Angel Face by Barbie Latza Nadeau Page A

Mignini’s
jurisdiction, which allowed the prosecutor to reopen the moribund Monster of Florence case. In doing so, he says, he offended prominent Florentine judges who didn’t want the small-time Perugian prosecutor nosing around.
    Mignini believed that Spezi and Preston were concerned that the Narducci theory might undercut their story line or imperil their movie deal with Tom Cruise, and he suspected they might go to extraordinary lengths to promote their version of the crime. So, as is often the case in Italy, Mignini ordered a wiretap on Spezi’s phone. (He also wiretapped several other journalists and police officials, for which he would later be convicted of abusing his office.) Andrea Vogt and I listened to those wiretapped conversations between Spezi and Preston on a hot summer day sitting in Mignini’s office in Perugia, and, as he alleges, they do seem to refer to steering the police to faked evidence. On the basis of those tapes, Spezi was arrested and sent to prison for a month. Preston was also called in to see Mignini.
    “He didn’t understand anything,” says Mignini, who believes that Preston was duped by Spezi. Mignini describes this conversation in gentle terms. He says Preston was nervous and did not understand Italian.
Mignini told him that perhaps he needed a lawyer, but denies ever asking him to leave the country. But Preston tells a very different story. He says Mignini browbeat him for two hours, accusing him of a crime he did not commit and threatening him with jail. Preston was terrified to the point of having to excuse himself to use the toilet during the interrogation. After Amanda Knox was arrested, Preston quickly stepped forward to corroborate her claim of being abusively interrogated, recounting his own experience with Mignini to an American press eager to embrace the narrative of a corrupt, rogue prosecutor “railroading” an innocent American—even though Mignini was barely present at Amanda’s interrogation.
     
     
    MIGNINI LOOKS LIKE a balding teddy bear and favors shabby chic cotton trousers and a faded jacket. I have spent hours and hours with him, in his office and in more casual settings. I also sat in the Florentine courtroom where he was being tried for abuse of power, which became part of the brief against him in the Knox coverage. The main charge in the abuse case was that Mignini and a former Florentine policeman-turned-crime-writer ordered a forensic analysis on the
state’s budget rather than the police budget—which did not necessarily affect the outcome of the testing, but did anger the powerful Florentine judges who thought the Perugian prosecutor was trying to interfere with a local investigation. On January 22, 2010, Mignini was acquitted of the primary charge of improperly ordering up the forensic analysis, but convicted of abuse of office for lesser charges, namely, wiretapping journalists and other police officials close to the case. He was given a sixteen-month prison sentence, but in Italy sentences of less than two years are not required to be served, and at the judge’s discretion, Mignini’s sentence was suspended. Prosecutors in Italy are often accused of corruption, and in the Italian legal system, even the most banal charges must be investigated, which clogs the court dockets with relatively inconsequential cases. Moreover, these minor convictions are rarely grounds for stripping a prosecutor of his or her responsibilities.
    None of the charges against Mignini were directly related to the Knox case, nor were they that unusual; wiretapping journalists is a national pastime in Italy, and most of us assume we are frequently intercepted. But the fact that Mignini was being prosecuted for misconduct—even if it happened more than ten years
ago—was a great boon to the Friends of Amanda. The Knox camp issued press releases depicting him as a judicial rogue and exaggerated the gravity of the charges against him. They also used the fact that Mignini was