It will be the name. It will be the surname. Or, perhaps, the whole. Because, if you call you Napoleon, some idea of command and battles take it on you, almost out of predestination. If then to the surname you unite a name like Fabio, which evokes the Roman general Fabio Massimo, called “the temporer”, who with a war of attrition contributed to the victory over the Carthaginians, well, the figure is completed: the ledge of the leader next to prudence, and a careful management of the strength. For Fabio Napoleone, from December 2021 Prosecutor in Pavia, name and surname are also the synthesis of over 40 years of work: a mix between the attitude to the command shown in the many investigations that has led so far, and the weighted rigor used in the courtrooms. Born in Bari 68 years ago, raised in the small center of Ortona, in Abruzzo, Napoleon since last March ended up in a (for him unpublished) media turbines because he wanted to reopen the investigations on the mysteries of the death of Chiara Poggi, murdered in Garlasco in August 2007, in search of a judicial truth other than that crystallized in the controversial condemnation of the victim of the victim, Alberto Stasi.
Napoleon, who leads the case with the assistant prosecutor Stefano Civardi, is overturning the work and certainties of his predecessors of 18 years ago. The suspicions of the investigators today focus on Andrea Seveio, a friend of Chiara’s brother, whose DNA is compatible with that left under the victim’s nails. The investigation is the classic “Cold Case”; It could be said, indeed, that it is a more-che-cold case. The media attention, however, is all too hot. The chronicles are hypnotized by the interest of the Prosecutor’s Office for the many details unexplored so far, by the continuous discoveries of the investigators on forgotten imprints, possible motives never identified and weapons of the crime never recovered: novelties that seem to light up as radioactive electrons in that cloud of activism that has always been the typical “Napoleon method”. With a paradoxical corollary: because the information hurricane on Garlasco clashes with the inclination to the silence of the prosecutor, and with his desire to keep everything under control. Entering the judiciary in 1981, at the age of 24, initially with the functions of judge in Milan, Napoleon has started to make the public prosecutor in 1988 and has never stopped since then. Just in Milan, between the late eighties and the early nineties, he had taken part in some important investigations: from the “Duomo Connection”, conducted in the shade of an already famous Ilda Boccassini, from which the first financial penetration of Cosa Nostra had emerged in the North, up to the processes of clean hands against corruption in urban planning, a theme lately returned to great fashion in the Milanese judicial offices.
In the Prosecutor’s Office there are those who still remember the maniacal care of another Napoleon investigation, the one on the Telecom dossier: A difficult investigation, which had targeted the espionage on computers and phones of politicians, journalists and entrepreneurs. In 2006 Giuliano Tavaroli, head of the Security of Telecom, and Emanuele Cipriani, a former carabiniere owner of the Instinct Polis, a Florentine investigative agency that saw with the eyes of today seems to be the “mother” of the many private intelligence plants of the last judicial chronicles, were arrested in 2006 in 2006. Equalize. At the end of the investigations on Telecom espionages, in July 2008, Napoleon and the two colleagues Nicola Piacente and Stefano Civardi (who since 2023 has returned to support him in Pavia) had deposited 169 folders icing with acts, kidnappings, appraisals and 400 interrogations. The three prosecutors had made rogatory and investigations in Switzerland, Great Britain, the United States, in Guersey, in the Principality of Munich and in Luxembourg. An immense amount of work, accumulated in just over two years without smudges or controversy. In November 2008, Napoleon had left Milan and had moved to Sondrio, head of the prosecutor.
This also frequently moving from large cities to small looks like a destiny, for the magistrate. A bit like the other Napoleon, the Bonaparte, who started from the tiny Ajaccio had been an emperor in Paris and then had been confined to Elba; And after fleeing it, to transform into battle folgore and fiery Europe, he had finally been forced to darkly in the remote island of Sant’Elena. Even in Sondrio, however, the prosecutor Napoleon had certainly not remained in the shadows: he had dealt with the corruption of the urban planning offices in small municipalities in the province and mafia infiltrations in waste management. Eager on the other, certainly ambitious, Napoleon in 2014 had a candidate for the Superior Council of the judiciary with the area, the “progressive” sign between the two currents of the democratic judiciary and movement for justice, the extreme judicial left. In the fulcrum of the Roman judicial power, Napoleon had landed triumphantly, with 1,127 votes, a hundred less than the charismatic leader of the Centrist Unicost current, Luca Palamara.
Precisely that council would have been marked by the scandal of promotions agreed in secret between the currents of the magistrates: An indelible stain for the category, which emerged in 2019 thanks to the discovery of the thousands of recommendations, negotiations and merchants in the telephone chats of Palamara. In that CSM, Napoleon had greatly contributed to the launch, in 2015, of the “Consolidated Law on judicial management” which in 95 articles established the criteria to choose the leaders of the judicial offices. A reform that, while introducing formal criteria of merit, did not scratch the power of the currents in the CSM. Indeed, establishing that the judgment on candidates must be “overall and unitary”, and that it serves an unidentified “evaluation of the results achieved”, the Consolidated Law has perpetuated the total discretion of those who decide the appointments. Even Napoleon would soon find out, in spite of himself: he left the CSM, in 2019 he had returned to Milan in the Court of Appeal, as a deputy attorney general, and immediately he had a candidate for the general prosecutor. In December 2020, however, he had been preferred (14 votes to eight) Francesca Nanni, head of the prosecutor of Cagliari and of the democratic judiciary. Despite the ideological proximity, the area had criticized that choice with hardness, attributing it to “a distorted and formalist vision” and “to that carrierism that led the judiciary and the CSM to an unprecedented crisis of credibility”. They say that Napoleon himself had taken it very badly. He seems to be preparing an appeal to the TAR and that he had given up only in view of the promotion in Pavia. Of course, for him that 2020 had been the worst year.
A truly horrible year: In June his ex -wife, Laura Siani, deputy prosecutor in Lecco, had tragically put an end to his existence. But life continues, as they say, and the Pavia prosecutor is linked to another magistrate woman, Luisa Russo, already PM in Sondrio and from 2024 to the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office. Now Napoleon is 68 years old. He remains just two, before retirement. Who knows, perhaps in the mature age the Fabio “temporer” began to take back in front of the Napoleon leader. And after so many wars and some defeat, with the move on Garlasco, the prosecutor perhaps chose how to be remembered: with a last battle, capable of imposing his seal in history.
