When Spezi had had his house searched, the American press could not have cared less about an Italian journalist who had his papers taken away. But now, because an American was the target, the press picked it up. “Trapped in His Own Thriller” ran the front-page headline in the Boston Globe. “Life was fine for Douglas Preston as he worked on his latest book. Then he became part of the story.” The Washington Post ran a piece: “Best-selling thriller author Douglas Preston entangled in probe of Tuscan serial killings.” Stories went out on the AP wire, and news items appeared on CNN and ABC News.
Back in Italy, the papers were also full of my interrogation. A headline in the Corriere della Sera read:
MONSTER CASE: DUEL BETWEEN PUBLIC MINISTER AND AMERICAN WRITER
Serial killings of Florence. Thriller writer indicted for perjury. His colleagues mobilize.
A report went out over ANSA, the Italian news agency: “The prosecutor’s office of Perugia interrogated the American writer Douglas Preston as a material witness, and then indicted him for perjury. Preston and Mario Spezi have written a book on the case, which will be published in April, entitled Dolci Colline di Sangue, which Spezi has called a kind of counterinvestigation to the official one. Two years ago, Spezi was investigated for being an accessory to the murder of Narducci, and subsequently he was accused of participating in the murder.” Other articles contained information that appeared to have been leaked from Mignini’s office, claiming that Spezi and I had tried to plant the infamous .22 Beretta—the Monster’s pistol—at the villa, in order to frame an innocent man.
But the bright light of press scrutiny and publicity, if anything, seemed to make Giuttari and Mignini more aggressive. On February 25, two days after I left Italy, the police raided Spezi’s apartment yet again. He was placed under intense police surveillance, followed whenever he left his house and secretly videotaped. His phones were tapped and he assumed his apartment had also been bugged and his e-mail was being intercepted.
In order to communicate, Spezi and I arranged for the use of various e-mail addresses and borrowed phones. Spezi managed to send an e-mail to me from an Internet café after losing his police tail. In it he proposed a system: when he sent me an e-mail from his regular account saying “salutami a Christine” (“say hi to Christine for me”), it meant he wanted me to call him on a borrowed telephone number the following day at a certain time.
Niccolò regularly sent me news stories about the case, and we spoke often by telephone.
On March 1, Spezi finally took his car to a neighborhood mechanic to fix the broken door and put in a new radio. The mechanic emerged from the car holding a fistful of sophisticated electronic equipment from which dangled red and black wires. It consisted of a black box the size of a cigarette package, with a piece of tape covering the LCDs indicating “On” and “Off,” wired to a second mysterious device, two inches by five, which had been connected to the old radio’s power supply wires.
“I don’t know a lot,” said the mechanic, “but this looks like a microphone and recorder to me.”
He went around and opened the hood. “And that,” he said, pointing to another black cigarette pack tucked in a corner, “must be the GPS.”
Spezi called La Nazione, and they sent a photographer to take pictures of the journalist holding up the electronic equipment in both hands, like a pair of prize fish.
That very day Spezi went to the prosecutor’s office in Florence and filed a legal complaint against persons unknown, seeking damages for the wrecking of his car. He presented himself to a prosecutor in Florence, a man he knew, with the complaint in hand. The man didn’t want to touch it. “This business, Dr. Spezi, is far too delicate,” he said. “Present your complaint in person to the head prosecutor.” So Spezi carried it into the office of the head prosecutor, where, after having to wait, a policeman came and took the complaint, saying the prosecutor would accept it. Spezi heard nothing more about it.
On March 15, 2006, Spezi received a call from his local carabinieri post, inviting him down to the barracks. He was received in a tiny room by an officer who seemed strangely embarrassed. “We’re giving you back your car radio,” the man explained.
Spezi was flabbergasted. “You’re . . . admitting you took it and wrecked my car doing it?”
“No, not us!” He fiddled nervously with his papers. “We were given the job of returning it by the prosecutor’s office of Perugia, by Judge Mignini, who gave the orders to Chief Inspector Giuttari of GIDES to return your radio.”
Spezi with difficulty tried to stifle a laugh. “That’s incredible! You mean they actually put it in an official document that they wrecked my car to steal my radio?”
The carabinieri officer shifted uncomfortably. “Sign here, please.”
“Well,” Spezi said triumphantly, “what if they broke it? I can’t possibly take it back without knowing!”
“Spezi, will you just sign, please?”
Spezi quickly filed a second complaint for damages, this time against Mignini and Giuttari, now that they had (unaccountably) provided him with the very proof he needed.
In that same month, March 2006, Giuttari’s new book on the Monster of Florence was published by RCS Libri, The Monster: Anatomy of an Investigation, and it became a huge best-seller. In the book, Giuttari took several shots at Spezi, accusing him of being an accessory to Narducci’s murder and darkly hinting that he was involved in some way in the Monster killings.
Spezi promptly filed a civil lawsuit against the chief inspector for libeling him in the book and for violating the laws of judicial secrecy relating to the Monster case. The lawsuit was filed in Milan, where Giuttari’s book was published by Rizzoli, another imprint of our publisher, RCS Libri. (In Italy libel suits must be filed in the place of publication.) It asked for the seizure and destruction of all copies of Giuttari’s book. “It is no pleasure for a writer to call for the seizure of a book,” Spezi wrote, “but this is the only remedy that will limit the damage to my reputation.”
Spezi wrote most of the lawsuit himself, every word perfectly pitched to infuriate his foe:
For more than a year, I have been the victim not just of half-baked police work, but of what could be said to be authentic violations of civil rights. This phenomenon—which pertains not just to me, but to many others—brings to mind the most dysfunctional societies, such as one might expect to find in Asia or Africa.
Mr. Michele Giuttari, a functionary of the State Police, is the inventor and indefatigable promoter of a theory, according to which the crimes of the so-called Monster of Florence are the work of a mysterious satanic, esoteric, and magical sect, an organized “group” of upper-middle-class professionals (bureaucrats, police and carabinieri, magistrates—and in their service, writers and journalists) who commissioned individuals from the very poorest levels of society to commit serial killings of pairs of lovers, paying handsomely to gain possession of female anatomical parts with the goal of using them in certain inscrutable, undetermined, and otherwise improbable “rites.”
According to the fantastic conjectures of this self-described brilliant and diligent investigator, this criminal assembly of seemingly upstanding persons dedicated itself to orgies, sadomasochism, pedophilia, and other vile abominations.
Spezi then proceeded to deliver an uppercut to Giuttari’s soft underbelly—his literary talent. In the lawsuit, Spezi quoted extract after extract from Giuttari’s book, savaging his logic, ridiculing his theories, and mocking his writing ability.
The suit was dated March 23 and filed a week later, on March 30, 2006.
CHAPTER 49
Back in America, I watched the gathering storm from afar. Spezi and I had received a curt e-mail from our editor at RCS Libri, who was seriously alarmed at what was happening. She was terrified that the publishing house would be dragged into a legal mess, and she was particularly incensed that I had given her telephone number to the reporter for the Boston Globe, who had called and asked her to comment. “I must te
ll you,” she wrote me and Mario, “that this call seriously annoyed me. . . . Right or wrong, personal disputes have nothing to do with me nor do they interest me. . . . I pray both of you to keep RCS out of any eventual legal disputes connected to your personal business.”
Meanwhile, curious to find out more about this Gabriella Carlizzi and her website, on a whim I went online and checked it out. What I read infuriated me. Carlizzi had posted pages of personal information on me. With the diligence of a rat collecting its winter store of seeds, she had gathered bits and pieces of information about me from all over the Web, managed to find someone to translate it all into Italian (she herself was monolingual), and had mixed it all together with out-of-context excerpts from my novels—usually descriptions of people being murdered. She managed to dig up public remarks I had made in Italy that I had no idea were even being taped, and she made particular use of a lame joke I had told at a book presentation, that had Mario Spezi decided not to write about crime, he would have made a marvelous criminal himself. To this brew she added her own sinister insinuations, creepy asides, and animadversions. The end result was a toxic portrait of me as a mentally disturbed person who wrote novels full of gratuitous violence that toadied to the basest human instincts.
That was bad enough. But what really enraged me the most was to see my wife’s and children’s names, taken from my biography, posted next to pictures of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the burning Twin Towers.
I fired off an outraged e-mail to Carlizzi, demanding that my wife’s and children’s names be removed from her website.
Her response to my e-mail was unexpectedly mild, even ingratiating. She apologized and promised to take down the names, which she promptly did.
My e-mail had achieved the results I’d hoped, but now Carlizzi had my e-mail address. She wrote me back: “Even if brief, our little exchange of ideas, touching as they do upon spheres both delicate and in a certain sense intimate, it seems silly to address each other formally using ‘lei.’ Souls, when they speak from the heart, speak to each other using ‘tu.’ Would it displease you, Douglas, if we used the ‘tu’ form with each other?”
I should have known better than to reply to that one. But I did.
A flood of e-mails from Carlizzi followed, each one running to many pages, written in an Italian so contorted, so full of smarmy confidences and loopy conspiracy logic that they were almost impossible to decipher. Decipher them I did.
Gabriella Carlizzi knew the truth about the Monster of Florence, and she desperately wanted to share it with me.
Hi Douglas, did you get my long e-mail? Are you perhaps frightened of the fact that I asked you to reserve the front page of The New Yorker to reveal the name and the face of the Monster of Florence? . . . I will write on my website a piece, declaring my invitation to you to reserve this prestigious page, and I will notify The New Yorker as well . . .
Re: I PRAY YOU . . . YOU MUST BELIEVE ME . . . IF ONLY YOU AND YOUR WIFE COULD LOOK INTO MY EYES . . .
Dearest Douglas,
. . . Know that even while I write you, I am thinking that I am speaking not just to you, but also to your wife, and to those you love and that I know well how much they mean to your life as a man, beyond that of a journalist and a writer, but simply a man, a friend, a father. . . . I have embarked on this battle, this search for the truth, I do it only to maintain a promise I made to the Good Lord and to my Spiritual Father, a famous Exorcist, Father Gabriele . . . I made this promise, Douglas, as a way of thanking the Lord for the miracle of my own son Fulvio, who after only a quarter of a day of life died, and while in the hospital, when they were dressing him for his coffin, I telephoned to Father Gabriele for a blessing, and the Father answered me, “Don’t pay it any mind my daughter, your son will live longer than Methuselah.” After a few instants, a hundred doctors in the hospital of San Giovanni in Rome cried out, “But it is a miracle, the baby is revived.” Back then I didn’t have the Faith I have now, but with regard to the gift God gave to me, in some way, sooner or later, I would have to pay him back. . . . Dear Douglas, I have the photographs of every crime, when the victims became aware of the Monster, and screamed, their scream was photographed by a minicamera given by the secret service. . . .
. . . And I found, dear Douglas, in Japan, a document that I think is useful, which would prevent the Monster from killing someone close to you. I am undertaking investigations of this document. . . .
Look at the article I have published on my site, where I have written that truly I invite you to come to see me, and to prepare the first page of The New Yorker . . . I wrote that only to convince you that I am not joking.
Alarmed by these references to The New Yorker and this business of the Monster killing “someone close” to me, which would appear from the creepy references to be my wife, I went back to Carlizzi’s site and discovered she had added a page, in which she reproduced the cover of my novel Brimstone next to the cover of a novel Spezi had written, Il Passo Dell’Orco.
Gabriella [read the website] has not wasted any time and has invited Preston to come visit her and gaze with his own eyes on the Monster and his victims. She puts it in black and white and responds to the e-mail of Preston: “Save the front page of The New Yorker and come to me, I will give you the scoop that you’ve been waiting for for a long time.” How will Douglas react? Will he accept the invitation or suffer the prohibition of an Italian friend? Certainly The New Yorker will not let this scoop slip away. . . .
And above all—she continues—I want to serenely ask Douglas Preston: “You, what would happen to you if one day proof comes in that ‘your’ Monster is a blunder, while the real Monster is another. . . . You would discover that he is very close to you, that you worked with him, you became friends with him, you held him in esteem as a professional, and that never did you perceive that inside such a person so cultivated, so sensitive, so full of goodwill, there was a labyrinth in which the Beast had hidden itself since completing its Great Work of Death . . . a Monster who is respected, who knows how to fool everyone. . . . Wouldn’t that be for you, dear Preston, the most upsetting experience of your life? Then you surely could write the most unique thriller in the world, and perhaps, with the royalties you receive, even buy The New Yorker.
So that was it. Spezi was the Monster. The flood of crazy e-mails came in like the tide at full moon, hitting my inbox multiple times during the course of each day. In them Carlizzi elaborated on her theories and urged and begged me to come to Florence. She hinted that she had a special relationship with the public minister, and that if I came to Italy she could guarantee I would not be arrested. She would, in fact, see to it that the charges against me were dropped.
. . . Florence has always been under orders to protect the true Monster, and these orders come from on high, because the Monster could at any time reveal horrible things regarding the pedophilia of illustrious magistrates, who because of this threat of blackmail will never capture him. Dear Douglas, you, unknowingly, are being used, in Italy, by the Monster, who uses as a cover illustrious names. . . . I pray you, Douglas, come to me immediately even with your wife, or give me your telephone number, I have sent you mine, we will consult with each other . . . don’t say anything to Spezi. . . . I will explain all. . . . I pray to God that you and your wife will believe me . . . I can show you everything. . . .
•
One day, if you would care to write my biography, you will realize that you can leap beyond fantasy and fiction, with a true story.
•
You can well imagine that the investigation marches along even at night and on holidays. For this I pray you CONTACT ME WITH THE GREATEST URGENCY! . . . Remember: this is to be treated with the maximum secrecy.
•
Dear Douglas, I still haven’t received a response to my e-mails: is there a problem? I pray you, let me know, I am worried and I want to understand what to do to bring clarity.
I soon stopped reading all but the subject lines:
/>
Re: WHERE ARE YOU?
Re: LET US PRAY FOR MARIO SPEZI.
Re: NOW DO YOU BELIEVE ME?
Re: URGENTISSIMO URGENTISSIMO
And finally, forty-one e-mails later:
Re: BUT WHAT IN THE WORLD HAS HAPPENED TO YOU?
The e-mail barrage left me reeling, not from the sheer madness of it, but from the fact that the public minister of Perugia and a chief inspector of police took a person like this seriously. And yet, as Carlizzi herself claimed, and as Spezi’s later investigative work would show, this woman was the key witness who had convinced Judge Mignini and Chief Inspector Giuttari that the death of Narducci was connected—through a satanic sect—to the crimes of the Monster of Florence. It was Carlizzi who directed the public minister’s suspicions to Spezi and who first claimed he was involved in the so-called murder of Narducci. (Spezi was later able to show that entire paragraphs in legal documents produced by the public minister’s office closely paralleled the paranoid ramblings that Carlizzi had earlier posted at her website. Carlizzi, it might seem, had a Rasputin-like influence over Mignini.)
Even more incredibly, Gabriella Carlizzi had somehow managed to become an “expert” in the Monster case. Around the same time she was filling my inbox with e-mails, she was much sought after by magazines and newspapers in Italy to comment on the Monster investigation, and quoted at length as a reliable expert. She appeared on some of the most noted talk shows in Italy, where she was treated as a serious and thoughtful person.
The Monster of Florence Page 27
