Adriano Carlesi, a trickster pardoned by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi just 10 days ago, might best be considered a child of his generation. A student militant caught up in the post-1968 wave of left-wing activism, he once belonged to the left-wing movement, "Lotta Continua", an organisation described as "libertarian, irreverent and chaotic" by the historian Paul Ginsberg. Those were the days when revolutionary groups sprung up like mushrooms, each with its own fervent dogma. By the early 1980s, however, most of those groups, many of them more anarchic than marxist, had long since disappeared. In the "rampant" socialist era of Craxi's Italy, Adriano Carlesi was just another young Italian, looking around to set himself up in business and more concerned about the marketplace than Marcuse.
A trained photographer, Carlesi wanted to set up his own photographic agency. Finding it difficult to raise the necessary cash via bank loans, he turned to usury. Soon he was submerged in debt, unable to repay the exorbitant rates of interest asked by his creditors.
At that point, Carlesi appears to have become something of a confidence trickster, committing a whole series of crimes including fraud, counterfeiting, receipt of stolen goods, falsifying documents, cheque bouncing and more besides. He did so, he claims, in order to feed his family and to survive.
Inevitably, the long arm of the law caught up on Carlesi who, along with his wife, was arrested in a bar in Turin in 1983. At a subsequent trial, he was given a 26-year sentence (originally 29 years) in relation to 42 different crimes while Silvana received a 10-year sentence, commuted to house arrest, for her "moral involvement" in her husband's crimes. To Carlesi (and indeed to neutral observers) his sentence seemed inexplicably harsh, more suited to murder than bouncing cheques and fraud.
For 11 out of the last 20 years, Carlesi has been in prison, fighting to have his long sentence reduced. At stake in his battle was a relatively straightforward legal principle. Italian criminal law holds that the total prison sentence for someone convicted on multiple counts should not exceed five times the normal sentence for the most serious of the crimes committed. In Carlesi's case, no single crime carried a sentence in excess of 31/2 years.
The Venice Appeals Court which heard Carlesi's case last year, however, refused to apply this "cumulative" principle to the photographer, arguing that his behaviour as a free man did not reflect a "single criminal intent" but rather an "incorrigible criminal vocation". Carlesi, admittedly, did not help his cause by twice escaping from prison, going "on the run" from 1989 to 1996 for a seven-year period when, according to the weekly magazine L'Espresso, he and his wife resumed their confidence trickster ways, creating a luxurious lifestyle for themselves in the process. Those were days when Carlesi drove a big Mercedes car and passed himself off as an architect.
Carlesi's story might have ended there, serving out his time. Were it not for his militant past, he might not have had the intellectual equipment, not to mention political contacts, to continue his long fight.
Angered by the most recent Venice Appeals Court decision, Carlesi opted to go on hunger strike in August, consuming only water, coffee and sugar. By the beginning of this month, he had lost more than three stones in weight and doctors warned that his condition was becoming incompatible with a prison regime.
Ten days ago, when Carlesi was on the 100th day of his hunger strike, Mr Ciampi issued the formal pardon for him. The pardon had been requested by the Justice Minister, Mr Oliveiro Diliberto. The president of the prisoners' rights association, Antigone, commented: "This pardon represents a happy outcome to a surreal case. The president and the minister have had the courage to respond radically to the sense of total injustice provoked in all of us by this absurd sentence".
When Carlesi finally emerged from prison, after one painfully long final day waiting for the bureaucratic details of his pardon to be processed, he immediately insisted that his struggle had not finished, saying, "I now want to fight for all those who, like me, are in there (in prison) but who should not be".
Needless to say, not everyone greeted Carlesi's pardon enthusiastically. The Policemen's Association spokesman, Giovanni Aliquo, argued that the pardon showed a total lack of respect for Carlesi's victims. Those same victims, such as the traders who received only a dud cheque by way of payment for a variety of luxury goods ranging from antique candelabra and books to expensive rugs, are now unlikely ever to be compensated for their losses.
Adriano Carlesi clearly is no saint. Yet, despite his catalogue of crime, it is difficult to completely ignore his wife when she says that the judicial system "is strong with the weak". All the more difficult at a time when centre-right opposition politicians and some on the left are openly lobbying for some form of amnesty for the millions of pounds worth of fraud and bribery unearthed by the infamous "Tangentopoli" investigations of the early 1990s into illegal political party funding.