Valter Lavitola before the Review Court: waiting for the fixer's moves

ROME – The memoir is in preparation, about sixty pages. The papers are being filed in view of Monday, when Valter Lavitola will return to the Review Court. But the wait, rather than for the technical moves of his lawyers, is for him. For the fixer - restaurateur who confessed to being the instigator of the attack on his friend, the journalist Sigfrido Ranucci. For what he will decide to say, or possibly put forward, after weeks spent radically changing his position: first the extraneousness, then the admission. But, he claims, only for good purposes. A bomb, in short, to protect the now former host of Report.

Lavitola remains in Rebibbia, in the wing where mafiosi and people accused of being mafiosi are detained. Like him, after all: the prosecutor accuses him of the mafia method. He told the investigating judge that he had asked the bombers recruited by his friend Tavares to shoot at a wall of the house, not to plant a bomb. A demonstrative gesture that should have pushed the State to increase Ranucci's protection. An attack organized, he explained, to safeguard him. The singular concern did not convince the investigating judge, who defined his statements as "smoky". And left him in prison. For the prosecutors, however, there was a political plan behind the attack. Lavitola would have imagined himself in the guise of a sort of Rasputin, an advisor in the shadow of a Ranucci - at least in the fixer's plans - projected to lead the left. A reconstruction that he rejects and that the defense will try to dismantle on Monday. Final goal: release from prison. A goal which, given the cards accumulated so far, appears decidedly uphill.

The statements of the men accused of physically carrying out the attack will inevitably also be on the table. Pellegrino D'Avino and Antonio Passariello said that they did not know Lavitola and that they had only had relationships with Tavares: the intermediary, friend of the fixer and, according to the accusation, recruiter of the shabby team that would then plant the bomb.

But there is a point on which the Review has already ruled. And with words that are difficult to get around. Confirming the prison and the challenge of the mafia method to the perpetrators.

And this is why the road becomes narrow for Lavitola. On Monday he will have to argue that behind that bomb there was a different story: an attack yes, but to protect his friend. And it will have to do so in front of a Review which, judging the labourers, has already recognized the "intimidating force typical of mafia action". Denying it now to the instigator after recognizing it to the bombers would be a step that is anything but obvious. Even for a Rasputin wannabe.