The Monster of Florence (7 page)
T
he Sardinian Trail investigation illuminated a curious and almost forgotten corner of Italian history, the mass emigration in the 1960s from the island of Sardinia to the Italian mainland. Many of these immigrants ended up in Tuscany, changing the character of the province forever.
To go back to Italy in the early sixties is to make a journey much longer and deeper than a mere forty-five years. Italy was another country then, a world that has utterly vanished today.
The unified country had been created in 1871, cobbled together from various grand duchies and fiefdoms, ancient lands awkwardly stitched into a new nation. The inhabitants spoke some six hundred languages and dialects. When the new Italian state chose the Florentine dialect to be official “Italian,” only two percent of the population could actually speak it. (Florentine was chosen over Roman and Neapolitan because it was the language of Dante.) Even in 1960, fewer than half of the citizens could speak standard Italian. The country was poor and isolated, still recovering from the massive destruction of World War II, mired in hunger and malaria. Few Italians had running water in their homes, owned cars, or had electricity. The great industrial and economic miracle of modern Italy was just beginning.
In 1960, the poorest, most backward area in all of Italy was the barren, sunbaked interior mountains of the island of Sardinia.
This was a Sardinia long before the Costa Smeralda, the harbors and yacht clubs, the rich Arabs and golf courses and million-dollar seaside villas. It was an isolated culture that had turned its back on the sea. Sardinians had always been afraid of the sea, because in centuries past it brought them only death, pillage, and rape. “He who comes from the sea, robs,” went an ancient Sardinian expression. From the sea came ships bearing the Christian cross of the Pisans, who cut the Sardinian forests to build their navy. From the sea arrived the black feluccas of Arab pirates who carried off women and children. And many centuries ago—so the legends went—also from the sea came a giant tsunami that wiped out the seaside towns, driving the inhabitants forever into the mountains.
The police and carabinieri charged with investigating the
Pista Sarda
, the Sardinian Trail, went back into those mountains, back in time to the town of Villacidro, where many of the Sardinians connected to the Mele clan had originated.
In 1960, almost nobody in Sardinia spoke Italian, using instead a language all their own, Logudorese, considered to be the oldest and least contaminated of all the Romance languages. The Sardinians lived with indifference to whatever law happened to be imposed by
sos italianos
, as they referred to the people of the mainland. They followed their own unwritten laws, the Barbagian code, born out of the ancient region of central Sardinia called La Barbagia, one of the wildest and least populated areas in Europe.
At the heart of the Barbagian code was the man known as the
balente
, the wily outlaw, the man of cunning, skill, and courage, who takes care of his own. Stealing, particularly of livestock, was an exalted activity under the Barbagian code when it was committed against another tribe, because, aside from mere gain, it was a heroic act, an act of
balentìa.
The thief, by stealing, demonstrated his cunning and his superiority to his adversary, who paid a just price for his incapacity to take care of his own property and flocks. Kidnapping and even murder were justified under similar rules. The
balente
had to be feared and respected.
Sardinians, especially shepherds who lived most of their lives in nomadic isolation, despised the Italian state as an occupying power. If a shepherd, by way of the code of
balentìa
, transgressed the laws inflicted by “foreigners” (Italians), instead of bearing the shame of prison he became an outlaw, joining groups of similar fugitives and brigands who lived in the mountains and raided other communities. Even as an outlaw, he could continue to live secretly in his community, where he was given protection, a welcome, and, beyond that, admiration. To the community, in return, the bandits distributed a share of their spoils, always keeping their depredations away from the home territory. The people of Sardinia viewed the brigand as a person who valiantly defended his rights and the honor of the community against the foreign oppressor, investing in him an almost mythic esteem, a figure of romance and courage.
It was into this clannish environment that the investigators delved as they followed the twists and turns of the Sardinian Trail, prying open an antique culture that made the Sicilian concept of
omertà
seem almost modern.
The village of Villacidro was isolated even by Sardinian standards. Lovely despite its great poverty, it sat on a high plain, divided by the river Leni, ringed by craggy peaks. Deer roamed the oak forests beyond the village and royal eagles soared above its red granite cliffs. The great waterfall of Sa Spendula outside the town, one of the natural wonders of Sardinia, was the inspiration for the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio on a visit to the island in 1882. As he gazed in wonder at the series of falls, tumbling down among boulders, he spied one of the local inhabitants:
In the lush valley a watchful shepherd,
wrapped in animal skins,
stands poised on the steep limestone cliffs,
like a bronze faun, silent and still.
The rest of Sardinia, on the other hand, considered Villacidro a cursed land, a “country of shadows and witches,” as an old saying went. Everyone said that the witches up at Villacidro,
is cogas
, covered themselves with long dresses that swept the ground, to hide their tails.
Villacidro was home to a family named Vinci.
There were three Vinci brothers. The oldest, Giovanni, had raped one of his sisters and was shunned by the community. The youngest, Francesco, had a reputation for violence and was known for his ability with a knife—able to kill, skin, gut, and butcher a sheep in record time.
The middle one was named Salvatore. He had married a teenage girl, Barbarina, “Little Barbara,” who had given him a baby, Antonio. One night, Barbarina was found dead in her bed, and her death was ruled a suicide by propane gas. But the rumors in Villacidro about this supposed “suicide” were ugly. There were whispers that someone had removed Antonio from his mother’s bed after the gas bottle had been turned on, thus saving his life—and leaving the mother to die. Most of the townspeople believed Salvatore had murdered her.
The death of Barbarina was the final straw against the Vinci brothers. The town of Villacidro united against them, and they were compelled to leave. One fine day in 1961 they boarded a ferry for the mainland, joining the great emigration from Sardinia. They landed in Tuscany to begin a new life.
On the other side of the sea, another Barbara awaited them.
W
hen the three Vinci brothers arrived at the docks in Livorno, they were not typical Sardinian immigrants to Tuscany, stepping off the ferry, clutching their cardboard suitcases, with dazed looks on their faces, the first time out of their small mountain village with scarcely a lira in their pockets. The Vincis were self-assured, adaptable, and surprisingly sophisticated.
Salvatore and Francesco were the two brothers who would play a major role in the Monster of Florence story. Physically they resembled each other: short and robust, good-looking, with curly, raven-black hair, their restless eyes peering out of the deep fissures in their rough, arrogant faces. Both were blessed with an intelligence far greater than might be expected from their limited background. But despite their resemblance, the two brothers couldn’t have been more different. Salvatore was quiet, reflective, introverted, given to reasoned arguments and discussions that he pursued with a mellifluous, Old World courtesy. He wore a pair of spectacles that gave him the air of a professor of Latin. Francesco, the youngest, was extroverted and cocky, the man of action with a macho swagger, the true
balente
of the two.
Naturally, they hated each other.
Once in Tuscany, Salvatore found work as a bricklayer. Francesco spent most of his time in a bar outside of Florence that was an infamous hangout for Sardinian criminals. It was the unofficial headquarters of three famous Sardinian gangsters who had exported to Tuscany a classic Sardinian business: kidnapping for ransom. These men were partly responsible for the rash of kidnappings that plagued Tuscany in the late sixties and seventies. In one instance, when a ransom was slow in coming, they killed the victim, who was a count, and disposed of the body by feeding it to man-eating pigs—a detail Thomas Harris used to great effect in his novel
Hannibal.
Francesco Vinci, as far as we know, never took part in these kidnappings. He dedicated himself to petty holdups, theft, and another venerable Sardinian tradition, rustling livestock.
Salvatore rented a room in a run-down house occupied by a Sardinian family named Mele, where Stefano Mele lived with his father, siblings, and wife, Barbara Locci. (In Italy, the wife traditionally keeps her maiden name after marriage.) Barbara Locci was slinky and sloe-eyed, with a flattened nose and thick, well-shaped lips. She favored skintight red skirts that showed off a full-bodied figure. When she was a teenager back in Sardinia, her deeply impoverished family had arranged for her to marry Stefano, who came from marginally better circumstances. He was much older than she, and on top of it
uno stupido
, a simpleton. When the Mele family had immigrated to Tuscany, she went along.
Once in Tuscany, the very lively young Barbara set about ruining the Mele family’s honor. She often stole money from her in-laws and went out on the town seeking men, giving them money, and sneaking them back into the Mele home. Stefano was completely unable to control her.
In an effort to put an end to her nocturnal adventures, the patriarch of the Mele family, Stefano’s father, put iron bars on the first-floor windows and tried to keep her locked in the house. It didn’t work. Barbara soon took up with their lodger, Salvatore Vinci.
Barbara’s husband was no obstacle to the affair. He even encouraged it. Salvatore Vinci testified later, “He wasn’t jealous. He was the one who invited me to live in their house when I was looking for a place to live. ‘Come live with us!’ he said. ‘We’ve got a free room.’ ‘What about money?’ ‘Give whatever you can.’ So I moved into Mele’s house. And right away he brought me to meet his wife in bed. Then he urged me to take her to the movies. He said that it didn’t matter to him. Or he would go play cards at his social club and leave me alone with her in the house.”
At one point Stefano’s motorbike was hit by a car and he was laid up in the hospital for several months recuperating. The following year Barbara bore him a son, Natalino, but anyone with the ability to count to nine could see that the paternity of Natalino was in grave doubt.
Fed up with this blight on their honor, the patriarch of the family threw Stefano and his wife out of the house, along with Salvatore. Stefano and Barbara rented a hovel in a working-class suburb west of Florence, where she continued to see Salvatore, with the complete (and indeed enthusiastic) cooperation of her husband.
“What was her attraction?” Salvatore testified later about Barbara. “Well, when she made love she certainly wasn’t a statue. She knew what kind of game it was, and she knew how to play it.”
In the summer of 1968, Barbara left Salvatore and took up with his brother Francesco, the
balente
who played the macho man. With him, Barbara acted the part of a gangster’s moll, going to the Sardinian bar, joking with the tough guys, wiggling her hips. She dressed like a femme fatale. Once she went too far, at least for Francesco’s taste, and he seized her by the hair, dragged her into the street, and ripped off the offending dress, leaving her in the middle of a gaping crowd in only her slip and hosiery.
At the beginning of August 1968, a new lover appeared on the scene: Antonio Lo Bianco, a bricklayer from Sicily, tall, heavily muscled, with black hair. He too was married, but that didn’t stop him from challenging Francesco: “Barbara?” he was reported to have said. “I’ll fuck her in a week.” Which he did.
Now both Salvatore and Francesco had reason to feel angry and humiliated. On top of that, Barbara had just stolen six hundred thousand lire from Stefano, money he had received for the motorbike accident. The Vinci and Mele clan feared she would give it to Lo Bianco. They decided to get it back.
The story of Barbara Locci was reaching its final chapter.
The end came on August 21, 1968. A careful reconstruction of the crime, done years later, revealed what happened. Barbara went with her new lover, Antonio Lo Bianco, to the movies to see the latest Japanese horror flick. She brought along her son, Natalino, six years old. Afterwards the three of them drove off in Lo Bianco’s white Alfa Romeo. The car headed out of town and turned in to a little dirt road past a cemetery. They drove a few hundred feet and stopped next to a stand of cane, a place where they often went to have sex.
The shooter and his accomplices were already hidden in the cane. They waited until Barbara and Lo Bianco began having sex—her on top, straddling him. The left rear window of the car was open—it was a warm night—and the shooter approached the car in silence, reached in the window with the .22 Beretta in hand, and took aim. The gun was poised a few feet above the head of Natalino, who was sleeping in the backseat. From almost point-blank range—there was powder tattooing—he fired seven shots: four into him and three into her. Each round was perfectly placed, penetrating vital organs, and they both died immediately. Natalino woke at the first shot and saw, in front of his eyes, the bright yellow flashes.
In the magazine of the gun remained one more shot. The shooter handed the gun to Stefano Mele, who took it, pointed it at his dead wife’s body with an unsteady hand, and pulled the trigger. The shot, even from that close range, was wild and it struck the woman in the arm. No matter—she was dead and the shot had served its purpose: it had contaminated Stefano’s hand with powder that the paraffin-glove test, then in use, would certainly pick up. Mele, the simpleton, would take the fall for the rest. Someone searched the glove compartment for the missing six hundred thousand lire, but it wasn’t found. (Investigators would find it later, hidden elsewhere in the car.)
The remaining problem was the child, Natalino. He couldn’t be left in the car with his dead mother. After the killing, he saw his father holding the gun and cried out, “That’s the gun that killed Mommy!” Mele threw the gun down and picked up his son, hoisted him to his shoulders, and set off walking. He sang a song to calm him down, “The Sunset.” Two and a half kilometers down the road, Stefano dropped him at the front door of a stranger’s house, rang the doorbell, and disappeared. When the homeowner leaned out the window, he saw a terrified little boy standing in the light of the front door. “Mama and Uncle are dead in the car,” the little boy cried in a high, quavering voice.