Marazzo and alleged friend

By Philip Willan

Philip Willan

ROME —The centre-left governor of the Lazio region has resigned after being caught in a sex, drugs and videotape scandal involving a Brazilian transsexual prostitute. But the complex background to the affair – worthy of a spy thriller – suggests the centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi could also end up red-faced.
Piero Marrazzo, a former television journalist whose area of responsibility as governor included the Italian capital, handed in his resignation after it emerged that he had been blackmailed over a cellphone video purportedly showing him in the company of the prostitute in an apartment on the outskirts of Rome.
He was reportedly planning to seek refuge in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, where the abbot is a personal friend, but abandoned the idea for fear of attracting a chaotic media circus to the hilltop refuge where German and Allied soldiers fought one of the fiercest battles of World War II.
Marrazzo’s personal ordeal began in early July when two plainclothes officers of the paramilitary Carabinieri police reportedly burst into the apartment where he was preparing to have sex with the prostitute, identified as Natalie.
To make matters worse, lines of cocaine were allegedly laid out ready for consumption.
The police officers, who appear to have been alerted to Marrazzo’s presence, reportedly used a cellphone to film the unfortunate governor, wearing only his shirt, recording the presence of the cocaine and the prostitute in a blurry video.
The video, or a similar film secretly recorded by a prostitute, was subsequently used to blackmail the governor, who is married with children.
News of its existence led to the arrest of the four Carabinieri and brought Marrazzo’s political career to a brusque end.
Two days after the resignation more than 6 million viewers watched a popular political talkshow called Annozero dedicated to the salacious affair.
It showed two different reconstructions of the police raid: one in which the officers entered the flat to find Marrazzo ready for sex and with cocaine on the table, and another, based on an account provided by friends of the governor, in which police burst in, pointing a gun at the governor’s head, forcing him to drop his trousers, and planting the cocaine themselves.
The four allegedly corrupt Carabinieri officers rather than extorting the maximum amount of money from their victim, reportedly offered the video for sale to a number of publications that normally support the government, including the magazine Chi, owned by the prime minister.
The editor of Chi turned down the offer but informed his boss, Berlusconi’s daughter Marina, and the 13-minute blackmail video ended up being viewed by the prime minister himself.
Berlusconi has admitted that he informed Marrazzo of the video and provided him with the details of the Milan photo agency that was handling the sale so that Marrazzo could offer to buy it himself.
Berlusconi’s spokesman Paolo Buonaiuti described the premier’s action as a “gesture of kindness” that no centre-left leader would have dreamed of doing for a political rival.
Some of the Annozero panelists disagreed, suggesting Berlusconi’s “chivalrous” action could be seen as intimidation and actually made him an accomplice in the blackmail operation.
There are other reasons for institutional disquiet over the Marrazzo affair.
The apartment at Via Gradoli 96 where the governor was caught with his pants down is part of a building currently home to a colony of transsexual prostitutes, but the edifice has a peculiarly sensitive history.
In 1978 one of the flats was used as a base by Mario Moretti, the head of the Marxist revolutionary Red Brigades, while he masterminded the kidnap and murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro.
The hideout was discovered while Moro was still a prisoner as a result of a mysteriously flooded bathroom: a careless terrorist had apparently left a shower on with the jet of water pointed at a crack in the wall.
Embarrassingly for the authorities, it later emerged that numerous flats in the building – though not the Red Brigades’ – belonged to companies controlled by the domestic secret service, SISDE.
“A discreet secret service presence continues in the area today. Many of the people who live there don’t have residence permits. The system serves to keep tabs on problematic phenomena such as illegal residents and transsexual prostitutes,” said Gianpaolo Pelizzaro, the journalist who first revealed the presence of the secret service flats in the vicinity of the Red Brigades’ hideout.
Via Gradoli is a private road with only one entrance and access controlled by a movable barrier. “From the moment you go in there you are under surveillance,” Pelizzaro said.
The presence of illegally resident Brazilian transsexuals, who are vulnerable to manipulation, was tolerated in return for information, Pelizzaro said.
“It raises the suspicion that they knew everything and just waited for events to mature, doing today just as they did in Moro’s time,” he said.
Sergio Flamigni, a former Communist senator and author of a book on the Via Gradoli mystery, said he had been amazed to discover that the Marrazzo saga had its origins in the same building that once housed Mario Moretti’s den.
“I realized that the domestic secret service and the interior ministry department responsible for foreigners were interested in controlling particular types of property so that they could control particular types of foreigners,” Flamigni said.
One of Moretti’s neighbours at the time of the Moro kidnap was an Egyptian student named Lucia Mokbel who acted as a police informant on the activities of the Egyptian community in Rome. Mokbel was the daughter of an Egyptian naval officer who had participated in an unsuccessful coup attempt before seeking refuge in Italy.
She had informed her police contact of her suspicions about her neighbour after hearing what sounded like Morse code communications coming from the next door flat, but had failed to goad the police into taking effective action, Flamigni said.
Intelligence services had maintained their interest in the area in subsequent years, according to Flamigni, as it remained popular with Egyptians and Iranians and was inhabited by foreign embassy staff.
Flamigni said he wouldn’t be surprised if the arrested Carabinieri officers had been involved in an intelligence operation that had spun out of control.
“Sometimes the Carabinieri end up committing illegal actions as part of their official duties. It’s hard to avoid that suspicion here,” Flamigni said.
If his suspicion turns out to be well founded that could be a fresh source of embarrassment for Berlusconi – who has ultimate authority over the secret services and has been battling sex scandals of his own.
And it would confirm an impression that in the waning Berlusconi era the battle for power plays out in stuffy bedrooms and boudoirs rather than the lofty halls of parliament.