The Dark Heart of Italy (7 page)

Two of the accused (Delfo Zorzi and Carlo Maria Maggi) come from the ranks of
Ordine Nuovo
in the Veneto, the north-east of the country. Zorzi, having avoided extradition by virtue of being a Japanese citizen, is absent throughout the trial. Zorzi – or Roi Hagen as he is now called, in deference to his assumed nationality – is now a wealthy businessman in Tokyo, having spent the 1980s and 1990s importing and selling Italian designer labels to the Japanese. In 1969, he was twenty-two. One of his school friends described him to Salvini as ‘a person of very strong character, often hard, very brutal and without those reactions which arose in many of us at the sight of blood during beatings … he had a closed character, introverted and very reserved, carried almost to a type of mysticism.’
12
He had studied oriental languages in Naples, and afterwards opened the first Karate salon in the Veneto. During one police raid on his house, a significant arsenal had been unearthed: a P38, a Beretta and a Smith & Wesson, as well as other explosives. His was a perfect emulation of the writings of Julius Evola, Italy’s post-war Fascist philosopher par excellence: a heady blend of neo-nazism and oriental spiritualism. He once
plastered across walls in the Veneto, ‘six million Jews aren’t enough’.

Although Zorzi is absent from the trial, another of the accused – Carlo Maria Maggi – is ever-present, sitting impassively in the front row of the court in a cream suit and dark glasses. By 1969 he was thirty-five, already qualified as a doctor and working in one of Venice’s hospitals. Outside his working life, however, Maggi was the leader of the Veneto division of
Ordine Nuovo
. He was a regular presence on the firing range in the Lido, and was a member of the so-called ‘children of the sun’, an organisation which at the solstices used to burn wooden swastikas on hill-tops. In November 1991, Maggi was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for ‘reconstituting the Fascist Party’ between 1969 and 1982.

The accusation rests, of course, on the testimonies of two
pentiti
. Carlo Digilio, nicknamed
Zio Otto
(‘Uncle Eight’ because of his love of the Lebel 8 handgun), was for years an informer for the CIA in the Veneto. His contact – one ‘David Carret’ – is constantly invoked throughout the trial, though he has never been identified or located. As an explosives expert used by
Ordine Nuovo
in the Veneto, Digilio claims to have brokered a deal for gelignite from a deep-sea recovery expert in Venice. Having taken possession of the consignment, Zorzi apparently showed Digilio three military cases stashed in the back of Maggi’s car days before the Piazza Fontana bomb: inside each were wired explosives, ‘at least a kilo in the small ones, a bit more in the larger one’. Later on, Zorzi is said to have boasted to Digilio: ‘I participated directly in the placing of the bomb in the
Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura’
. The other
pentito
in the case is Martino Siciliano, one of Zorzi’s school peers. ‘It was us who did that stuff, us as an organisation,’ Zorzi apparently boasted to Siciliano days after the Milan bombing.

The accusations go much further however. The prosecution and various historians suggest that the Piazza Fontana bombing was actually organised from within the Ministry of the Interior. ‘The Piazza Fontana bomb,’ one army general has written, ‘was in some way organised by the “Office for Reserved Affairs” of the Minister of the Interior. SID [the secret services] took over to
cover everything up.’ The allegations centre on Elvio Catenacci, a man from that same Office for Reserved Affairs. Catenacci had, according to the accusations, recruited Delfo Zorzi; he had immediately dispatched one of his men to Milan after the bombing, and had systematically interfered with evidence. The allegation that the secret services were somehow involved recurred throughout the 1970s: two of the Fascists originally accused of the bombing, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, were close friends of Guido Giannettini, an officer in SID. All three were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981; all three were later absolved.

Put simply, the new accusations suggest not only that Fascists from
Ordine Nuovo
planted the bomb (subsequently blamed on Anarchists), but also that they were nudged by men from the Ministry of the Interior, the secret services and by a mysterious CIA agent in the Veneto. With no sense of
sub judice
, the Slaughter Commission has echoed the findings of the initial investigation, describing with its usually robust rhetoric the bombing as a
strage atlantica di Stato
, more or less a ‘slaughter by the Atlantic [i.e. American] state’. In the words of the President of the Slaughter Commission, Piazza Fontana’s bomb wasn’t an obscure incident of extremist terrorism but rather a shrewd prompt for a political turnaround:

George Bush senior was even on the wish-list of witnesses presented by the prosecution. It was a great story, but I – like everyone else – had no idea if it really represented
La Storia
.

The ‘suicide’ of Pino Pinelli, the Anarchist in police custody, became
‘an awkward death’, his name ‘like a collective remorse’. That was
how Camilla Cederna, author of
A Window on the Slaughter,
described his death in 1970. As the police account of events became
increasingly inconsistent throughout that year, a handful of journalists
began interrogating the official line of the Anarchist bomb, and its
allegedly repentant perpetrator who had fallen from the fourth floor of
the police station. The
‘controinformazione’
began to portray
Pinelli’s as the suicide that never was, to hint heavily that he had,
rather, been
‘suicidato’ –
‘suicided’ – and quickly made the scapegoat
for much darker political forces. The previously anonymous
railway worker was immortalised as the anarchist who had suffered
an awful, ‘accidental death’ (the phrase, famously borrowed by
Dario Fo, came from the
coroner’s
report of July 1970). Walls began
to be daubed with
‘Calabresi è assassino’
(Calabresi was the police
commissioner in charge of Pinelli’s interrogation), or
‘Valpreda è innocente, la strage è di stato, unico giudice il proletariato’
(‘Valpreda is innocent, the slaughter is by the state, the only judge is
the proletariat’)
.

Whilst investigations into the actual Piazza Fontana bombing
were continuing, two overlapping court cases began in an attempt
to resolve the riddle of what exactly had happened to the Anarchist
suspect. In the first, starting in October 1970, Luigi Calabresi sued
Pio
Baldelli,
editor of the left-wing magazine
Lotta Continua
(‘Continuing Struggle’). The magazine had repeatedly insinuated
that the police had
suicided
their suspect. In the second case, the
mother and widow of Pinelli presented an accusation of murder
against the police officials who had been in charge of the interrogation.
What emerged from those trials was a disconcerting tangle of
confusion and contradiction. When Pinelli’s body was re-exhumed,
evidence suggested that his had been a ‘passive’ rather than an
‘active’ suicide leap: there were no injuries to his arms, despite the
fact that even suicides instinctively protect their head in a fall.
Nobody had heard a scream as he fell. There was evidence of a blow
to the back of the neck (a possible cause for the police request for an
ambulance two minutes before the ‘suicide’ jump). No one could
explain quite why the window was open in winter, or why four
policemen were unable to impede Pinelli’s alleged action. One of the
policemen claimed to have grabbed one of Pinelli’s shoes when he
was at the window, although the victim had shoes on both feet when
he was found. The cases brought by or against Calabresi were
abruptly halted, however, when, in May 1972, he was murdered with
five shots on the pavement outside his house
.

I begin to get used to the commute to the courtroom in Milan. The same trains, thoroughly spray-painted and looking like the rainbow-colour of spilt petrol. Inside, columns of cigarette smoke pirouetting upwards before being sucked out of the windows. Percussive confusion: everyone staring into their mobiles, laboriously writing and receiving messages, experimenting with their ring-tones, so that the whole carriage becomes an atonal, electronic chorus. As the train rattles across the
Pianura
Padana
, the basin of the Po, single rows of poplar trees loom into view, looking like the upturned teeth of a comb on an empty table. Facing Milan, the Apennines lie to the left, the Alps to the right, but for most of the year they’re hidden by the gypsum-sky, by the blanket fog of the plain.

The courtroom has the same sense of bathos as a modern church, unable to capture the import or solemnity of its subject matter. Journalists tap their short bulletins into laptops; lawyers nip out for cigarette breaks. There are TV cameras from Japan permanently rolling, since Delfo Zorzi is still a fugitive from justice. Today is the first day of the deposition of the
pentito
, Carlo Digilio. He has recently suffered a stroke and so his deposition is relayed by video from a clinic in Lake Garda. It’s hard to know whether the resulting fiasco is a result of technical incompetence or a deliberate attempt to undermine any credibility in the witness. The courtroom becomes an echo chamber of
pronto, pronto
, as the video stalls. The picture frozen on the screens shows a balding man, slumped in a wheel-chair in a cramped room.

When the connection is fixed, the relay of question-and-answer is punctuated with long pauses. The prosecuting lawyer reads out long, fluent phrases apparently given by Digilio years ago, and asks him to confirm them. Digilio breathes heavily into his microphone, before finally slurring his assent. He confuses
dates and names, and by mid-afternoon he complains about ‘the humid, sweltering heat’, and the court is adjourned until the next day. Everyone retires to the nearby bar, and lawyers leave their indiscretions. ‘As a first run, it was frankly embarrassing, for the prosecution obviously,’ says Gaetano Pecorella, the
Forza
Italia
deputy defending Zorzi. The left-wing press concede the next day that it was a ‘difficult hearing’.

During the ensuing days and weeks, Digilio’s version of events, tortuously told, begins to emerge: ‘Mine was neither an ideological nor a political adhesion,’ says Digilio. ‘I entered
Ordine Nuovo
at the suggestion of David Carret on behalf of the Americans. I am a nationalist, nothing more than a man of the centre right … A few days before the 12 December 1969, the day of the
Immacolata
, Zorzi … asked me to examine the explosives closed in three metal boxes with English writing. They were those [used to contain] the belt-feeds for machine-guns used by the Italian army, inherited from the United States. The explosives were placed in the boot of Doctor Maggi’s [Fiat] 1100. I asked Zorzi: “but where are you going with all this load?” The reply was: “to Milan.”’

‘It was the right thing to do,’ are the words Digilio claims Zorzi used in the aftermath of the bombing. ‘He spoke of the Piazza Fontana slaughter,’ continued Digilio, ‘as a war report. He spoke of it as if he had been the head of the command. He said that he had had the courage to do it, the others were weak.’

A few weeks later, in the witness chair in front of the horseshoe of judges, Pino Rauti is rubbing his hands in a scholastic manner. He’s a short man, wearing a cheap blue suit. He’s got slicked-back white hair, and eyes that seem to fall away at the edges. One of the Italian journalists tells me Rauti is playing the ‘Andreotti gambit’: the important, cultured man dragged through the courts by spiteful, lesser beings. Rauti was, in the 1960s, the leader of
Ordine
Nuovo
: ‘the motto of
Ordine
Nuovo
is the same as that of the SS: “our honour is called faith,”’ he wrote back in the 1960s. His is a cantankerous performance. He frequently calls the prosecution lawyer by a lesser title, and is each time corrected. During his
deposition one journalist from the ‘Communist daily’ (
Il
Manifesto
) guffaws melodramatically, rocking her hands – pressed together in praying position – backwards and forwards (the gesture usually used by imploring footballers). The judge suddenly interrupts Rauti and asks for the journalist to be ejected from the court.

In 1956, Rauti and his followers left the Fascist party, the
Movimento Sociale Italiano
, and formed their own study centre,
Ordine Nuovo
. The move had been precipitated by a perceived softening of the MSI, and Rauti remained outside the party until 1969. During that time, the new movement made its position explicit: ‘the Aryan blood of the SS is still warm and so is that of the Kamikaze and of the Black Legionnaires and those of the Iron Guard who fell in the name of and for the eternal
Ordine Nuovo
.’ Rauti presented a paper at a conference in 1965, where Communists were described as ‘some sort of an alien presence, like the extra-terrestrial races of science fiction …’

Although Rauti denies chairing a meeting of
Ordine Nuovo
in Padova in April 1969, shortly before the spring bombing campaign, it’s certain that he went on an ‘educational’ tour of Papadopoulos’s Greece in the summer of that year. When an electrician came forward as a witness, claiming that he had unknowingly supplied the timers for
Ordine
Nuovo’s
bombs, Rauti (identified by the electrician’s wife) apparently visited the shop to counsel silence. (Asked about this in court, Rauti indignantly replies that it’s inconceivable that a respected politician would do such a thing.) The strange thing – if it’s true – emerging from the trial is that Rauti and his Fascists weren’t isolated extremists, but rather pawns of a very clear, strategic plan. In his
Istruttoria
, the prosecutor, Guido Salvini, wrote of
Ordine Nuovo
that it was ‘one of the organisations of the right characterised by the most extensive collusion with the apparatuses of the state …’ Rauti’s cantankerous performance in the witness stand isn’t because he denies his Fascism (which he proudly admits), it’s because after years of appearing the most threatening extremist in Italian politics, he now seems little more than a man manipulated by much greater forces. During his
deposition, newspapers report that in the early 1970s, Rauti was receiving cheques from the US embassy.