There is also a request for help from a minister in the case of the accused Rebirth Scott Giancarlo Pittelli, the former Forza Italia parliamentarian and criminal lawyer today sentenced to 11 years for the crime of external complicity in a mafia association and for two cases of revealing official secrets. Pittelli was instead acquitted of the charge of aggravated abuse of office because the fact does not exist. On 7 December 2021, despite finding himself under house arrest, Giancarlo Pittelli sent a letter with a request for help to the then minister Mara Carfagna, also from Forza Italia, who however forwarded it to the competent authorities and, therefore, to the judiciary. In the letter, Pittelli denounced her detention while at the same time inviting the minister to contact him by telephone. A violation of house arrest while the trial was underway – according to the accusation that had prompted the Catanzaro DDA, led at the time by the prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, to request and obtain from the Collegiate Court of Vibo Valentia the reinstatement of detention in prison. The judges, in particular, had highlighted for Pittelli the danger of repeating the crime which he had obtained under house arrest since October 2020. The decision to send him back to prison had sparked several controversies among Italian criminal lawyers and among some Forza Italia parliamentarians in solidarity with the former deputy Pittelli.
Pittelli: “I leave the comments to the jackals”
«I have always been used to not commenting on sentences, I will continue to do so. I leave it to the jackals on duty to rage, as they have done in these 4 years, on national and local television.” This was told to Agi by former Forza Italia parliamentarian Giancarlo Pittelli, sentenced today to 11 years in prison at the conclusion of the “Rinascita-Scott” first degree trial against the ‘ndrangheta clans of the Vibonese area.
Pittelli’s lawyers: “Sentence essential to save Rinascita”
«The lawyer Giancarlo Pittelli is convicted of the same crime for which only a few months ago the Court of Cassation first, and the Review Court immediately afterwards, had excluded the existence of even serious indications of guilt. This is enough to make all those who have the intellectual honesty to want to do so understand how this conviction was indispensable at all costs to save the credibility of the entire Rinascita Scott investigative operation.” This is what Pittelli’s lawyers claim in a note, the lawyers Giandomenico Caiazza, Salvatore Staiano and Guido Contestabile. «These are dynamics – they continue – that we have dramatically learned about in other sensational judicial cases, starting with that of Enzo Tortora; and from those court cases we have also learned that, in the end, the innocence of the accused will be recognized, albeit with an unforgivable delay, and after having caused immeasurable damage. This will be our even more determined commitment from now on, this will be our certainty.”
De Magistris on Pittelli: “Time is a gentleman”
“Time is a gentleman, but the injustices suffered by institutional crime will never be repaired.” This is stated in a note Luigi de Magistris, former magistrate and former mayor of Naples. «This morning the Court of Vibo Valentia – he adds – sentenced the lawyer Giancarlo Pittelli, former regional coordinator of Forza Italia then Fratelli d’Italia, former deputy and senator, to 11 years in prison in the Rinascita Scott trial for complicity in a mafia association. When as a prosecutor in Catanzaro I investigated Pittelli in 2006/2007 for criminal association, money laundering and participation in occult lodges as part of the Poseidon investigation into very serious crimes in the environmental sector, the Public Prosecutor Lombardi, of whom Pittelli was a lawyer and dear friend , he revoked the investigation. Six months earlier the son of the Prosecutor’s wife had also been hired by the lawyer Pittelli’s company and the Prosecutor also gave a guarantee. The same son was recently arrested red-handed for extortion of 50 thousand euros.”