You couldn't make it up dept. no.25: death of an honest crook
Former Senator Severino Citaristi has just died in his home town of Bergamo, northern Italy, aged 85. He was very little known outside Italy, and, until 1992, even in his own country; but his passing has been met with unanimous grief from politicians and journalists, for he was personally beloved even by political opponents.
He entered politics, as many did, via the partisan war against Nazi invaders, and became a deputy in the first republican parliament in 1946. From then on, he was never out of Parliament, first as deputy, then as senator, but never prominent either. He was one of those industrious persons who keep the wheels of any organization turning while more rumbustious personalities play at being leader, and his honesty and competence were undoubted. It was because of these qualities that he was to gain the all-comers' record for criminal charges and final guilty sentences of any Italian politician in history - and that is saying something.
Even a corrupt system needs an honest person to manage it. At some point in the seventies or eighties, I forget when, Senator Citaristi was made the treasurer of his party, the majority Christian Democrats, and as such he was in charge of receiving, managing and distributing the enormous flow of corrupt donations and bribes that constantly flowed in from most economically active subjects in Italy - which he did in his usual hard-working, personally honest, and efficient manner. In 1992, the lid finally blew off - the situation, thanks in particular to the rampant greed of Bettino Craxi's Socialists, had become unsupportable, and one entrepreneur after another started giving evidence to a bunch of young, ambitious and angry investigating magistrates in Milan. Poor Citaristi, already an old man, not in the best of health, and looking forward to retirement, found himself in the thick of it, and collected the astounding total of seventy separate criminal proceedings, many of them ending in convictions. Throughout it all, he maintained that he had not personally either taken a penny, or bribed anyone; and both magistrates and journalists seem to have believed him, for the Press always treated him with remarkable consideration, and all the dozens of guilty sentences in criminal trials ended up costing him no more than about a month total of house arrest. Unlike most other people involved, he never saw the inside of a cell from beginning to end, and when the storm had spent itself, he just went home to spend his last days in the peace and respect of a minor elder statesman. Except for a terrible tragedy when his daughter and grandson died in an airplane accident, his last days were quiet. But is it not strange that a man might live all his life at the centre of a corrupt, inefficient and damaging political system, and still keep his own reputation for honesty and morality? Looking at what the Italian State was in Citaristi's time, and what it has further degenerated into since, would you excuse his role? I really do not know.
He entered politics, as many did, via the partisan war against Nazi invaders, and became a deputy in the first republican parliament in 1946. From then on, he was never out of Parliament, first as deputy, then as senator, but never prominent either. He was one of those industrious persons who keep the wheels of any organization turning while more rumbustious personalities play at being leader, and his honesty and competence were undoubted. It was because of these qualities that he was to gain the all-comers' record for criminal charges and final guilty sentences of any Italian politician in history - and that is saying something.
Even a corrupt system needs an honest person to manage it. At some point in the seventies or eighties, I forget when, Senator Citaristi was made the treasurer of his party, the majority Christian Democrats, and as such he was in charge of receiving, managing and distributing the enormous flow of corrupt donations and bribes that constantly flowed in from most economically active subjects in Italy - which he did in his usual hard-working, personally honest, and efficient manner. In 1992, the lid finally blew off - the situation, thanks in particular to the rampant greed of Bettino Craxi's Socialists, had become unsupportable, and one entrepreneur after another started giving evidence to a bunch of young, ambitious and angry investigating magistrates in Milan. Poor Citaristi, already an old man, not in the best of health, and looking forward to retirement, found himself in the thick of it, and collected the astounding total of seventy separate criminal proceedings, many of them ending in convictions. Throughout it all, he maintained that he had not personally either taken a penny, or bribed anyone; and both magistrates and journalists seem to have believed him, for the Press always treated him with remarkable consideration, and all the dozens of guilty sentences in criminal trials ended up costing him no more than about a month total of house arrest. Unlike most other people involved, he never saw the inside of a cell from beginning to end, and when the storm had spent itself, he just went home to spend his last days in the peace and respect of a minor elder statesman. Except for a terrible tragedy when his daughter and grandson died in an airplane accident, his last days were quiet. But is it not strange that a man might live all his life at the centre of a corrupt, inefficient and damaging political system, and still keep his own reputation for honesty and morality? Looking at what the Italian State was in Citaristi's time, and what it has further degenerated into since, would you excuse his role? I really do not know.