Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

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  Aldo Icardi immediately called the charges “absurd, vicious, and completely untrue.” He said that if the Italian partisans had confessed to the murder of Holohan, they were simply trying to shift the blame to him and Lo Dolce. “The vagaries and complexities of Italian politics are such that all kinds of trumped-up charges could be made against us,” he said. Rather than being tried by a magazine, radio, and press, “contrary to every concept of due process of law and freedom that we have fought with blood to preserve,” Icardi said he would accept a trial by jury “at the drop of the hat.” He even offered to reenlist to face a military tribunal. But he vowed to fight any attempts to extradite him to Italy, where he would not stand a chance for a fair trial due to the nature of his espionage activities during the war. “I am the victim of enemies in Italy who are striking back at me because they did not understand the work we were doing or were disgruntled in failing to get arms we were not able to supply. I have been caught in the cross-current of Italian politics. These enemies are trying to Shanghai me into standing trial in a country where I served as a spy for the Allies.”12

  Carl Lo Dolce came out in public as well after the Rochester Police Department released to the press his eight-page confession to the murder of Holohan from a year ago. In a press conference in Rochester on August 17 with his wife and lawyers by his side, Lo Dolce admitted that the confession he signed a year earlier was in his own handwriting. But, he added, “I refute and repudiate the confession as it appeared in the press. It is incomplete and the facts will prove that I am completely innocent of those charges. There is no doubt in my mind that when the proper authorities reveal the complete and true story, the disclosures will prove that I am innocent.”13

  Other people came to the defense of Icardi and Lo Dolce. Arthur P. Ciarmicoli, the OG technical sergeant who had been a member of the original Chrysler mission told reporters, “As far as Lo Dolce and the lieutenant [Icardi] murdering anyone, I don’t believe it. As for the motive—money—that’s silly. As far as saying there was any bad feeling between Icardi and Holohan, that is not fair. We all didn’t particularly like the major. He was older than the rest of us and was content to sit back and take things easy. He endangered our lives on several occasions with his attitude.”14

  General Donovan spoke to reporters from his law office at 2 Wall Street and said that the sum Holohan carried with him was closer to $14,000 and not the $100,000 reported by the Pentagon and in the press. He praised Holohan as a “very upstanding, serious, brave guy,” assigned to the difficult mission of working with pro- and anti-Communist partisans, “whichever could at a given time deliver a more effective blow at the Germans.”15

  Vincenzo Moscatelli, the wartime Communist partisan leader, who in 1951 was a member of the parliament in Italy, spoke to the press there and described his dealings with Major Holohan. “The major came to me accompanied by Icardi and asked the number of my forces,” he said. “Because of his attitude toward us, I did not give him detailed information. What I firmly told him was this: ‘Send us more arms. For any information about my men, apply to the British missions, who know us better than you do.’” He said that propaganda from Christian Democratic partisan groups had caused Holohan to take an anti-Communist attitude. When Icardi took command of the OSS mission after Holohan’s disappearance, Moscatelli said, his Communist partisans received a larger proportion of the arms dropped.16

  By some strange coincidence, as the story of Holohan’s murder behind enemy lines made the headlines around the country, his body arrived on August 20, 1951, at the Brooklyn Army Base on a transport ship from Trieste. It was in a bronze casket encased in a wooden crate draped with the American flag. A requiem mass for Major Holohan was celebrated at the Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on August 27. General Donovan, Colonel Suhlig, and other former military associates, friends, and family members attended the funeral service. A military honor guard accompanied the funeral cortege after the service to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Pleasantville, New York. Major Holohan was buried next to his parents, according to his wishes, with full military honors including the traditional three volleys that the honor guard fired over the grave.17

  * * *

  On the same day that Holohan’s burial ceremony was held in New York, magistrate Carlo Rama in Italy finalized the investigation on the circumstances of the major’s death. He named Aldo Icardi, Carl Lo Dolce, and the two Italian ex-partisans, Gualtiero Tozzini and Giuseppe Manini, as his murderers. He issued warrants for the arrests of Icardi and Lo Dolce, which was the first step for their extradition to Italy to face trial under the terms of an 1868 treaty between Italy and the United States. On January 1952, the Italian government submitted a formal extradition request to the State Department, together with over one hundred pages of evidence, including the affidavits from Manini and Tozzini confessing to participating in the murder. After the State Department completed the review of the request, Secretary Dean Acheson signed orders for the arrests of Icardi and Lo Dolce for being fugitives from the justice of Italy. These orders were forwarded to the Italian General Consul in New York on January 31, 1952.18

  With these orders in hand, Italian consular officers tried for several months to get federal courts in Pennsylvania and New York to issue warrants for the arrests of Icardi and Lo Dolce. Their efforts were frustrated at every turn on the grounds that the 1868 extradition treaty between the United States and Italy was not in force in December 1944 because the Italian government did not have physical control and authority over northern Italy. Italy was still the enemy of the United States at the time and courts had repeatedly upheld the immunity of US military forces in enemy territory from the laws and tribunals of the occupied hostile country.19

  At the end of August 1951, Italian authorities abandoned efforts to extradite Icardi and Lo Dolce. Lo Dolce, who at the time was undergoing treatment for his back injuries at the Buffalo Veterans Hospital, said when hearing the news that “this is the most beautiful day of my life.” Icardi sent him a telegram that said, “Our hour approaches to tell the world we served the country well and honorably.” He told the Associated Press in Pittsburgh, “I’ve been taking a beating for over a year and I’m going to start punching back. I am going to take my story to the American people in the form of a book which I am completing.”20 The book, Aldo Icardi, An American Spy, came out in 1954 and provides Icardi’s version of the events and his rebuttal to the accusations levied against him and Lo Dolce in the Holohan case.

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  When the Italian government’s efforts to extradite Icardi or Lo Dolce failed, the judicial authorities there moved to try them in absentia for the robbery and murder of Major Holohan. According to the indictment, Icardi was the mastermind of the plot, Lo Dolce pulled the trigger, and three Italians—Aminta Migliari, Gualtiero Tozzini, and Giuseppe Manini—were accessories to murder and had assisted in getting rid of the major’s corpse.

  The trial began on October 19, 1953. At 8:45 a.m., a closed van escorted by two Carabinieri trucks stopped at the steps of the Court of Assizes of Novara. The first to come out was Migliari, in his early thirties, extremely pale, very thin, with a bony face and myopic eyes. He was stunned for a moment by the flashes of dozens of cameras but then lowered his head and proceeded up the stairs into the building. Tozzini and Manini followed, both in their forties. Handcuffed and chained together, they ignored the photographers but greeted friends and family waiting for them in the steps of the courthouse. At 9:30 a.m., the Carabinieri brought the defendants into a cage inside the courtroom, which was packed with ex-partisans, journalists, lawyers, and other members of the public. Vincenzo Moscatelli, the ex-partisan leader of the area and Communist member of the Italian parliament, set the mood of the audience by shouting, “Let the Italians go free. They were only obeying American orders. They couldn’t do otherwise.” Then, he called out to the three defendants, “The comrades won’t forget you.”21

  A few minutes after 9:30, the eight-mem
ber court presided by Judge Francesco Sicher entered the room and the trial began. After the opening formalities, one of the court-appointed lawyers for Icardi and Lo Dolce rose. Reading from a letter that Icardi had sent him, he argued that based on international law the Italian judicial system did not have jurisdiction to try two foreign military personnel accused of murdering a co-national. The court took a brief recess and when it returned, it rejected the argument.

  The next order of business was to interrogate a minor defendant in the case, a farmer by the name of Edoardo Maulini, who three years earlier had purchased from Tozzini the pistol that had been used to kill Holohan. Now, he stood accused of illegal possession of a firearm. Under interrogation from Sicher, he quickly admitted his culpability. Sicher asked him to come back in fifteen days for sentencing.

  Finally, the public prosecutor came to the point of reading the charges against the two American fugitives and three Italian detainees. They were accused of “homicide with multiple aggravating circumstances by having caused the death—through poison put in the soup followed by two revolver shots while he was sleeping—of major William Holohan, head of the Chrysler mission, for the purpose of robbing him of three thousand dollars.”22

  In the afternoon, Judge Sicher began interrogating Gualtiero Tozzini. “Lieutenant Icardi hated Major Holohan because of his severity, but also because the major had displaced him in the command of the mission,” Tozzini said. “His feelings were based on loathing of discipline, jealousy, and perhaps also the desire to take the money.”23 After Tozzini, Judge Sicher interrogated Manini. He repeated a similar story and admitted to having procured the potassium cyanide used to poison the major, under orders from Icardi.

  The next day, Migliari came in front of the judge to answer questions. When asked when he had begun planning with Icardi to take out the major, Migliari said, “I never heard of such a thing. Lieutenant Icardi only told me he would like to have some men dressed as Fascists capture his superior and send him to Switzerland.” Migliari maintained that he had not known what had happened to Holohan and had been the first one to doubt the story of an ambush in the area.

  The most painful part of the deposition for Migliari was when he had to explain the large sums of money he had accumulated during the war. He said that the Americans gave him one hundred thousand lire ($1,000) per month for him and his network of informants. Once, Major Holohan had given him one and a half million lire ($15,000) to reward him for exchanging three and a half kilograms of gold Louis d’Or coins. With this money, he founded a commercial venture in November 1944, in partnership with Icardi.24

  After the court finished interrogating the defendants, the prosecutor began presenting his witnesses. The first one on the list was the Communist leader Moscatelli who told the judge about his meeting with Holohan at the end of November 1944. “Holohan as an officer was always collected, courageous but prudent,” Moscatelli told the judge. “Whereas Icardi was a dynamic type, cordial, effusive. Their diverse mindset was the foundation for their divisions. In my opinion, Icardi freed himself from Holohan to take over command. But perhaps he acted in obedience of an order from his superiors. I know that the Allied command ignored the reports against him. Not only that, but they nominated him as chief of mission and promoted him to captain.”25

  A parade of prosecution witnesses followed Moscatelli over the next three days, including local villagers who had interacted with the mission, the priests who had sheltered them, and former partisans. Everyone painted Icardi as the diabolic schemer driven by greed and ambition to kill his superior. Lo Dolce was the spineless dimwit who followed the lieutenant blindly. Tozzini and Manini were the poor souls who had no choice but to follow Icardi’s orders if they did not want to suffer the same fate as the major. And Migliari was the complete innocent dragged into the story by confused witnesses who retracted in court depositions they had made during the investigation phase.

  By the end of the day on October 23, the attorneys for the defense told Judge Sicher it was superfluous to call their own witnesses given the favorable, often laudatory depositions that the prosecution witnesses had given toward the accused. Judge Sicher agreed. “I have never seen the Carabinieri so patient and prosecution witnesses so generous with the accused as in these proceedings,” he said at the end of the session. Then he postponed the trial for several days to give the prosecution and the defense time to prepare the closing arguments.26

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  When the trial resumed on October 28, the public prosecutor rose for his closing arguments. In the hushed courtroom he stared for a moment at the three defendants, then exclaimed, “Anyone would be perplexed with these proceedings: three Italians are in the cage, two Americans are free and undisturbed in their country despite being clearly responsible for killing a senior officer, a fellow American. Feelings of pity and national solidarity, even of Italian nationalism, play in favor of Migliari, Manini, and Tozzini. All the witnesses I brought in this courtroom turned their back to me. But I, for the love of justice, will continue to support the case.” The prosecutor continued to speak for the rest of the day, summarizing the case and calling in the end for the judges to give life sentences to the two Americans, twenty-four years in prison to Migliari, and twenty-two years in prison each for Tozzini and Manini.27

  The following day, October 30, it was the turn of the defense layers to make their case on behalf of their clients. There were nine lawyers assigned to the defense and each one of them could not pass the opportunity to display their oratory skills in the courtroom. The lawyers for Lo Dolce, Icardi, and Tozzini talked for the entire day on the October 30, those for Migliari took October 31, the lawyers for Manini spoke for the whole day on November 3, and those for Icardi and Migliari returned for another full-day session on November 5. The lawyers asked the court to absolve the three Italian defendants. “Open wide the prison gates for poor Manini and Tozzini. Let Aminta Migliari leave the jail with his head held high, with his honor as a citizen and a partisan intact,” exclaimed one of the lawyers.28

  For Icardi and Lo Dolce, even their defense lawyers would not claim their innocence. Instead, they portrayed them as having committed the crime for political reasons and necessities of the war. “Icardi was the true and only commander of the Chrysler Mission which was ordered to work with the partisans and to give them arms so they could fight and help shorten the war,” Icardi’s lawyer said. “Holohan obviously had other instructions. The fact is he was mainly concerned in gathering political information and did not want to be bothered with anything else. Icardi had to eliminate him as an obstacle in the fight for victory.” The lawyers for the Americans asked the court to grant them amnesty, as the Italian law provided.29

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  By the afternoon of November 6, 1953, all sides in the Holohan process in Novara had run out of things to say. At 1500 hours, the president of the court, Judge Sicher, addressed the three defendants with the ritual words, “Do you have anything else to add?” “Nothing, nothing,” replied Migliari, Manini, and Tozzini. The court retired to the council chambers to deliberate. After one hour, it announced it had reached a verdict. At 1610 hours, the eight judges returned to the packed courtroom. An absolute silence fell in the room.

  Judge Sicher read the court decision with a calm voice articulating carefully each word. Aminta Migliari was fully absolved of all charges—he had no involvement whatsoever in any of the alleged crimes. Gualtiero Tozzini and Giuseppe Manini were absolved because they participated in the crime against their will and under threat of death. The two Americans were found guilty. Lieutenant Aldo Icardi received a life sentence and Sergeant Carl Lo Dolce seventeen years in prison. The farmer Edoardo Maulini, involved in the case by accident, received eight months’ probation and a fine of ten thousand lire for abusive possession of a firearm.

  The judge had barely finished reading the court’s decision when the crowd erupted in a loud and continuous ovation. The austere magistrate tried to control the room by shaking his
bell to no avail. In front of him, there were hundreds of people tightly packed against each other. They had managed to raise their arms over their heads and now were all applauding and cheering, “Long live the Court! Long live the Justice!” Seeing that they could not calm the enthusiasm of the public, the president and the popular judges whose faces radiated with joy left the podium precipitously and retired in their chambers. The Carabinieri tried to empty the courtroom but it was not an easy task because now everyone was trying to get to the cage to congratulate Migliari, Manini, and Tozzini who were in tears. That same afternoon, they were released from jail and returned to their families in time for dinner.30

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  The last act in the Holohan-Icardi tragedy began shortly after True magazine published Michael Stern’s account of Holohan’s murder in its September 1951 issue. Representative Sterling W. Cole, Republican of New York, charged that the Defense Department had tried to cover up the Holohan death. By December of that year, Cole was named chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee to investigate the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Major Holohan and the Defense Department’s handling of the matter.31

  Cole conducted the first hearing on December 19, 1951. In a closed-door session, Michael Stern told the committee what he had learned during the eighteen months he had spent investigating the case. He also showed the subcommittee that the Defense Department’s press release had borrowed liberally from his article, including errors or guesses he had made. For example, the government press release described Villa Castelnuovo as a twenty-two-room villa, the same way as Stern described it in his article. Stern explained that he had simply guessed at the number of rooms in the villa—he had never counted them. Likewise, Stern had guessed the value of mission funds to be $100,000—a number the government repeated without bothering to verify that the true amount had been only a fraction of that.32