SCANDAL : Decaying Train Station Stands for What’s Wrong With Italy : Corruption probe shows worst offenders have cleanest faces.

One of the most bizarre crime scenes in Italy, duly padlocked and sternly sealed with judicial warnings, is a futuristic $50-million train station in suburban Rome where nothing has happened for years.

That is precisely the crime: The train to nowhere is emblematic of a gigantic and seemingly bottomless scandal in which some of Italy’s dirtiest criminals have the cleanest faces.

Nearly every day, more rich men are led away in a swish of cashmere. “No problem getting a table here; half my clients are in jail,” the owner of a fancy Roman restaurant toldan Italian reporter.

Some of the manifestations of national rot are risible, but there is a deadly serious side to Italy’s corruption malaise: Political revolution is brewing in a country that has utterly lost faith in its politicians, their leadership and the system under which they have ruled postwar Italy.

Hard-working, no-nonsense judges like Antonio Di Pietro are the people’s new heroes. The other night, nearly 8 million Italians watched the televised trial by Di Pietro of a small fry among some 1,000 businessmen and political figures so far implicated in the corruption scandal. The insight into Operation Clean Hands swept the ratings against competing channels showing Tom Cruise and Sofia Loren movies.

It is just one year since the disgruntled owner of an office cleaning company in Milan went to the police after the umpteenth request for a 10% kickback on a public contract. Police recorded the payoff with a hidden microphone and caught a senior member of the Socialist Party red-handed.

Nearly every day there are revelations and new arrests. Leaders of political parties, Cabinet ministers, mayors, city councilors and their cronies on the one hand; some of the country’s most prominent businessmen and their bagmen on the other.

Politicians, as they are led off, complain that without the payoffs Italy’s myriad political parties could not have supported themselves. Businessmen, sometimes from an adjoining interrogation room, say that without the kickbacks their firms could never have won lucrative public contracts.

Payoffs were casually arranged over expensive dinners and from street corners across cellular telephones. They ranged from the sublime (numbered Swiss bank accounts and villas) to the ridiculous (tens of millions of lire dumped by a faithful architect-bagman in the Milan office next to that of Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi).

A former prime minister, Craxi is the object of 11 different corruption inquiries and has lost his party post. His secretary is one of the few women in jail as a result of the inquiry.

An aspect of the scandal just now coming to light was the facile approval of mammoth spending for white elephant public works. Some were never built, and most were corruption havens. Magistrates believe that there may have been payoffs in construction contracts of all 12 stadiums used for the 1990 soccer World Cup.

Here in Rome, the new train station at Vigna Clara was built as part of the expanded urban transport grid to carry World Cup visitors to nearby Olympic Stadium. The station worked fine for two weeks during the games. It has been closed ever since and is now decaying rapidly. “Today Vigna Clara, tomorrow Italy,” snapped one Rome newspaper echoing the outrage sweeping a country that demands a cleanup.