The political and judicial earthquake of Mani Pulite turns 28 today. It was in fact February 17, 1992 when the event from which all the others sprang then occurred: in Milan the socialist Mario Chiesa, president of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, is arrested after taking a bribe of 7 million from a cleaning company in exchange of the concession of a contract. Thus begins the investigation conducted by the pool of magistrates of the Milan prosecutor's office including Antonio Di Pietro, Gerardo D'Ambrosio, Francesco Saverio Borrelli, Ilda Boccassini and Gherardo Colombo. Mani Pulite, or Tangentopoli, revealed a system of corruption involving numerous exponents of Italian politics and business: trials and arrests resulted which forever changed the map of Italian power, effectively putting an end to the so-called First Republic.
So it all started from that day, when Chiesa was caught in the act while accepting the bribe from the entrepreneur Luca Magni, who ran a small cleaning company and who wanted to ensure victory in the contract for cleaning the hospice. Following increasingly expensive requests, the small businessman Magni had contacted the magistrate Antonio Di Pietro to denounce the president Chiesa and together they decided to frame him. Following the arrest, Chiesa, who was a prominent exponent of the Milanese socialist party, was expelled from the PSI and the secretary Bettino Craxi quickly distanced himself from him: on 3 March 1992, interviewed on TG3, Craxi called Chiesa a "mariuolo", emphasizing that the Milanese PSI was made up of honest people. In reality, the legal case then proved otherwise.
Returning to Chiesa, after the arrest the investigators also discovered, thanks to the testimony of his ex-wife Laura Sala, several bank accounts in Switzerland, with several billion lire in the name of his secretary. The ex-wife had filed a long lawsuit for some time to protest against the smallness of the alimony that Chiesa demanded to pay her and her fourteen-year-old son. After five weeks in prison, on March 23, 1992, Chiesa decided to speak. The interrogation lasted more than a week and on April 2, 1992, he was granted house arrest. Having served his sentence, Chiesa returned to the political scene by participating in public conferences of the Compagnia delle Opere, an entrepreneurial association linked to Communion and Liberation.
On March 31, 2009 Mario Chiesa was arrested again, accused of having been the collector of bribes in the management of illicit trafficking of waste in the Lombardy Region. He has been called "The 10% Man" as it would have had the ability to increase waste disposal costs by a tenth compared to the value reached at the end of the tender (contract).
