Rise and fall of the “Corsair”

The history of Italy in the second half of the twentieth century can be told from many points of view. We can talk about politics, about the so-called "First Republic", that of the large mass parties then overwhelmed by the Clean Hands investigations. Italian history can be approached from the point of view of a society that at the end of the Second World War was predominantly peasant and a few decades later had become urban, white-collar and blue-collar. Instead, we can follow the common thread of the entrepreneurial and economic events of a country, Italy, which was rapidly and disorderly industrializing.

A country whose entrepreneurship, in the 1980s, saw figures such as Gianni Agnelli, Carlo De Benedetti, Leopoldo Pirelli, Cesare Romiti and Raul Gardini competing for hegemony. The latter was perhaps the most fascinating of those who some have defined as "courageous captains", due to his ambition and desire to excel, others "captains of misfortune" due to the consequences, sometimes disastrous for the Italian system, of their choices. .

The journalist Alberto Mazzuca dedicated a volume that can be read in one breath, like a great popular novel, to the most iconic of courageous or misfortune captains: “Gardini. Il Corsaro” (Minerva, 2023, pp. 366, also e-book). But thirty years after his death, which occurred in July 1993 following a suicide whose nature was never fully clarified, perhaps it is useful to rewind the tape and tell who Gardini was and why he was called the Corsair .

Gardini was first of all an entrepreneur from Ravenna, Romagna and blood-red to the core, an old-fashioned master who managed his companies like a ship captain manages his vessel: without any limit to his power, his decisions and his ambitions. And Gardini, a free and somewhat anarchic man, was not by chance a fighter who loved the sea (his Moro di Venezia was the first Italian boat to win the Louis Vuitton Cup in 1992 and reach the final of the America's Cup), the dreams and challenges. His human and entrepreneurial story is then inextricably linked to those of the Ferruzzi dynasty, the family which, thanks to the skill and unscrupulousness of its leader, Serafino Ferruzzi, found itself dominating an empire born from the control of the cereal market. In 1979, Raul Gardini inherited the throne of the empire upon the death of Serafino (he had married one of his daughters) and began to be known as "the Corsair" for the raids on the stock exchange which led him to the conquest of Montedison and Enimont, to the the leading companies in Italy in the chemical sector at the time.

Gardini, part pirate, part adventurer, moved against the current, even against the strong powers of the time, in particular Enrico Cuccia's Mediobanca. He despised politicians in an era when parties demanded control (and bribes) over every aspect of national public life. At one point he reached such a high level that he united against himself the fears of other entrepreneurs, of the strong powers, of the political class and also of the direct heirs of Serafino Ferruzzi who had first given him the keys to the family business and then put him at the door. It was 1991 and two years later, in June 1993, Ferruzzi was swallowed up by the banking system led by Mediobanca, after being drowned in an ocean of debt. Many blamed Gardini for those debts, but the Corsaro didn't have much time to defend himself. He died in Milan on 23 July 1993: the Mani Pulite magistrates would soon arrest him for a history of bribes to corrupt politicians. A gunshot to the head, many oddities about the manner of death. Three days earlier, Gabriele Cagliari, president of Eni and his rival in the Enimont affair, had committed suicide in prison. Two excellent deaths that bloodied a season of reckoning which historians are only today beginning to investigate with the right detachment.

But beyond the tragic conclusion, the story of Gardini - and the Ferruzzi dynasty - is a fundamental part of the political, banking and industrial history of this country. A piece in the history of that Italian capitalism in which many entrepreneurs behaved like fathers-masters, bankers went hand in hand with compliant politicians, politicians thought more about their particular interests than general ones. A very current story because thirty years after Gardini's death the picture has certainly not changed.