Currently, for more than 5 years, Nino Di Matteo has at his disposal an escort defined as “first level of exceptional protection”, inside which men specialized in war interventions, that is, equipped with adequate military armament, are employed.

In an interview with the journalist Saverio Lodato, Nino Di Matteo states that living a life as an escort is not so simple, especially when you try to live a normal life together with your family: an inevitable sacrifice, which can sometimes lead to undertake difficult choices when frustration reaches its peak.

He realizes that he protected not only the magistrate, but also his wife and then adolescent children. The same carabinieri of the escort were forced to accompany his children to a shop with the machine gun leveled. Nino Di Matteo himself states:

There was a day I will never forget when my daughter, who was eleven at the time, had a fit of unstoppable crying. Also because at school they asked her, as happens among children, if it was true that her father would be killed at any moment.

The irrepressible desire of her daughter was to live a common life, like that of her classmates and, above all, to have a normal dad. And there was no day in which his father did not want to fulfill his daughter’s wish and, after seeing her in tears, he took the decision, which he felt was right and due, to communicate to the competent bodies the renunciation of all forms of protection.

So Nino Di Matteo tells what happened:

My wife was not at home at the time. I communicated the decision to my daughter to reassure her. My son, who was fifteen, present at the scene, had a strong and unexpected reaction for me. He telephoned friends and relatives and told them: persuade my father not to do it, please, he wants to give up the escort, and I am afraid that they will kill him.

In short, a short story in which the sacrifice of giving up a normal life saved a family from an almost certain disaster. Yet, despite the cumbersome apparatus that always accompanies him, Nino Di Matteo certainly does not give up occasionally going to the cinema or restaurant, otherwise we would give it to those who would like to lock people in an aquarium from which they never leave again.

The alibi of those who are neither with the mafia nor with the anti-mafia would be perpetuated indefinitely, and he chooses to watch both the mafia and the anti-mafia.

The perfect alibi for never taking sides.