The Italian job: ThePost.ie


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The Italian job
Sunday, July 16, 2006 - By Jonathan O'Brien
When he dies, Luciano Moggi will be remembered for a good many things. Arguably his most noteworthy and least remarked upon feat, however, will be that he was the best thing to happen to the Italian communications industry since Guglielmo Marconi.

He owned no fewer than six mobile phones and 300 sim cards, and he got every last drop of value out of them. Over the course of a nine-month period in 2004 and 2005, roughly 100,000 calls were made by Moggi on those six phones. That’s not a misprint: one hundred thousand. An average of some 416 calls per day or, if you like, one every two and a half minutes in a 16-hour day.

It is not known whether Moggi routinely carried all his phones with him. Nor is it clear how many calls he received, rather than made, during this period.

But he was ringing so many people so often it’s a wonder that his right ear didn’t burn to a crisp and fall off.

Moggi’s line of work was not, as you might think, a tester at Vodafone or a one-man Samaritans service. Instead, until a few weeks ago, he was employed as the general manager of Italian football club Juventus. This made him, by definition, one of the most powerful men in European sport. And the nine months during which he made all those calls happened to be the duration of the 2004/05 season in Serie A.

Moggi was once sardonically nicknamed Lucky Luciano because of his club’s seemingly charmed life when it came to getting the rub of the green from referees and linesmen. By May this year, he stood accused of fixing matches, bribing referees, and being the ringleader of an informal network set up to interfere with the Italian FA’s referee selection process.

Whenever Moggi wanted to sort out who would referee an upcoming Juventus fixture in Europe, for instance, he would reach for one of those phones and give Pierluigi Pairetto a call. Pairetto was the head of the committee which assigned referees to matches in Uefa competitions. In a past life, he was himself one of Uefa’s top men in black, handling the Euro 96 final between Germany and the Czech Republic.

What Moggi didn’t know was that his phones were being tapped by anti-corruption prosecutors.

One of the many transcripts of his phone conversations, which were printed several weeks ago in the Italian press, features Pairetto telling him: ‘‘I’ve put in place a great referee for the game in Amsterdam, Urs Meier.”

‘‘That’s really great,” replies Moggi.

‘‘Alright, I just called to say that,” said Pairetto. ‘‘You see that I remember you.”

In another transcript, Moggi thinks he has a deal where the referee of a certain game would be Portuguese official Lucilio Cardoso. He calls Uefa to confirm it and is shocked when he hears it will be another referee instead, Graham Poll of England, and then rings his Juventus colleague Antonio Giraudo (also implicated in the scandal) to whinge about it.

‘‘Did you see that they’ve changed our referee?” rants Moggi. ‘‘We got Paul Green [Graham Poll], the Englishman.

“Fuck them. . .the English are all assholes, I’ll find out a little bit and inform you.”

In Italy, they’re calling the affair Moggiopoli - Moggigate - but it has turned out to be much more than the rogue activities of one highly-placed bad apple. There is hardly a significant figure in Italian football who has avoided being touched by its tentacles in some way, from the World Cup-winning national team manager Marcello Lippi (who reportedly came under pressure to pick players that were signed to GEA World, a players’ agency run by Moggi’s son Alessandro) to the Azzurri’s goalkeeping hero Gianluigi Buffon (who bet on matches he was playing in himself).

Meanwhile, the massive investigation into false accounting at Juventus has seen a number of smaller clubs, including Bologna and Palermo, have their offices raided by the police, while the FIGC (Italian FA) has had to be placed in administration and is being run by an extraordinary commissioner, Guido Rossi.

On Friday evening, when the investigating tribunal’s verdicts were announced, Juventus, Fiorentina and Lazio had to pick up a hefty bill. All three clubs were shoved down into Serie B, the second tier of Italian professional football, with Juventus being stripped of their 2005 and 2006 league title wins. They and Fiorentina have also waved goodbye to their places in next season’s UEFA Champions League.

Milan, the fourth club implicated in the scandal, managed to hang on to their topflight status, but they will kick off the new season in September with a 15-point deduction.

They too are out of next season’s Champions League.

Moggi and Giraudo received five-year bans from football, with officials from other clubs receiving suspensions of between four and a half years and one year.

At the time of going to press, it was unclear whether the 2005/06 Serie A title would be awarded to Internazionale, a club who have elevated success-dodging into an expensive art form. If so, it would be by Homer Simpson’s two favourite words, ‘‘de’’ and ‘‘fault’’, but they can’t afford to be fussy - they haven’t won it since 1989, despite spending mind-boggling sums since then. If only they’d had Lucky Luciano on the payroll as well . . .

Moggi, a former stationmaster from the small town of Cittavecchia near Rome, had a slow but inexorable rise to the seats of power in Italian football. He was plucked from obscurity more than three decades ago by Italo Allodi, Juventus’ then managing director.

Allodi was the unscrupulous fixer who other unscrupulous fixers called The Guv’nor. He engineered a number of match-fixing episodes involving Juventus and Inter in the European Cup during the 1970s, including the notorious Lobo-Solti affair of 1974. He took the eager Moggi under his wing, assigning him a number of minor roles at Juventus.

Moggi eventually moved on, spending time in administrative roles at Torino, Roma, Lazio and Napoli. During his time at the latter outfit, he is thought to have been behind the infamous ruse in the late 1980s which saw Diego Maradona utilise a fake penis during a drug test to avoid the detection of cocaine and the other interesting things floating through his bloodstream.

Eventually, Moggi ended up back at Juventus in the summer of 1994.The Old Lady of Italian football was showing her age. For the past decade, despite a string of expensive signings, Juve had been a distant second best to Silvio Berlusconi’s seemingly invincible Milan, with only two Uefa Cups to show for their money.

Moggi’s first season back in Turin, 1994/95, coincided with Juventus finally breaking the Milan stranglehold. With a new coach, Marcello Lippi, in charge, they ran away with the Serie A title that year despite being without their best player, Roberto Baggio, for much of the campaign.

A year later, on May 22,1996, Juventus became European champions, defeating the youthful holders Ajax on penalties in Rome. It was only the second European Cup win in the club’s history and, given that the first had been achieved on a night of death and violence at the Heysel stadium in 1985, Juve’s fans celebrated this one as though it were unprecedented.

But neutral observers couldn’t fail to notice that, skilful players though they were, most of the Juventus team had developed the physiques of light-heavyweight boxers.

After Rangers were hammered 4-0 at Ibrox in a group game earlier that season, their manager Walter Smith incredulously asked a journalist: ‘‘Did you see the fucking thighs on [Fabrizio] Ravanelli?”

It wasn’t just Ravanelli. Previously slender players such as Michele Padovano, Attilio Lombardo and the wonderboy Alessandro Del Piero had become muscular and burly. Striker Gianluca Vialli, already a big man, now resembled a shaven-headed Rambo.

Subsequent new signings Zinedine Zidane and Christian Vieri also bulked up quickly. During this period, the club won three leagues and a European Cup in four seasons, as well as twice finishing runners-up in the Champions League.

By 1998, Zdenek Zeman, the Czech coach of Roma, had had enough. He went public with his suspicions that Juventus’ squad was being doped with creatine and other prohibited substances. The official inquiries lasted seven years, encompassing two trials, one by Uefa, the other by the FIGC.

Eventually, the statute of limitations saw the case dismissed last December. Juventus’ club physician, Riccardo Agricola, was cleared of all charges. By that time, Zeman’s managerial career had gone down the tubes, with few Serie A clubs willing to hire him. Gianluca Pessotto was one of the supporting cast in that Juventus side of the mid-1990s.

Diminutive, slightly thinning on top and relatively frail next to his teammates, he cut an unassuming figure as he did his usual solid job at left-back each week. For every Zidane, Lippi liked to say, there needs to be a Pessotto.

He wasn’t a world-class defender by any means, but he was good enough to play for Italy at the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000, and he ended his Juventus career with a vast haul of medals amassed over the course of a decade. By then, he was also suffering acutely from severe depression, though few outside his immediate family knew of his condition.

Pessotto hung up his boots for good in May, by which time the Moggi affair was starting to explode. Juventus immediately him offered a post as sporting director. He was an obvious candidate: he was young, intelligent, knew the club inside out, and most importantly had no ties whatsoever to the scandal.

On June 27, an ambulance was called to Juventus’ Turin headquarters to attend to a man in critical condition. Pessotto had toppled from a second-floor balcony, landing on a parked car and bouncing onto the roof of another vehicle.

He was found clutching a string of rosary beads in one hand, and was rushed to hospital with multiple fractures and internal bleeding.

In the following days, as the details of his psychological difficulties emerged, it became apparent that his fall from the balcony was a suicide attempt.

According to his wife, it had been weighing heavily on his mind in recent days that he might not be able to cope with the huge responsibilities of his new post.

When the news reached Italy’s World Cup base in southern Germany, the shock was quickly channelled into a collective determination to win the tournament for Pessotto.

He wasn’t allowed to watch the victory over France on the grounds that it would tire him out, but the following night, the returning Fabio Cannavaro and Gianluca Zambrotta paid a visit to his hospital room with the World Cup trophy. Italy’s success in Germany provided not so much a happy ending to the summer of scandal, but rather a brief interlude of ecstasy before the national attention switched back to Moggiopoli.

Thirteen of Italy’s 23-man squad play for the four accused clubs, including the five most impressive performers: Cannavaro, Zambrotta, Buffon (Juventus), Gennaro Gattuso and Andrea Pirlo (Milan).

The prosecutors investigating the Moggi scandal and its various offshoots are particularly interested in goalkeeper Buffon, who is alleged to have bet some €2 million on matches over the past few years. In Italy, players are banned from gambling on domestic league and cup fixtures.

Buffon’s initial defence against the betting allegations was that he did all the gambling while at his previous club, Parma. He stopped, he said, when the rules were changed in 2005 to prevent players having a flutter on matches.

It wasn’t long before magistrates in Parma were cutting Buffon’s excuses to ribbons.

They found evidence that he had withdrawn €10,000 in cash from his bank earlier this year, and that an identical amount was deposited in the account of his best friend - a bookmaker - later that same day.

Their sleuthing also revealed that Buffon had sent more than 1,000 text messages to his bookmaker friend this year, including a deluge of texts and calls on the afternoon of Juventus’ unexpected draw with Swedish minnows Djurgardens in a Champions League qualifier last August.

A lot depended on the Djurgardens game, due to its status as a Champions League qualifier.

The tie would appear to have been something of a nexus of dodginess, with Buffon gambling big money on the first leg, a game in which he was playing, and Moggi ringing up Pierluigi Pairetto to make sure Juventus got the right referee for the second leg (sadly, they got Graham Poll instead). After a shock 2-2 draw in Turin, Juventus won the second leg 4-1 in Sweden, thereby securing their passage into the Champions League.

For a time, with Buffon being whisked away from Italy’s training camp to be grilled by the authorities, it looked as though he wouldn’t play in the World Cup at all. He remained in the squad, however, and produced a string of excellent performances during the finals. In a country where roughly 30 per cent of the footballing electorate describe themselves as Juventus followers, the general reaction to the scandal has been somewhere between denial, anguished breast-beating and genuine revulsion.

Mike Bongiorno, a legend in Italian TV and one of the best-known celebrity Juventus fans, echoed the feelings of many when he announced he’d had enough and couldn’t stomach following the club any more.

Juventus’ demotion to Serie B ensures they will spend at least two years out of the Champions League, on which so much of their annual budget depends. Their estimated loss of income from relegation is roughly €150 million, much of which will be recouped by the sales of star players.

Fabio Capello, who quit at the beginning of this month to manage Real Madrid, has expressed an interest in bringing the likes of Cannavaro and Zambrotta to Spain with him.

Others, such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic and David Trezeguet, are likely to end up in the Premiership.

As for Moggi himself, his five-year ban from the game would appear somewhat lenient given the nature and scale of his activities. His career in top-level football should realistically be in ruins but, this being Italy, it can’t be ruled out that he will find another job within the sport when things blow over in time.

‘‘I have neither the strength nor the willingness to answer any questions,’’ Moggi told the press on May 13. ‘‘I’ll think only to defend myself from all allegations and wicked actions.

“I miss my soul, it has been killed. Tomorrow, I’ll be resigning.

“Tonight, the football world isn’t my world any more.”

Six weeks later, and just a few hours after Gianluca Pessotto had jumped off a balcony, Moggi gave a tearful TV interview in which he pleaded that he had only been trying to defend Juventus against the ‘‘powerful forces’’. Then he went straight to the hospital to pay the stricken Pessotto a visit. Nobody batted an eyelid.