compelling video evidence identifying not only the real chain of command that night, but also it’s complicity in the attempt to frame the Diaz plaintiffs.
Then there is the chain of evidence that has being uncovered by the diligent and courageous work of Public Prosecutor, Dr. Enrico Zucca. At one point during the trial, and in the face of police intransigence and refusal to cooperate with the investigations, Judge Barone authorised an extensive surveillance operation, including phone taps on the key police defendants. This uncovered a web of corruption and intimidation amongst some of Italy’s most senior policemen.
Zucca’s investigation was compelling in the logic of its arguments and the conclusions it reached. Some of Italy’s most senior police officers were clearly implicated in the conspiracy to plant false evidence, namely the infamous molotov’s. However, as he wrote in his prosecutors report “not a single official has confessed to holding a substantial command role in any aspects of the operation.”
Such officials include Giovanni Luperi, who has since been promoted to head of the Italian version of MI5, and two of Italy’s highest ranking detectives, Francesco Gratteri and Gilberto Calderozzi. From the officers present Gratteri was only third in the chain of command, but he is widely believed to have been the actual commander on the ground that night.
However there is a problem with all of this: to follow Zucca’s chain of argument would lead to the conviction of some of Italy’s most senior policemen. If such a verdict was delivered against corrupt officers within the higher echelons of the Italian police force, it would have had wide-ranging implications and massive political consequences, not to mention the problems it would have caused Silvio Berlusconi’s Government. In short, the question was would Judge Barone have the courage to see the evidence that lay before him?
THE COURTROOM.
We weren’t holding our breath, but as we waited for the verdict, the smug knowing looks on the faces of the defence lawyers and the assorted police chiefs present, they certainly gave us cause to doubt both Barone’s courage and his room for manoeuvre.
Earlier in the week we heard that Gratteri had given a press interview in which he’d been extremely cocky and confident of escaping conviction. As one person commented, “He knows who he is.”
It was a similar story at the hearing the week before, the defence lawyers, as they gave their closing statements seemed to focus on the trivial: What about this unaccounted for phone call? Where is the explanation for this? Or the personal; questioning Zucca’s integrity and the manner in which he had pursued his investigation.
After they’d finished with these weak and inconclusive arguments and their exhortations that the defendants must be found innocent, the defence lawyers proceeded to slap each other on the back and strut around the courtroom as if they’d just put on the best performance of their lives!
Then on the morning of the verdict, the big guns were rolled out; the extent of the theatre that the courtroom had been engaged in was revealed in full. The chief defence lawyer, Alfredo Biondi (and also, as it happens, an established and powerful MP in Burlesconi’s Forza Italia party), began his closing statement and from the rough translation that I got, he amazingly ‘instructed’ Judge Barone: “Our policemen are innocent, I am sure that you will know this and that they will soon be charged as innocent . . . Do not look at the evidence, consider the big picture” !!!!
Maybe it was just part of the rhetoric that comes with Italian jurisprudence; in reality it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. The political pressure personified within Biondi was obviously too much for Judge Barone to do anything but consider the big picture: the fact that such high ranking officers could not possibly be found guilty, no matter their crimes.
Ironically, and no doubt strategically, Biondi was representing Trioani, one of those actually convicted for handling the molotov’s (although obviously he won’t actually serve time). So while Biondi ‘technically’ failed to get ‘his’ man off the charges, he certainly did not fail with respect to the bigger effort: that of getting Burlesconi’s government out of a potentially awkward political dilemma, while in the face of overwhelming evidence also excusing from any responsibility the culture of corruption that appears to run to the heart of Italy’s police force.
THE VERDICT.
And so, Canterini and his “boys” were found guilty, the 7th unit from the 1st Division of the Rome Flying Squad, who entered the building first and were extremely violent. None of them except maybe Canterini, the unit’s Commander, will serve time.
Trioani and Burgio were found guilty, the officers who handled the molotov cocktails as they were transported from their police car to the school. Neither will serve their sentences.
Nucera was acquitted, the officer who stabbed himself, and then gave contradictory statements after forensic investigation revealed that the knife entry points on his anti-stab vest and the shirt worn underneath did not match up.
All of the senior officers who faced charges were acquitted, naturally. These officers were charged with signing a false declaration concerning the raid, and also libel and defamation for their involvement in the molotov conspiracy. And yet video footage clearly shows these officers standing in a huddle in the school courtyard, in discussion with each other as they pass the carrier bag containing the molotov’s between them. This bag was then passed to the still unidentified ‘bag man’ who took it into the school and planted it at the front door!
Vittorio Angeletto, one of the spokespeople for the Genova Social Forum in 2001, now a MEP for Rifondazione Comunista, said “This is one of the most tragic days in the history of the post-war republic. All those who wear a uniform should be those who most adhere to the laws and the constitution. But those who held senior public offices, those who have signed statements that did not correspond to the truth, those who have falsified criminal charges and evidence, those who have tried in every way to prevent justice from running its course, they have won.”
THE WIDER RESONANCES.
But the Diaz verdict is not just an Italian problem. Before I left for Italy, the de Menezes inquest was ongoing. The British police officers involved in that incident, having compared notes and got their stories straight, claimed that they had given an “armed police” warning and that de Menezes had acted suspiciously.
Members of the public who witnessed those police officers shooting de Menezes say that they heard no verbal warning and that de Menezes was sitting in his seat when he was shot. Ask yourself which of these witnesses is more likely to have an agenda?
Already in the de Menezes case, several police cover ups have been exposed and now we face the very real possibility that this will be the last such public inquest. In the future anti-terror legislation is likely to make it much simpler for the state to hold similar inquests in private; but of course only if it is in ‘the public or national interest’.
The verdict from the de Menezes inquest is due on the 1st December and then we will once again receive confirmation of the UK legal system’s integrity, or lack thereof.
And while de Menezes is another story, a different example of the collusion between police, state and judiciary; it is perhaps the same story, maybe more subtle than Diaz, but in essence the two cases reveal the integral nature of the corruption that runs through the power structures within which we live.
For the liberal democratic state this corruption is encapsulated in the essential double standard we see at work in both the Diaz trial and the de Menezes inquest: the state is unable to hold itself to account by the same standards with which it judges others.
And so the Diaz verdict is in; and with it the extent of Italy’s problems becomes all too apparent.
The raid on the Diaz school took place on the night of the 21st July 2001 and resulted in 93 people being illegally arrested and falsely accused, with 61 of those beaten so badly during the raid that they required hospital treatment. Of the 29 Italian police officers accused for these crimes, 13 have been convicted and 16 acquitted. It may not surprise you to hear that those convicted are mainly rank and file, from the first unit to enter the building, while none of the more senior officers accused were found guilty.
Haidi Giuliani, the mother of murdered demonstrator Carlo Giuliani, who has also never seen any form of justice, said that the verdict showed a “lack of dignity and courage”; while Sky (Mark Covell), the London based Indymedia journalist who received at least four severe beatings at the hands of Italian police before they entered the school, said “The evidence was overwhelming. There is no justice here. I feel sorry for Italy.”
From the crowded and chaotic courtroom scenes, crammed with television cameras, documentary makers and print journalists, there to record the announcement of this verdict, to the smug grandstanding of the defence lawyers beforehand, as they delivered their closing arguments, the level of political pressure applied to Italy’s judiciary appears unsubtle in the extreme.
It is the kind of thing you have always known to be true and yet on some level when you see it happen before your eyes, you cannot quite believe it. The open confirmation of our deepest suspicions: the intrinsic and systemic corruption of representative democracy.
THE RAID.
As a brief recap, in 2001, at the end of the mobilisations against the G8’s meeting in Genova, the Italian police launched a violent raid on the Diaz school complex, where the IMC media centre was based. In particular the raid focused on the Pertini building opposite the media centre, where demonstrators were sleeping. This was where 93 people were beaten, illegally arrested and falsely accused with ‘aggressive resistance to arrest’ and ‘conspiracy to cause destruction’.
This took place in an environment where the Italian police were receiving vociferous public and media criticism for the way they had policed the mobilisations. There were two main criticisms, the levels of ‘destruction’ to Genova and the small number of arrests made.
The raid was in part an attempt to address this second criticism. There is also the fact that the police officers taking part in the raid were to some extent manipulated into seeing it as an act of revenge; having apparently been told that the school contained the infamous black bloc who had been blamed for much of the damage across the city.
The medical reports of the injuries sustained by demonstrators during the raid do not make for pleasant reading. There were skull fractures, teeth knocked out, several people hospitalised for more than ten days and over ten incapacitated for upwards of forty days while also being discharged with the need for further medical assessment. Pretty much everyone received injuries from baton blows and kicks; while the number of fractured arms, hands, legs, ribs, the haematomas and the lacerated bruises, they tell their own particular story about the police ferocity during the raid.
THE INVESTIGATION.
Despite such details it has been extremely hard to piece together an accurate picture of exactly what happened on that night. The police involved have given contradictory and confused statements to back up their version of events. This version very much included the false accusations, which were based upon two fabricated stories.
There was the police officer who claimed he was stabbed in the school by an unidentified assailant, but was in fact found to have stabbed himself; then there were the two Molotov cocktails. Police had found them elsewhere in the city earlier that day, and they were then planted in the Diaz Pertini building during the raid. These two fabrications also formed the basis of police justifications for the extreme violence used during the raid.
However, after three and a half years of painstaking forensic video analysis, investigating the events of the raid on the Diaz school that night, the Genova Legal Forum, from it’s Genova and London offices, has produced convincing and compelling video evidence identifying not only the real chain of command that night, but also it’s complicity in the attempt to frame the Diaz plaintiffs.
Then there is the chain of evidence that has being uncovered by the diligent and courageous work of Public Prosecutor, Dr. Enrico Zucca. At one point during the trial, and in the face of police intransigence and refusal to cooperate with the investigations, Judge Barone authorised an extensive surveillance operation, including phone taps on the key police defendants. This uncovered a web of corruption and intimidation amongst some of Italy’s most senior policemen.
Zucca’s investigation was compelling in the logic of its arguments and the conclusions it reached. Some of Italy’s most senior police officers were clearly implicated in the conspiracy to plant false evidence, namely the infamous molotov’s. However, as he wrote in his prosecutors report “not a single official has confessed to holding a substantial command role in any aspects of the operation.”
Such officials include Giovanni Luperi, who has since been promoted to head of the Italian version of MI5, and two of Italy’s highest ranking detectives, Francesco Gratteri and Gilberto Calderozzi. From the officers present Gratteri was only third in the chain of command, but he is widely believed to have been the actual commander on the ground that night.
However there is a problem with all of this: to follow Zucca’s chain of argument would lead to the conviction of some of Italy’s most senior policemen. If such a verdict was delivered against corrupt officers within the higher echelons of the Italian police force, it would have had wide-ranging implications and massive political consequences, not to mention the problems it would have caused Silvio Berlusconi’s Government. In short, the question was would Judge Barone have the courage to see the evidence that lay before him?
THE COURTROOM.
We weren’t holding our breath, but as we waited for the verdict, the smug knowing looks on the faces of the defence lawyers and the assorted police chiefs present, they certainly gave us cause to doubt both Barone’s courage and his room for manoeuvre.
Earlier in the week we heard that Gratteri had given a press interview in which he’d been extremely cocky and confident of escaping conviction. As one person commented, “He knows who he is.”
It was a similar story at the hearing the week before, the defence lawyers, as they gave their closing statements seemed to focus on the trivial: What about this unaccounted for phone call? Where is the explanation for this? Or the personal; questioning Zucca’s integrity and the manner in which he had pursued his investigation.
After they’d finished with these weak and inconclusive arguments and their exhortations that the defendants must be found innocent, the defence lawyers proceeded to slap each other on the back and strut around the courtroom as if they’d just put on the best performance of their lives!
Then on the morning of the verdict, the big guns were rolled out; the extent of the theatre that the courtroom had been engaged in was revealed in full. The chief defence lawyer, Alfredo Biondi (and also, as it happens, an established and powerful MP in Burlesconi’s Forza Italia party), began his closing statement and from the rough translation that I got, he amazingly ‘instructed’ Judge Barone: “Our policemen are innocent, I am sure that you will know this and that they will soon be charged as innocent . . . Do not look at the evidence, consider the big picture” !!!!
Maybe it was just part of the rhetoric that comes with Italian jurisprudence; in reality it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. The political pressure personified within Biondi was obviously too much for Judge Barone to do anything but consider the big picture: the fact that such high ranking officers could not possibly be found guilty, no matter their crimes.
Ironically, and no doubt strategically, Biondi was representing Trioani, one of those actually convicted for handling the molotov’s (although obviously he won’t actually serve time). So while Biondi ‘technically’ failed to get ‘his’ man off the charges, he certainly did not fail with respect to the bigger effort: that of getting Burlesconi’s government out of a potentially awkward political dilemma, while in the face of overwhelming evidence also excusing from any responsibility the culture of corruption that appears to run to the heart of Italy’s police force.
THE VERDICT.
And so, Canterini and his “boys” were found guilty, the 7th unit from the 1st Division of the Rome Flying Squad, who entered the building first and were extremely violent. None of them except maybe Canterini, the unit’s Commander, will serve time.
Trioani and Burgio were found guilty, the officers who handled the molotov cocktails as they were transported from their police car to the school. Neither will serve their sentences.
Nucera was acquitted, the officer who stabbed himself, and then gave contradictory statements after forensic investigation revealed that the knife entry points on his anti-stab vest and the shirt worn underneath did not match up.
All of the senior officers who faced charges were acquitted, naturally. These officers were charged with signing a false declaration concerning the raid, and also libel and defamation for their involvement in the molotov conspiracy. And yet video footage clearly shows these officers standing in a huddle in the school courtyard, in discussion with each other as they pass the carrier bag containing the molotov’s between them. This bag was then passed to the still unidentified ‘bag man’ who took it into the school and planted it at the front door!
Vittorio Angeletto, one of the spokespeople for the Genova Social Forum in 2001, now a MEP for Rifondazione Comunista, said “This is one of the most tragic days in the history of the post-war republic. All those who wear a uniform should be those who most adhere to the laws and the constitution. But those who held senior public offices, those who have signed statements that did not correspond to the truth, those who have falsified criminal charges and evidence, those who have tried in every way to prevent justice from running its course, they have won.”
THE WIDER RESONANCES.
But the Diaz verdict is not just an Italian problem. Before I left for Italy, the de Menezes inquest was ongoing. The British police officers involved in that incident, having compared notes and got their stories straight, claimed that they had given an “armed police” warning and that de Menezes had acted suspiciously.
Members of the public who witnessed those police officers shooting de Menezes say that they heard no verbal warning and that de Menezes was sitting in his seat when he was shot. Ask yourself which of these witnesses is more likely to have an agenda?
Already in the de Menezes case, several police cover ups have been exposed and now we face the very real possibility that this will be the last such public inquest. In the future anti-terror legislation is likely to make it much simpler for the state to hold similar inquests in private; but of course only if it is in ‘the public or national interest’.
The verdict from the de Menezes inquest is due on the 1st December and then we will once again receive confirmation of the UK legal system’s integrity, or lack thereof.
And while de Menezes is another story, a different example of the collusion between police, state and judiciary; it is perhaps the same story, maybe more subtle than Diaz, but in essence the two cases reveal the integral nature of the corruption that runs through the power structures within which we live.
For the liberal democratic state this corruption is encapsulated in the essential double standard we see at work in both the Diaz trial and the de Menezes inquest: the state is unable to hold itself to account by the same standards with which it judges others.
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