Francesco Meloni. He is the father that Giorgia Meloni has wanted to forget: he abandoned her twice, he ran a restaurant in the Canary Islands, he was captured in Menorca when transported 1,500 kilos of hashish on a sailboat from Morocco for the Italian mafias and was sentenced to nine years in prison in Mallorca, as reported this week by Diario de Mallorca, from the Prensa Ibérica group.
Francesco Meloni’s more than thirty years of life in Spain, as a restaurateur in La Gomera, an opportunistic businessman in Madrid, a hashish trafficker sentenced to nine years in prison in Mallorca and a candidate for an anti-system party in two regional elections in the Balearic Islands and in two In general, they are the chapter that the next Italian prime minister preferred not to write in her biography, ‘Io sono Giorgia’, published in May 2021 by the Rizzoli publishing house.
In those pages is reflected only the pain due to the absence of the father, who abandoned the family -mother Anna and sister Arianna-, in Rome in 1980, when she was only three years old, the annual visits to La Gomera lasting two weeks until the age of 11 and, later, the most absolute indifference for who, according to Giorgia Meloni, had become a stranger. Or that is, at least, what he wanted to reflect in his biography.
Francesco becomes Franco in Spain, as his relatives begin to call him. He arrives in La Gomera on a sailboat called Crazy Horse, in the first of the great voyages through the Strait that he will star in. He runs the Marqués de Oristano restaurant, where many high-net-worth contractors and clients from the area used to meet, and he meets another woman, with whom he has four more children.
Many neighbors still remember it, as they also remember a last stage on the most convulsive island, in which the restaurant and other tourist businesses that he ran are beginning to go wrong. Giorgia Meloni recalls from those years another flight of her father by boat. She was 11 years old and he abandoned her for the second time in eight years, leaving her alone with her new family. She promised never to see him again.
Francesco Meloni disappeared from the Canary Islands at the beginning of 1990. And his trail reappears on the night of September 24 in Menorca, when the sailboat he skippers, called Cool Star, a Gib Sea 522 of 16 meters in length and flagged and made by France, enters the natural cove of the port at 9:30 p.m. of Mahón, with the waterline lower than normal and three other crew members on board, two children of his wife and his son-in-law. The four navigators feel like making landfall. They dock, go out to dinner and have a few drinks carefree. But they are unaware that the police are following them and that the sailboat carries a hidden radio beacon.
All four are arrested. The investigating judge Bartomeu Mesquida, brother of the former director general of the Police and the Civil Guard, Joan Mesquida, moves from Palma to Mahón and 1,500 kilos of hashish distributed in sacks and hidden in the cabin are seized on the ship. The instructor decrees preventive detention and the prosecution requests a joint sentence of 40 years in prison for crimes against public health and smuggling. The following year, 1996, the Court of Palma Giorgia Meloni’s father sentenced to 9 years in prison and the children of his second wife and his son-in-law, whom Francisco Meloni exonerates during the trial, four.
Judges Eduardo Calderón and Juan Catany recall that they offered Meloni an agreement with a reduced sentence if he revealed the name of the authors of the order, frustrated after an international police operation, but Meloni refused. “La prigione non è la vita”, he replied (Prison is not life)while he slid his hand along the neck with the palm of his hand facing down, a very graphic gesture of what omertá means. The court considered that Giorgia Meloni’s father was a carrier, “who did this job for someone important and we suspected it was for a mafia group.”
That same year a group of Italian prosecutors traveled to Palma to take statements from two sailors of the same nationality who were imprisoned for their alleged involvement in the landing in Sant Elm of a shipment of hashish that came from Morocco and was destined for Italy from a amount similar to that transported by Meloni. In addition, there were other cases that confirmed to the investigators that the Balearic Islands had become a regular stopover for large quantities of drugs from Morocco bound for Italy.
Meloni prepared the trip thoroughly. He rented the sailboat in July 1995 from an agency in Genoa. On September 5, she set sail from the marina of Bandol, located between Marseille and Toulon. His first port of call is Almería, where he disembarks his wife and one of his daughters. On the 19th he arrives in Gibraltar and on the 21st he arrives in Morocco, where she loads the hashish in jurisdictional waters from another vessel. The return is much faster. In just three days she arrives in Mahón, where the trip ends before reaching France.
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Meloni begins to serve a sentence when her daughter Giorgia has been a member of the Youth Front of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the neo-fascist ideology party with a violent past, for three years. The trace of her and her father reappears in 2001 in Madrid, when she registers a company called No fumo más SL
Y reappears again in Mallorca when in 2007 he participated in the regional elections of the Balearic Islands on the lists for the Parlament and the Consell de Mallorca for training Citizens in White, which achieved 1,216 votes in the legislative chamber and 937 in the island. The following year, he runs for Congress. He continues to reside in Palma and in 2011 he returns to the Parliament on the same lists, obtaining 3,163 votes and also presenting himself to the municipal elections to the Palma City Council and to the General of the same year in the lists to the Senate. Three years earlier, her daughter Gorgia had become Minister of Youth Policy in the Fourth Berlusconi Cabinet and the following year she was going to found the Fratelli d’Italia coalition, the coalition that has given her power.