The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  In the middle of this bombardment, I mentioned to Mario that I’d been exchanging e-mails with Carlizzi. He chided me. “Doug, you may find it amusing, but you’re playing with fire. She can do great harm. For God’s sake, stay away from her.”

  Carlizzi, for all her craziness, seemed to have excellent sources of information. I had been shocked at what she’d managed to dig up on me. Sometimes, she seemed almost prescient in her predications about the case, so much so that Spezi and I wondered if she might not have an inside source in the public minister’s office.

  At the end of March, Carlizzi had some special news to announce on her site: the arrest of Mario Spezi was imminent.

  CHAPTER 50

  The call came on Friday, April 7, 2006. Count Niccolò’s voice boomed over the transatlantic line. “They’ve just arrested Spezi,” he said. “Giuttari’s men came to his house, lured him outside, and bundled him in a car. I don’t know any more than that. The news is just breaking.”

  I could hardly speak. I never really believed it would go this far. I croaked out a stupid question. “Arrested? What for?”

  “You know very well what for. For several years now, he has made Giuttari, a Sicilian, look like an arrant fool in front of the entire nation. No Italian could tolerate that! And I have to say, dear Douglas, that Mario has a wickedly sharp pen. It’s all about face, something you Anglo-Saxons will never understand.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  Niccolò drew a long breath. “This time they have gone too far. Giuttari and Mignini have stepped over the line. This is too much. Italy will be embarrassed before the world, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Giuttari will take the fall. As for Mignini, the judiciary will close ranks and wash their dirty linen behind closed doors. Giuttari’s comeuppance may very well come at him from an entirely different direction, but he is going down—mark my words.”

  “But what will happen to Mario?”

  “He will, unfortunately, spend some time in prison.”

  “I hope to God it won’t be long.”

  “I will find out all I can and call you back.”

  I had a sudden thought. “Niccolò, you should be careful. You’re the perfect candidate for this satanic sect yourself . . . a count from one of the oldest families of Florence.”

  Niccolò laughed heartily. “The idea has already crossed my mind.” He broke out in a singsong Italian, as if reciting a nursery rhyme, speaking not to me, but to a hypothetical person wiretapping our telephone conversation.

  Brigadiere Cuccurullo,

  Mi raccomando, segni tutto!

  Brigadier Cuccurullo,

  Be sure to record everything!

  “I always feel so dreadfully sorry for the poor fellow who has to listen to these calls. Mi sente, Brigadiere Gennaro Cuccurullo? Mi dispiace per lei! Segni tutto!” (“Are you listening, Brigadier Gennaro Cuccurullo? I am sorry for you! Record everything!”)

  “Do you really think your phone is being tapped?” I asked.

  “Bah! This is Italy. They’re probably tapping the pope’s telephones.”

  There was no answer at Spezi’s house. I went online to look for news. The story was just breaking on ANSA, the Italian news agency, and Reuters:

  MONSTER OF FLORENCE: JOURNALIST SPEZI ARRESTED FOR OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

  Our book was to be published in twelve days. I was seized with fear that this was a prelude to stopping publication of the book, or that our publisher would get cold feet and withdraw it. I called our editor at Sonzogno. She was already in a meeting about the situation and unavailable, but I spoke to her later. She was rattled by Spezi’s arrest—it isn’t often that one of your best-selling authors orders the arrest of another one—and she was angry at me and Spezi. Her view was that Spezi, in pursuing a “personal” vendetta against Giuttari, had unnecessarily provoked the chief inspector, possibly dragging RCS Libri into an ugly legal mess. I rather hotly pointed out that Spezi and I were pursuing our legitimate rights as journalists seeking the truth, and that we had broken no laws nor done anything unethical. She seemed, to my surprise, to be somewhat skeptical of that last assertion. It was an attitude I would find all too prevalent among Italians.

  News from the meeting, at least, was encouraging. RCS Libri had made a decision to forge ahead with publication of our book. More than that, the house would push the book’s distribution up by a week to get it into the bookstores quickly. As part of this effort, RCS had ordered the release of the book from their warehouses as soon as possible. Once out of the warehouse, it would be far more difficult for the police to seize the print run, since the books would be scattered across Italy in thousands of bookstores.

  I finally got hold of Myriam Spezi. She was holding up, but barely. “They tricked him into coming down to the gate,” she said. “He was in slippers, he had nothing with him, not even his wallet. They refused to show a warrant. They threatened him and forced him in a car and took him away.” They drove him first to GIDES’s headquarters in the Il Magnifico building for an interrogation and then spirited him away, sirens blaring, to the grim Capanne prison in Perugia.

  The evening news in Italy carried the story. Flashing pictures of Spezi, the Monster’s murder scenes, the victims, and pictures of Giuttari and Mignini, the announcer intoned, “Mario Spezi, the writer and longtime chronicler of the Monster of Florence case, was arrested with the ex-convict Luigi Ruocco, accused of having obstructed the investigation into the murder of Francesco Narducci . . . in order to cover up the doctor’s role in the Monster of Florence murders. The public minister of Perugia . . . hypothesizes that the two tried to plant false evidence at Villa Bibbiani in Capraia, including objects and documents, as a way to force the reopening of the Sardinian investigation, closed in the nineties. Their motive was to divert attention from the investigations linking Mario Spezi and the pharmacist of San Casciano, Francesco Calamandrei, with the murder of Francesco Narducci . . .”

  And then a video of me appeared on the television, taken as I walked out of Mignini’s office after the interrogation.

  “For the same alleged crime,” the announcer said, “two other people are under investigation, an ex–inspector of police and the American writer Douglas Preston, who with Mario Spezi has just written a book on the Monster of Florence.”

  Among the many calls I received, one came from the State Department. A pleasant woman informed me that the American embassy in Rome had made inquiries about my status to the public minister of Perugia. The embassy could confirm that I was indeed indagato—that is, a person officially suspected of committing a crime.

  “Did you ask what the evidence was against me?”

  “We don’t get into the details of cases. All we can do is clarify your status.”

  “My status was already clear to me, thank you very much, it’s in every paper in Italy!”

  The woman cleared her throat and asked if I had engaged a lawyer in Italy.

  “Lawyers cost money,” I muttered.

  “Mr. Preston,” she said, in a not unkindly tone of voice, “this is a very serious matter. It isn’t going to go away. It’s only going to get worse, and even with a lawyer it could drag on for years. You can’t let it fester. You’ve got to spend the money and hire a lawyer. I’ll have our embassy in Rome e-mail you their list. We can’t recommend any particular one, unfortunately, because—”

  “I know,” I said. “You’re not in the business of rating Italian lawyers.”

  At the end of the conversation, she asked, tentatively, “You aren’t, by any chance, planning a return to Italy in the near future?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m so glad to hear that.” The relief in her voice was palpable. “We certainly wouldn’t want the, ah, problem of dealing with your arrest.”

  The list arrived. It was mostly lawyers who dealt in child custody cases, real estate transactions, and contract law. Only a handful dealt in criminal matters.

  I called a lawyer on the
list at random and spoke to him in Rome. He’d been reading the papers and already knew of the case. He was very glad to hear from me. I had reached the right person. He would interrupt his important work to take the case, and enlist as a partner one of the preeminent lawyers in Italy, whose name would be well known and respected by the public minister of Perugia. The very hiring of such an important man would go halfway toward settling my case—that was how things worked in Italy. By hiring him, I would show the public minister that I was a uomo serio, a man not to be trifled with. When I timidly inquired about the fee, he said it would take a mere twenty-five thousand euros, as a retainer, to get the ball rolling—and that low, low fee (practically pro bono) was only possible because of the high profile of the case and its implications for freedom of the press. He would be glad to e-mail me the fund-wiring instructions, but I had to act that very day because this most-important-lawyer-in-Italy’s schedule was filling up . . .

  I went to the next lawyer on the list, and then the next. I finally found one who would take my case for about six thousand euros and who actually sounded like a lawyer, not a used-car salesman.

  Before Mario’s arrest, we would later learn, Villa Bibbiani in Capraia and its grounds were searched by the men of GIDES, looking for the gun, objects, boxes, or documents we were supposed to have planted. Nothing was found. To the ever resourceful Giuttari, this was not at all a problem. He had acted so promptly, he said, that we hadn’t time to carry out our nefarious plot—he had stopped it dead in its tracks.

  CHAPTER 51

  On April 7, the day of his arrest, Spezi finally arrived at Capanne prison, twenty kilometers outside Perugia. He was hustled into the prison grounds and brought to a room with nothing but a blanket spread on the cement floor, a table, a chair, and a cardboard box.

  His guards told him to empty his pockets. Spezi did so. They told him to take off his watch and the crucifix he wore around his neck. Then one of them yelled at him to strip.

  Spezi took off his sweater, shirt, and undershirt, and shoes. And waited.

  “Everything. If your feet are cold, stand on the blanket.”

  Spezi stripped until he was completely naked.

  “Bend over three times,” the head guard ordered him.

  Spezi wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “Do like this,” said another, demonstrating a crouch. “All the way to the ground. Three times. And push.”

  After a degrading search, he was told to dress himself in the prison garb he would find in the cardboard box. The guards allowed him a single pack of cigarettes. They filled out some forms and ushered him to a cold cell. One of the guards opened the door and Spezi went in. Behind him, he heard the four loud clashings of steel as the cell door was slammed shut and barred, and the lock turned.

  His dinner that night was bread and water.

  The next morning, April 8, Spezi was allowed to meet with one of his lawyers, who had arrived at the prison early. Later, he would supposedly be allowed a short visit with his wife. The guards escorted him into a room where he found his lawyer seated at a table, a stack of files in front of him. They had barely exchanged greetings when a new guard rushed in with a big smile on his pockmarked face.

  “This meeting is canceled. Orders of the prosecutor’s office. Counsel, if you don’t mind—?”

  Spezi barely had the time to tell his lawyer to reassure his wife that he was well, before he was hauled back and locked up in isolation.

  For five days, Spezi wouldn’t know why he had been suddenly denied a lawyer and placed in isolation. The rest of Italy learned the next morning. The day of Spezi’s arrest, Public Minister Mignini had asked the examining magistrate in Spezi’s case, Judge Marina De Robertis, to invoke a law normally used only against dangerous terrorists and Mafia kingpins who pose an imminent threat to the state. Spezi would be denied access to his lawyers and kept in isolation. The purpose of the law was to prevent a violent criminal from ordering the killing or intimidation of witnesses through his lawyers or visitors. Now it was applied against the extremely dangerous journalist Mario Spezi. The press noted that Spezi’s treatment in prison was even harsher than that meted out to Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia boss of bosses, captured near Corleone, Sicily, four days after Spezi was arrested.

  For five days, nobody had any idea of what had happened to Spezi, where he was, or what they might be doing to him. His judicial disappearance caused exquisite psychological anguish to all of his friends and family. The authorities refused to release any information about him, his state of health, or the conditions of his imprisonment. Spezi simply vanished into the black maw of Capanne prison.

  CHAPTER 52

  Back in America, I recalled Niccolò’s words—that Italy would be ashamed before the world. I was determined to make that happen. I hoped to cause an uproar in America that would embarrass the Italian state and force it to remedy this miscarriage of justice.

  I called every organization I knew that was concerned with freedom of the press. I wrote an appeal and broadcast it on the Web. It concluded, “I ask all of you, please, for the love of truth and freedom of the press, come to Spezi’s aid. This should not be happening in the beautiful and civilized country that I love, the country that gave the world the Renaissance.” The appeal included the names, addresses, and e-mail addresses of the prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, the minister of the interior, and the minister of justice. The appeal was picked up and published at many websites, translated into Italian and Japanese, and written about by various bloggers.

  The Boston branch of PEN organized an effective letter-writing campaign. A novelist friend of mine, David Morrell (the creator of Rambo), wrote a letter of protest to the Italian government, as did many other well-known writers who belonged to International Thriller Writers (ITW), an organization I helped found. Many of these writers were best-selling authors in Italy, too, and their names carried weight. I received an assignment from the Atlantic Monthly to write a story about the Monster case and Spezi’s arrest.

  The worst was not knowing. Spezi’s disappearance created a void filled with grim speculations and terrible rumors. Spezi was at the mercy of the public minister of Perugia, a man of great power, and Chief Inspector Giuttari, whom the newspapers had dubbed il superpoliziotto, the supercop, because he operated with an apparent lack of oversight. For those five silent days I woke up thinking of Spezi in prison, not knowing what they might be doing to him, and it drove me crazy. We all have a psychological breaking point and I wondered whether they would find Spezi’s—because breaking him was surely their plan.

  Every morning I would sit in my hut in the Maine woods, having made every call I could think of, shaking with frustration, feeling powerless while waiting for return phone calls, waiting for the organizations I had contacted to take some kind of action.

  The managing editor of The New Yorker had put me in touch with Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York–based organization. This organization, above all others, understood the urgency of the situation and leapt into action. CPJ immediately launched an independent investigation of the Spezi case in Italy, directed by Nina Ognianova, program coordinator for Europe, interviewing journalists, police, judges, and colleagues of Spezi.

  In the early days following Spezi’s arrest, most of the major daily newspapers in Italy—especially in Tuscany and Umbria, and particularly Mario’s home paper, La Nazione—shied away from covering the full story. They reported Spezi’s arrest and the charges against him, but they treated it as a simple crime story. Most remained silent on the larger questions of freedom of the press raised by the arrest. There were almost no protests. Few journalists commented on one of the most insidious charges against Spezi, that of “obstructing an official investigation by means of the press.” (Inside La Nazione, we would learn later, a number of Spezi colleagues were fighting with the paper’s management over the newspaper’s lily-livered coverage.)

  In my conve
rsations with Italian friends and journalists, I was surprised to discover that quite a few suspected that at least some of the accusations were true. Perhaps, some of my Italian colleagues demurred, I didn’t understand Italy well after all, as this was the sort of thing Italian journalists did all the time. They viewed my outrage as naïve and a bit gauche. To be outraged is to be earnest, to be sincere—and to be a dupe. Some Italians were quick to strike the pose of the world-weary cynic who takes nothing at face value and who is far too clever to be taken in by Spezi’s and my protestations of innocence.

  “Ah!” said Count Niccolò in one of our frequent conversations. “Of course Spezi and you were up to no good at that villa! Dietrologia insists that it be so. Only a naïf would believe that you two journalists went to the villa ‘just to have a look.’ The police wouldn’t have arrested Spezi for no reason! You see, Douglas, an Italian must always appear to be furbo. You don’t have an English equivalent for that marvelous word. It means a person who is wily and cunning, who knows which way the wind is blowing, who can fool you but never be fooled himself. Everyone in Italy wants to believe the worst of others so they don’t end up looking gullible. Above all, they want to be seen as furbo.”

  I had trouble, as an American, appreciating the climate of fear and intimidation in Italy surrounding the issue. True freedom of the press does not exist in Italy, especially since any public official can ask that criminal charges be lodged against a journalist for “diffamazione a mezzo stampa”—defamation by means of the press.