The memory of Valter Lavitola and Sergio De Gregorio: the Campania newspaper that never took off, the relationships with Berlusconi and the subsequent legal events.
Given that, by now, many important colleagues admit to having frequented Valter Lavitola’s restaurant, a bistro which – apparently – had become a crossroads for journalists, artists and entrepreneurs, I must say that I have never set foot there. I looked at the images of the restaurant online, the tree-lined exterior in the Monteverde neighborhood and the menu with a series of tempting options, but I didn’t even know that the man convicted of attempted extortion of Silvio Berlusconi had opened an inn.
And to think that I knew Lavitola well, even if I had lost sight of him in recent years. Before the Rome Prosecutor’s Office investigated him for the massacre and it became known about his new activity and his new friends, among whom I discovered the presenter of Report, Sigfrido Ranucci, Valter passed himself off as a publisher. My meeting with him dates back to almost thirty years ago, well before he became Gianfranco Fini’s main accuser for the house in Montecarlo, a property bequeathed by Countess Colleoni for “a good fight” and which instead ended up in the availability of the brother-in-law of the leader of AN. In 1997, after being fired from Tempo for daring to do an investigation into Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, I worked at the Giornale as a columnist. And Vittorio Feltri, of which I had been the co-director, asked me to take care of an editorial initiative in Naples. In practice, a new newspaper that should have become the Campania branch of the Milanese newspaper. The initiative was promoted by Antonio Martusciello, former director of Publitalia 80 who, with the arrival of Silvio Berlusconi, found himself parachuted into the Chamber, deputy of Forza Italia.
When I went to Naples to carry out the task entrusted to me, instead of the MP I found myself in front of two guys, who were introduced to me as entrepreneurs. The first was Sergio De Gregorio, a reporter who, a few years earlier, had managed to intercept Tommaso Buscetta while he and his family were enjoying a cruise in the Mediterranean. A few years later, we will talk about him not for the journalistic scoops but for the judicial investigations in which he will be the protagonist. The other guy, however, was Lavitola, pompously defined as editor of L’Avanti. It was not the historic newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party, but an imitation of it: like the fake Vuitton bags made in Naples, it was the fake organ of the PSI made in Lavitola.
Valterino was already quick with his words back then, a storyteller who imagined a crowd of readers at the newsstands and already had a list of editors to hire ready. He didn’t talk about investments, who the financiers were or even how much money he had, but he imagined the investigations and, I think, the deals that could be done with the new newspaper.
What convinced me, however, that the two were unreliable was not the money, which also wasn’t there, but a sentence from De Gregorio who, at a certain point, said that in the Caserta area it would be necessary to pay the Camorra, to prevent it from stealing copies of the newspaper before they were distributed to newsstands. Once back in Milan, I advised against starting the project, as both De Gregorio and Lavitola seemed like two nice swindlers to me. The Campania edition was born anyway, but it didn’t last long, because – in December 1997 – I became director of the newspaper and dissolved all ties with that initiative.
As for Lavitola and De Gregorio, they soon committed to doing more damage. The first, I don’t know how, managed to get into Berlusconi’s good graces, the second got himself elected with Di Pietro, only to also pass to the Knight’s court. Before getting into trouble for public contributions and attempted extortion, I met Valterino again when he revealed the documents of the Monte Carlo house. While De Gregorio, after his parliamentary rise and fall, found him before me in Michele Santoro’s study (we can see that both he and Lavitola are fascinated by the people’s tribunes, or vice versa), enlisted as Berlusconi’s accuser, after having benefited from his money. I reminded him of the Camorra episode and he, in an Immaculate Conception version, tried to deny any relationship with that world. To which I asked him: did the investigators find my checks or his at the home of a Camorra member? Stung to the quick, he threatened a lawsuit. I’m still waiting for her.
