Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/782193
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2017 10 News A lesson on post-truth A lesson on post-truth MATTHEW VELLA FAKE news. Post-truth. Alternative facts. Anything tagged with Sean Spicer. Donald Trump and the entire Orwellian cast of revisionists and climate- change deniers. Untruth is all the rage in a danger- ous world whose foundations are being shaken to the core by populist power-mongers. But for one Italian self-promoter who paid dear- ly for his elaborate fibs that pumped up the Italian stock market, the game is on. Remember Alessan- dro Proto, a realtor who claimed Tom Cruise wanted to spend millions on a Malta home? He has learnt about Sliema's controversial Townsquare and wants the Maltese press to hear him whisper two words: Donald Trump. But more of that later. For it is Proto's paradoxical tale of lies, to which he freely admits in an Affaritaliani.it interview, that provides an education on the gullibility of the media and how the desertion of truth can leave us stranded in a landscape of lies. A landscape which begins to look even better than the truth. Google Alessandro Proto and find his name still being bandied about in mass-market South Ameri- can web portals, in quality press like The Australian, or in the English redtops which extoll his financial exploits: he has sold his Ferrari to Lionel Messi, he is selling George Clooney's lakeside property, he is fronting the acquisition of 1% in Fiat, and he is even the inspiration for multimillionaire and part-time S&M lover Christian Grey. All of this is patently untrue, but these news stories live in the ether and get imparted to unwitting read- ers who seem to have no choice but to believe. In 2012, Proto, now 42, was responsible for spark- ing 'Tom Cruise fever' in Malta after claiming the Hollywood actor wanted to buy a massive property on the island. But when MaltaToday asked, Cruise's publicist denied the claims. A year later, Proto was being arrested over an investigation into market rig- ging, having spent three years doing the false bid- ding of inexistent financiers, pledging to buy the stakes in companies like Fiat and Tod's. His postur- ing attracted real business: people selling high-end properties wanted his celebrity friends to buy them, others wanted to buy access to the billionaires Proto claimed he knew. The Milanese prosecutor Stefania Donadeo said Proto was a "capable conman, much to the chagrin of cash-strapped investors looking for finance outside the common banking channels." When MaltaToday took on the talented Mr Proto in 2012, the Milanese braggart intimated that he was a modern-day Sindona, the convicted banker and P2 freemason who laundered money for the Mafia. More boasting and posturing. This is how Proto perforated the epidermis of the media, using his intelligence and fantasy, and an abundance of paraculismo – the word Italians em- ploy to denote the sneaky, self-serving opportunist who literally "has his ass covered". His weapons of choice were false public statements – 240 in all – often used to inflate share prices on the stock market, or showing his impeccable talent at courting Hollywood greats. Proto's hyperreality – a falsity which the media found too irresistible – was a key to lucrative aggrandisement. He admitted as much in court, earning a three- year jail term for which Proto spent just two months incarcerated, while paying a €5 million penalty and spending time under house arrest. But in so doing, Proto paradoxically exposed how easily he could dis- seminate statements from his 'Proto Organisation' to agencies like ANSA and Reuters, and wait for the Italian press to rehash the statements without verify- ing the contents. "If a nobody like me can do it, just wait for someone with power in his hands to do it," the re- pentant Proto told an interviewer in an ominous presaging of the way the Donald Trump adminis- tration is undermining objective truth. "Why did newspapers like the Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, or Il Sole 24 Ore never carry out a verification of what I said?" Proto asks. "When Mat- teo Renzi told journalists they were napping [on Italy's banking sector troubles], I laughed. They are accomplices to the wrongdoing." When Proto would announce that his organisation was fronting a third-party deal to buy 1% of Fiat or Unicredit, he would not even know what the value of that percentage was. "Nobody ever called me asking whether I had really bought those shares… what's worrying for Italians is that these journalists would run the story." Proto today seems to enjoy revelling in his acci- dental role of exposing such laziness at the heart of the press. When in 2012, MaltaToday employed the humble question to reveal that Proto was fibbing on Tom Cruise searching for a Malta base, the Milanese speculator took unkindly to the probing. He insisted that Cruise was eyeing San Gwann for a €12 million house, ostensibly finding the name exotic enough for a Hollywood star. This was typical Proto, with a cock and bull story of millionaires searching for property that could not Don't believe all you read. The Italian hustler Alessandro Proto's 'organisation' is trying its luck to blag free publicity, this time with Malta's property boom and an easy headline-grabber: Trump