The Body of Il Duce (15 page)

Not content to have confessed enough, Gasparini and Parozzi also told police about several other offenses they had committed in Milan in the weeks following the theft. The most serious of these involved hurling a bomb at the Communist federation building in Piazza Garibaldi and setting off dynamite on the eve of the referendum at the presses where the Socialist
Avanti!
and Communist
l'Unità
were printed. The Leccisi gang was also charged with hiding a genuine arsenal: four munitions cases containing numerous hand grenades, both Italian and foreign, fourteen tubes of explosives, three boxes of dynamite, dozens of detonators and fuses, a land mine, six automatic pistols, and an American machine gun with ammunition. In addition, the band was accused of minting and possessing counterfeit banknotes worth 200,000 lire. Gasparini and Parozzi insisted that the fake money came from Father Zucca, a point the police were inclined to believe because the two were interrogated separately. Leccisi, confronted with the other confessions, explained that the counterfeit notes were used to support unemployed Fascists. But the authorities found little evidence of such “criminal charity” among the documents they seized, which showed only a few payments of several hundred lire to some of Leccisi's closest associates.
35

Still, the evidence the Milan police supplied to the prosecution to initiate criminal proceedings depicted the offenders as petty crooks rather than dangerous subversives. The group had engaged in action merely “to prove a point,” the police chief wrote, adding that the gang lacked “seriousness, a doctrinal basis, and the principles of honesty and organization that characterize a movement.”
36

*   *   *

BEFORE WE LOOK
more closely at Police Chief Vincenzo Agnesina, we will follow the steps of the police as they pursued Mussolini's corpse, which some of the Fascist detainees insisted was hidden inside Sant'Angelo. On the basis of the confessions, the police suspected not only Father Zucca but also Father Alberto Parini, the brother of Piero Parini, mayor and prefect of Milan under the Social Republic. On August 11, Zucca and Parini went voluntarily to the police for questioning, but they denied knowing Leccisi, Gasparini, and Parozzi. In a direct confrontation with the prisoners, the Franciscan friars stuck to their version of the facts. But slowly the investigators came closer to the truth. Father Parini, exculpating Father Zucca, insisted that he alone had conducted negotiations with the neo-Fascists. He said he had received Leccisi at Sant'Angelo, where he had given him spiritual counsel according to the rules of the order. He claimed to know the precise location of Mussolini's body but would reveal it only if his conditions were met. Once the body was recovered, he insisted, the state must guarantee a Christian burial, with the proviso that no one, not even the Mussolini family, be told where the new burial place was.

After consulting with the Rome chief of police, Agnesina agreed to the friar's demands. And so the following day, the travels of Mussolini's corpse came to an end. Father Parini led Agnesina to the Certosa di Pavia, a well-known fifteenth-century monastery outside the city of Pavia where the Franciscans had taken the body after the neo-Fascists were arrested. According to the statement issued by the Milan police, Il Duce's body had been sealed in a trunk, wrapped in two rubberized sacks, and placed in a closet in one of the monks' cells on the ground floor. Along with Mussolini's mortal remains (“no longer a corpse,” according to one newspaper, “but a skeleton falling to pieces”) the authorities found a declaration by the Democratic Fascist Party that spoke of the day when the august body would have the distinction of being buried on Rome's Capitoline Hill.
37
But these were feeble words, given to Agnesina's success. After months of investigation, the government had triumphed over the ghosts of the past.

Journalists and photographers were summoned. What better occasion for political show than the public exhibition, if not of the body of Il Duce, of the receptacle that had held it? Years later, a reporter would recall the atmosphere that day in a little room on the third floor of the police headquarters: the brown trunk, with its black buckles encrusted with mud—a trunk so small that those present could only wonder how the body, even bent in two, had fit in it; the heat of the room, gradually filling with a pungent smell; the silence, broken only by the sound of cameras clicking. The scene was altogether surreal: “Everyone was looking down, looking at the trunk, and the magnesium flashes made the shoes of all those people standing in a circle seem enormous, all those dusty shoes of the police officers, the reporters, and the photographers.”
38

The receptacle that held the body of Il Duce—a trunk so small those present could only wonder how the body had fit in it. (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

Among the journalists covering Mussolini's postmortem adventures was a reporter for
l'Unità
, Tommaso Giglio. Barely past adolescence, he had the ethical certainty of so many young people who had become Communists during the war. “To show indulgence means to pile hate onto hate,” he wrote in a poem published in
Il Politecnico
around this time.
39
His articles avoided the pitfall of indulgence. Giglio described Father Parini and Father Zucca as favorites of a large circle of wealthy, idle Milanese ladies who hoped to get to heaven by aiding outlaw Fascists. This well-informed reporter named a number of such outlaws who had been protected in the Sant'Angelo convent. Besides Leccisi and his sidekicks, they included Vanni Teodorani, Mussolini's right-hand man at Salò. According to Giglio, Father Parini was closely tied to Guglielmo Giannini, head of the
qualunquista
movement, and to the former king, Umberto of Savoy, while Father Zucca was dealing counterfeit money, if not actually drugs, to ex-Fascists and ex-Nazis who had taken refuge in the Alto Adige region, bordering Austria. The right-wing
Corriere lombardo
replied to
l'Unità
's charges blow for blow. Its rebuttal relied heavily on the attorney for the two friars, who had been incarcerated on charges of aiding and abetting Leccisi and the others. According to him, the monastic order of the convent required the friars to be compassionate and forgiving. The right of asylum, he argued, was as valid for corpses as for human beings.

In a country with Italy's churchgoing tradition, few wished to challenge the Church's long-standing claim to the handling of corpses and commemoration of the dead. But in Mussolini's case, the issue was not as simple as his body's right to “return to legality” under the “great wing” of Christian mercy, as Father Parini argued.
40
Behind the skirmishes in the press, the lawyer's resonant pronouncements, and the friar's pious statements lay the political question of where the Church stood on the epuration of Fascist officials from public office after the war. From 1943 on, following the Italian armistice, the ecclesiastical hierarchy had kept its distance from anti-Fascism as a political movement, embracing it only as a moral option. Father Parini made implicit reference to that position when he said, of the theft of Il Duce's body, that “the act was, just as it seemed to the great majority of Italians, moral and not political.”
41
Upholding the distinction between morality and politics, the Milan branch of the Pontifical Committee on Welfare was so active in helping veterans of the Republic of Salò that police reports began to refer to it as “ill-reputed.”
42
On the whole, a large segment of the Church made little of what was a major transition from dictatorship to democracy. As for Father Parini, who claimed to be anti-Fascist, his actions were to prove more revealing, for the friar of Sant'Angelo eventually gave his public backing to a group of neo-Fascists called the Italian Liberation Army.

In the summer of 1946, Father Parini and Father Zucca were well known in Milan, and their trouble with the justice system threatened to cast the entire Church in a bad light. They were also respected and well liked, however, so any harshness against them risked casting the justice system in an even worse light. The interests of church and state thus came together, resulting in the friars' release and the dropping of the charges against them. Domenico Leccisi counted for nothing and had no reputation. Thus there was no Machiavellian calculation nor were there any reasons of state to prevent Police Chief Agnesina from coming down hard on Leccisi in his report to the state prosecutor. In Agnesina's view, the Democratic Fascist Party was as absurd as its name, a pretext, “a means of profit that never worked out,” Agnesina wrote. Leccisi was an ex-Blackshirt nostalgic for the “comfortable Fascist feeding trough” to which he had long been attached, a political zero, a parasite, a clever do-nothing. As for the theft of Mussolini's corpse, Agnesina called it a tragic farce. While
Lotta fascista
boasted “with the usual upstart Fascist language” that Il Duce's body had been safely guarded by the movement faithful, the corpse, “folded up for four long months,” had in fact been tossed around Lombardy inside a steamer trunk.
43
Four months after Agnesina wrote his report, the courts confirmed the spirit of his version of events: Leccisi was sentenced not as a political criminal but as a common delinquent, receiving a six-year sentence for the phony banknotes and nothing for the theft of the body.
Avanti!
was then able to run the headline “Thieves of Supercorpse Bag Sentences as Counterfeiters.”
44

We have seen enough of Leccisi to know that the Milan police chief's judgment was not only politically mistaken but humanly unfair. The graveyard thief was certainly a fairly disreputable figure, a thug and a bomb thrower, but he was also a genuine believer, sincerely dedicated to the cult of Il Duce and the cause of neo-Fascism, not the petty crook with no principles whom Agnesina described. It is rather the Milan police chief who warrants closer examination because he is in many ways an example of what historian Claudio Pavone had in mind when he wrote of the long-term “continuity of the state”—the persistence of old Fascist officials in the new democratic republic.
45
A series of snapshots of Agnesina, taken during his career as an exemplary civil servant, are revealing. In 1931, at the height of the Fascist system, Agnesina, as chief of the political section of the Naples police, sought to prevent the young Communist Giorgio Amendola from leaving the country (Amendola's father, Giovanni, shared Matteotti's posthumous role as a symbol of anti-Fascist martyrdom). A few years later, his repressive tactics were such that the Naples police earned the admiration of no less a Nazi figure than Heinrich Himmler. On July 25, 1943, when Mussolini was overthrown, Agnesina worked directly for the dictator as chief of personal security. He did nothing, however, to prevent Il Duce from being arrested. In 1947, as Milan police chief, Agnesina was secretly appointed by the Ministry of the Interior as an anti-Communist superprefect with broad powers. Finally, years later, in 1962, as deputy national police commissioner, he led a brutal repression of strikers in Turin. The evidence prompts the question whether, in 1946, Agnesina had any right to present himself as an anti-Fascist chasing down the thieves of the Musocco cemetery.

At the end of that year, Leccisi was in prison when an above-ground neo-Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, or Italian Social Movement, was founded. The party received the blessing of the Vatican and the approval of the Ministry of the Interior, both of which were eager to prevent the radical neo-Fascists—firm believers in “socialization”—from swelling the ranks of the Communists. Incarcerated though he was, Domenico Leccisi deserved a place among the founding fathers of the Italian Social Movement as the mastermind of the theft of Mussolini's body; no other act had done as much to lift neo-Fascism from the private realm of self-pity to the public sphere. In fact, the first step taken by the new party showed that Leccisi's investment in Il Duce's body was neither madness nor folly to the fledgling political organization. On the contrary, his act helped define the neo-Fascists' identity and ensure their future. According to the party's unofficial gospel, the abbreviation of its name in Italian, MSI, also stood for “Mussolini Sempre Immortale”—Mussolini ever immortal. And in the party symbol, a flame sits atop a trapezoidal base—the shape of the casket Leccisi had the nerve to uncover, so that the body of Il Duce would continue as a historical actor.

4

M
USSOLINI
, D
EAR
D
EPARTED

Rescued from its posthumous embrace with Domenico Leccisi, the body of Il Duce was hidden away between 1946 and 1957 for reasons of state. On orders from the prime minister and with the agreement of Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan, Mussolini's remains were kept in the chapel of the convent of Cerro Maggiore, near Milan, honoring the commitment that Police Chief Agnesina had made with Father Parini to give Mussolini a Christian yet secret resting place. For that eleven-year period, only a very small group of politicians, religious figures, and civil servants knew the exact location of the tomb.