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Antonio Di Pietro

Antonio Di Pietro
Antonio Di Pietro Siena 2010.JPG
Minister of Infrastructures
In office
May 17, 2006 – May 8, 2008
Prime Minister Romano Prodi
Deputy Angelo Capodicasa
Preceded by Pietro Lunardi
Succeeded by Altero Matteoli
Minister of Public Works
In office
May 17, 1996 – November 20, 1996
Prime Minister Romano Prodi
Deputy Antonio Bargone
Gianni Francesco Mattioli
Preceded by Paolo Baratta
Succeeded by Paolo Costa
Personal details
Born (1950-10-02) October 2, 1950 (age 66)
Montenero di Bisaccia, Italy
Nationality Italian
Political party Independent (2014–present)
Other political
affiliations
Italy of Values
(1998; 2001–2014)
The Democrats
(1999–2001)
Profession Politician
Judge

Antonio Di Pietro (born October 2, 1950) is an Italian politician. He was a minister in government of Romano Prodi, a Senator and a Member of the European Parliament. He was a prosecutor in the Mani Pulite corruption trials in the early 1990s.

Di Pietro was born into a poor rural family from Montenero di Bisaccia, Molise, Italy. As a young man he travelled to Germany where he worked in a factory in the mornings and in a sawmill in the afternoons to pay for his studies. He graduated from night school in Italy with a degree in law in 1978 and became a police officer. After a few years, he started a judicial career as a prosecutor.

In February 1992, Di Pietro began investigating Milan's politicians and business leaders for corruption and kickbacks. Together with other well-known magistrates such as Francesco Saverio Borrelli, Ilda Boccassini, Gherardo Colombo, and Piercamillo Davigo, he worked on the Mani Pulite ("Clean Hands") team, which investigated political corruption. As part of this team, he investigated hundreds of local and national politicians, all the way up to the most important national political figures, including Bettino Craxi. The Italian press named the investigation "Tangentopoli" ("Bribesville").

He soon became the most popular of the Mani Pulite judges, due to his peculiar way of speaking, with a number of dialectal inflections and expressions, coupled with a pronounced accent and a determined disposition. However, Di Pietro was accused by Craxi of having provoked a "false Revolution", and of investigating only some politicians, ignoring the opposition parties. Only in 2012, Di Pietro admitted that Craxi was right when during the Enimont trial he accused the Italian Communist Party of having received illegal funding from the Soviet Union. Craxi's sentences seemed to him "criminally relevant", but Di Pietro omitted to investigate that crime.


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