Even for a nation that renounced its monarchy by popular vote 60 years ago,there is a curious frisson involved in seeing the erstwhile heir to the throne locked up in jail. And when the man doing the locking-up is a firebrand prosecutor named Woodcock who was born in Somerset, there is more than a whiff of Cromwell about it. Since his arrest last Friday he has shared a cell four metres square with Gian Nicolino Narducci, a long-time aide who is also under investigation: he has taken the top bunk, as befits a "highness", though on the first night he fell out of it and sustained bruises.
He has complained bitterly about having the belt for his trousers confiscated, but by the time Prosecutor Woodcock came to question him on Tuesday he had re-assembled his damaged dignity. And to abstain from alcohol for a spell is a good thing, too He is not yet on trial. But Henry John Woodcock, the year-old half-British state prosecutor of Potenza, has been listening in to his telephone conversations and those of his associates for a long time, and believes that there are serious charges to be answered.
He believes the former prince is the leader of a criminal gang involved with illegal gambling and prostitution and more. And late last Friday Mr Savoy was seized, driven "bent double" in the police Fiat Tipo "as if squashed into a suitcase - it was a nightmarish journey," he complained, from his home in Rome to Mr Woodcock's headquarters in Potenza.
In a few days or weeks Mr Savoy will walk out of Potenza jail a free man, once the investigators have squeezed him dry. Only then, and not necessarily even then, will he be charged and brought to trial, a trial which, like nearly all Italian trials, is likely to drag on and on for years: every year the European Court of Human Rights tries to prod Italy into doing something about its painfully tardy legal system.
In Italy condemnation often comes before charges are laid; and punishment, too, in the form of public humiliation. Yet the transcripts of the prosecutor's wiretaps of the prince and his associates that have been filling Italy's daily papers appear to provide startling evidence of guilt. They give a vivid impression of a man, already immensely wealthy but consumed with greed, and using his name and influence to grub money from seedy affairs of every sort, from casinos and video-game slot machines in tax havens to prostitution, and trying to use his influence with the authorities, including the tax police, to insulate himself from attack.
