As a private investigator and owner of the Octopus detective agency, I would have liked to witness the same enthusiastic solidarity shown to Chico Forti for the approximately 30 thousand innocent people wrongly accused over the last twenty years.

I am happy for Chico Forti’s return to Italy and the affection that surrounds him now that he has been repatriated, but as a private criminal investigator and owner of the Octopus detective agency in Cassano d’Adda I would have liked to witness the same enthusiastic solidarity for Angelo Massaro, 21 years in prison as an innocent man; for Giuseppe Gullotta, found innocent after 22 years in prison; Beniamino Zuncheddu, acquitted after 33 years in prison. And I could continue to list for pages and pages, given that there are around 30 thousand innocent people wrongly accused in the last twenty years, between 1991 and 2022. Some got away with a few months or years in prison before being recognized their own extraneousness to the facts ascribed to them, others have seen their existence burn out due to the inefficiency of judicial police and self-referenced and too superficial magistrates.

These days in Italy everyone treats Chico Forti like a star, forgetting that he suffered an unfair trial in which his guilt was certainly not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but his full innocence has not yet been demonstrated either. Personally, as a private criminal investigator, and owner of the Octopus detective agency, which has been dealing with criminal investigations for 43 years, I am quite convinced about Chico Forti’s innocence, but firmly convinced that a guilty man on the loose is better than an innocent man in jail.

The story of Chico Forti demonstrates the power of media and the mystery of online indexing. While convicted innocent, with a much more tragically clear story than Chico Forti’s, suffered unjust imprisonment and sentences in the total media silence, Chico’s family members were able to bring in the limelight the tragic story of the their relative. Journalists initially treated the case as an ordinary piece of judicial news, but behind journalists there are editors that, as soon as they realized the great media interest in Chico’s figure as well as in his story, brought press an television to deal the case.

As a private investigator and owner of the Octopus Investigations agency in Cassano d’Adda, I have also been exploiting the power of the Web for several years when dealing with the tracing of missing persons, the abduction of minors by ex-spouses and in numerous criminal cases. On the one hand to increase the possibilities for research and cooperation, on the other hand because sentences, even before the existence of internet ad television, were written by public opinion before in the courtrooms.

Nowadays the need for visibility has become so decisive in crucial cases that the private detectives of my Octopus detective agency in Cassano d’Adda collaborate with social media managers to highlight the story they are investigating and to ask for help from the people of the WEB.