Alessandra Mussolini’s Husband Investigated in Child Prostitution Inquiries

Mauro Floriani made spontaneous statement to Carabinieri. Former financial police captain’s number found on girls’ mobile phones. Other prominent people among clients

Investigations continue into under-age prostitution in Rome. More prominent people are understood to have been identified among the clients of the two girls who sold sex in a Parioli district apartment. Twenty names have been entered in the register of persons under investigation, among them that of Mauro Floriani, the husband of parliamentarian Alessandra Mussolini. As they sift through the list of clients, assistant public prosecutor Maria Monteleone and prosecutor Cristiana Macchiusi will soon conclude the main part of the inquiry that led last October to the arrest of five individuals, including the mother of one of the two young prostitutes. So far, forty clients have been identified, many of them in the public eye. Twenty are under investigation, ten of whom have requested plea deals and could face prison sentences of six months to one year.

Investigators first identified the phones involved and then cross-checked them with recorded phone calls to trace the alleged clients. Any final doubts were removed by photographic evidence obtained from the two teenagers who received money in exchange for sex. Further questioning failed to alter the picture of “incontrovertible” charges emerging from investigators’ reconstructions of events. The list of wealthy professionals, well-to-do family men and prominent people who in the course of two months visited the Viale Parioli apartment to have sex with M., 14 and L., 15, already contains more than twenty names. One of the names now in the register is that of Mauro Floriani.

Mr Floriani is a former financial police captain who worked with Antonio Di Pietro on the Enimont inquiry. More than two decades ago, he hung up his uniform to become managing director of Metropolis, the Italian state railway company that administers the group’s property portfolio and today he heads the Ferrovie dello Stato Logistica SpA company. Mr Floriani married Alessandro Mussolini at Benito Mussolini’s birthplace, Predappio, on 28 October 1989, the anniversary of the dictator’s 1922 March on Rome. The couple have three children. When questioned by Carabinieri, Mr Floriani denied wrongdoing and made a spontaneous statement to rebut charges that he had sex with the two girls.

About forty individuals are still under investigation by prosecutor Cristiana Macchiusi and assistant public prosecutor Maria Monteleone. Inquiries by the Carabinieri investigation unit are believed to focus on a politically connected businessman but the names on the list remain under maximum confidentiality. Some of the clients have applied for plea bargains and others have expressed their intention to follow suit as soon as notification of investigation is served. Taking general mitigating circumstances into account - none have criminal records - and the tariff reduction that goes with the alternative form of trial, those found guilty should get away with sentences of less than one year.

Some of the phones tapped turned out to belong to multinational enterprises like Ernst & Young and KPMG or UN agencies like the International Fund for Agricultural Development. None of the organisations is implicated in the inquiries. The painstaking reconstruction will shortly bring to an end the second investigation into under-age prostitution in Rome’s upmarket Parioli district. A development of the main inquiry into prostitution and drug-dealing, which is also in its last stages, the under-age prostitution case has already led to six arrests, including the mother of one of the two adolescents. All those arrested have since been released.