As a private investigator and owner of the Octopus Investigations agency
I often witness innocent people being unjustly convicted, because they believe they have nothing to hide and can defend themselves on their own, without the assistance of a lawyer.
Chico Forti is finally in Italy. Governor Ron DeSantis granted the repatriation through the intercession of President Giorgia Meloni.
At the time Chico Forti was arrested I had already opened my second Octopus detective agency in Milan and I was a private criminal investigator, that is, a private detective authorized to carry out defensive criminal investigations on behalf of defense lawyers or civil parties.
I remember immediately thinking at that moment that something wasn’t right with the story, also because, despite the U.S., cradle of due process and equality between prosecution and defense, my Octopus detective agency in Milan had already dealt with international investigations in the United States of America, and I had already seen first-hand some flaws in the US judicial system.
In Florida, for example, apart from such an impressive number of murders that its size can put any Major Crimes office into crisis, the majority of police detectives can work as private investigators as a second job. The result of this double work is an impressive number of unsolved murders archived as suicides or accidents solely due to lazy policemen who are not very dedicated to their main institutional job. I don’t mind my police friends in Florida and who I consider very efficient and conscientious, but they themselves complained and explained this anomaly in the system to me, while I was dealing with a murder case hastily dismissed as an accident.
Let’s briefly reconstruct the story of Chico Forti.
The naked body of 42-year-old Dale Pike from Sydney was found on 16 February 1998 at Sewer Beach, near Miami, with two .22 caliber pistol shots in the back of the head; the police did not believe the homosexual lead, but believed that the stripping of the body had been a staging to sidetrack the investigations.
Dale was the son of Anthony Pike, known as Tony, who was trying to sell the Pikes Hotel in Ibiza, Spain, to Chico Forti. The hotel had been a very fashionable meeting place in the eighties, but by now its popularity was over; it is not known whether Forti was about to be scammed or he was aware of the risks because, despite everything, he saw a great potential in the accommodation facility. The large sum, over four million dollars, that Chico was negotiating for the hotel, however, suggests a scam against our compatriot.
The Miami homicide squad, however, believed that Chico Forti was trying to defraud old Pike. However, the opposite scenario was much more likely, because Pike senior, by no means a saint and by now very ill, was no longer basically the owner of the Spanish hotel which had now become a source of trouble and he was supported, not to say extorted, by his friend Thomas Knott, an habitual swindler, thief, cocaine addict and bankrupt in constant search of money.
In fact, after Chico Forti was arrested for fraud, circumvention of an incompetent person and complicity in the murder of Dale Pike, the charges of fraud and circumvention of an incompetent person, which supported the motive for the murder, were dropped. While, however, the accusation of murder incredibly remained standing supported by a circumstantial framework that was approximate to say the least:
– the sand on Forti’s car, although anyone who has spent a few days on the Florida coasts knows that you don’t need to have been to the beach to find sand everywhere and especially in your car.
– A .22 caliber pistol which, however, the same armory clerk says he gave to Thomas Knott, after Chico Forti helped him fill out the documents for the purchase, even paying for the gun with his credit card.
– A telephone card, found next to Dale’s body, which recorded some calls made to Forti shortly after 5pm, while Dale was still landing or had just landed at the airport.
As an old criminalist private investigator, staging the telephone card next to the naked corpse stinks much more than the stripped body. While the undressing of the body makes one think more of the murderer’s fear of having left traces on the corpse’s clothes.
-For the Miami police, the fact that Chico Forti was one of the last to meet Dale before his death was crucial. The search for the last person to have contact with the victim is a basic investigative method, but it only happens in some areas of the third world (judicial) that the police trap you and throw away the key simply because you were the last to see the murdered person.
Chico Forti’s first big mistake was that he was not immediately honest with the Miami police, mainly out of fear, failing to say that he was one of the last to meet Dale before his assassination.
I know from experience, as a private criminal investigator and owner of the Octopus Investigations agency in Cassano d’Adda, that not being honest with the Judicial Authority, even if due to the understandable fear of being involved, often turns into a road of no return for many condemned innocents.
Even though Chico Forti belatedly says he accompanied Dale Pike to the parking lot of the Rusty Pelican restaurant in Key Biscayne and saw that Dale was waited on by a Hispanic man in a white Lexus, no Miami homicide detective cares anymore. to verify.
The second big mistake made by Chico Forti consists in not having immediately made use of a lawyer up to his task. Another misstep that I often witness, as a private criminal investigator and owner of the Octopus Investigations agency in Cassano d’Adda which deals with defensive criminal investigations, is that innocent people, who are accused and then unjustly convicted, believe they have nothing to hide and can justify themselves to the judicial police.
I cannot say whether Chico Forti is guilty or innocent, but his story teaches us that the Judicial Authority of any nation, even the most legally advanced, tends to maintain its image of efficiency and infallibility even to the detriment of reasonable doubt, which should be the guarantee for any innocent defendant and the last bulwark against judicial errors.