You imagine him with his body dented by the controversies, by the center-right accusations of nothing less than intelligence with organized crime, by having also been denied by Antonio Decaro regarding the home visit from the sister of Chief Capriati. If so, Michele Emiliano does not show it, fond of being the political version of Mario Brega from the old Verdone films: if a hand can be a pen or iron, he always uses it in iron mode.
Yesterday, at seven in the afternoon, at the end of a day in which the case has amplified and in which the photos and selfies of the Decaro family and the Capriati family have multiplied in a disproportionate and even inappropriate manner, he governor’s version is entrusted to delivery courier: «This fact about when Decaro and I went to see Capriati’s sister after they had threatened him with the closure of that piece of old bari He had already said it a thousand times, without anyone changing the meaning as has been done in the last few hours. Some of these times she had also told it in the presence of Antonio, who had had nothing to object… Now, for the love of God, eighteen years have passed, I can’t expect others to have the memory I have. Capriati’s sister knew me very well, as mayor but also as magistrate that he had sent his brother to life imprisonment; Antonio didn’t know him, he had never seen him before, for her he was a councilor like any other and today perhaps he does not recognize in the mayor of Bari the person he saw with me then…”.
Someone, in the last hours of also friendly fire, thinks that this time he broke the vase. Remembering how, exactly twenty years ago, Emiliano explained precisely with the metaphor of the vase the reasons that had pushed him to take off his toga to show off the tricolor sash, the same one that Decaro wore. It was removed dramatically and put back on the other day. following the decision of the Ministry of the Interior to send the access commission to Bari. “As an anti-mafia magistrate” – he said at the dawn of that electoral campaign that ended with victory – “I intervened when the vase was already broken, with my work I could only put the pieces back together. I’m running for mayor be able to intervene earlier to prevent the vase from breaking.”
Those were the years in which the thread with the old Bari, very widespread when he was very young anti-mafia deputy prosecutor with photos of Che Guevara in the office (although Massimo D’Alema, a few years later, had the opportunity to mock him and call him a “fascist”), for Emiliano it was so narrow that the spoiled child of those streets, the footballer Antonio Cassano, had become a kind of involuntary testimony of his political rise. «Put Cassano, vote for Emiliano»: the motto that combined the prayer to the national coach Giovanni Trapattoni to use the talent of the old Bari in the 2004 European Championship and the call to vote for the prosecutor who had launched himself into politics, was epoch-making; Things went wrong for Trap and Cassano, who were eliminated in the groups; However, it went very well for Emiliano, who began his promotion. Even before that, in 1996, he had put together a dossier highlighting how “fifty meters of road” could “mark the destiny of a child”: on one side of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, he stated, you were born in old bari and your destiny was sealed; It was there Bari is good, and everything changed.
“That’s why when they even accuse me of having asked the boss’s sister for protection,” says Emiliano in these stormy days, “they don’t bother me at all and they don’t create any kind of imbalance, on the contrary. I’m used to it‘reversal of truth, especially when there is an electoral campaign involved. There is a story that speaks for me, in Bari and outside of Bari, perhaps I am wrong out of modesty in almost not remembering it. But I learned to be a magistrate Rosario Livatino personally, in Sicily; and the coffin of Rosario Livatino, after they killed him, I carried on my shoulder.”
Memory, he often states, is a life companion that does not betray him. She prides herself on remembering everything, down to the smallest detail, sometimes uttering it as if it were an invitation not to defy him. This time there is a broken vase.. In Bari, these last days, there are pieces everywhere.