by Tobias Jones
Inside, the courtroom is an oval bunker. Lining the walls to the left and right are eight enormous and barred prison pens, a reminder of the maxi-trials that used to take place here against entire terrorist organisations in the 1970s. Two judges sit below an imposing crucifix. To their left and right on the dais are the so-called ‘popular judges’ or jurists, wearing tricolour sashes. They in turn are flanked by other jurists without the gaudy sash (each juror has to have a possible replacement, because the trial is expected to be so long). Accordingly, and this being Italy, the start of the trial is delayed by a lawyers’ strike. It begins a week later.
The first decision of the court is whether to move the trial to Catanzaro, over a thousand miles to the south in Calabria. It was on the basis of a law about public order dating from the era of Il Duce that various Piazza Fontana trials were removed to Catanzaro during the 1970s. There accusations were blurred and confused, witnesses whisked abroad. ‘You see,’ explains one journalist next to me in the press gallery, ‘there’s nothing south of Rome which is left to chance.’ In a portent of things to come, the judge speaks for hours on the subject – a judgement described the next day by even the most sober newspapers as ‘very tedious’. The request for a transfer to Calabria is turned down.
The apparent trouble with the trial is that nobody (neither Amnesty International, nor the European Court of Human Rights nor the Italian populace in general) maintains much faith in ‘the togas’, the judiciary. For its snail’s pace and contrary decisions, the Italian judiciary has recently been blacklisted by Amnesty International, and in 1999 the country topped the list of condemnations from the European Court of Human Rights. By the end of that year, the European Court still had almost 7,000 cases to deal with from Italy, making up over 20% of its impending workload. Moreover, since the judiciary is politicised to a degree unthinkable in most modern democracies, Italian justice often looks more like ‘revolutionary justice’, like Robespierre and his sans-culottes dispatching a whimsical terror in all directions. Political enemies can be laid low not by ideological debate, but by a timely accusation, thereby subjecting them to the near-stagnant waters of the legal system (there’s no habeas corpus, very rarely a jury). That habit of sordid smear and political finger-pointing is called giustizialismo, and is one of the reasons why there’s such a breezy attitude to the lengthy criminal records many politicians have: if you point out that the Italian parliament (of 650 senators or deputies) currently has fifty politicians inquisiti (under investigation), people simply shrug: ‘the magistrates must be out to get them, that’s all’. Most people I spoke to, especially with regard to the Piazza Fontana trial, said that it was probably a case of a grudge, and that magistrates didn’t know the difference between perseguire and perseguitare (between ‘to pursue’ and ‘to persecute’).
Moreover it became obvious that the courts, like the Slaughter Commission, are acutely politicised. No one pretends to believe that the judiciary is separate from the legislature, so if someone receives a conviction it’s often treated not as a moral indictment but rather, say, like an electoral defeat: it’s a temporary set-back. They haven’t committed a crime, just had a decision go against them. People will forget about it. Increasingly, the Piazza Fontana trial seemed less a historical reconstruction, less a righting of historical wrongs, and more simply a continuation of politics by legal means. It wasn’t coincidental that the case arrived in court at a time when Italy had its first left-wing government since the war. The right, too, had obvious interests in the outcome of the trial. Despite the acute political sensitivity of the trial, two of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia parliamentarians were acting as defence lawyers in the case. One proudly donned his Forza Italia lapel-pin each day. There was no sense of a conflict of interest, no need to separate judiciary and legislature. Pino Rauti, the Fascist politician whose organisation is accused of planting the bomb, was also recently in alliance with Berlusconi’s party for the European elections in 1999.
The other reason anything emerging from the togas is taken with a spoonful of salt is the culture of pentitismo. Originally intended to weaken the Red Brigades and then used to break the silence of mafiosi, (by allowing criminals the opportunity to ‘repent’ and to point the finger), pentitismo has by now become a simple mechanism to stitch up enemies. There are, at the time of writing, 1,171 pentiti, suddenly turned from poachers into the judiciary’s most revered gamekeepers, and many have produced convictions which are little short of staggering. In the south, the smear normally used is involvement with Cosa Nostra; in the north it’s the suggestion that the accused participated in the lotta armata, the armed struggle of the 1970s. In one infamous case in the 1980s, a pentito pointed the finger at a famous television presenter, Enzo Tortora, who he accused of being involved in dealing cocaine along with the Camorra, the Napolitan mafia. The case became another absurd show-trial, and Tortora was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He was later absolved, but died soon afterwards. On his urn were written the words of Leonardo Sciascia: che non sia un’ illusione, ‘Don’t let it be an illusion’.
In between hearings I watch a documentary from the late 1980s. The journalist is asking an Anarchist, the ‘monster’ first accused of planting the bomb and who was absolved in 1975, where or when the truth got lost. Pietro Valpreda, with a shock of grey hair from each temple, looks stern and says: ‘Immediately after the slaughter, as soon as the judges arrived from the powers in Rome … I believe that since then, the truth has totally disappeared … even though something continues to emerge, not in an active form, but in a negative form … not “I did” but “I don’t remember”, “I couldn’t have done …”’
The prosecution in the new trial alleges that the slaughter at the bank in Piazza Fontana was part of the programmatic terrorism of Italian Fascists. ‘It’s probable,’ wrote Guido Salvini in his Istruttoria, the lengthy prosecution document which precedes any trial, ‘that the bombs of 12 December 1969 had the end of promoting a coup which was already planned for the end of 1969 on a wave of fear and disorientation which, as with the bombs on trains and in banks, affected ordinary citizens.’ Salvini identified Ordine Nuovo, the Fascist party then led by Pino Rauti, as ‘the prevalent structure responsible in terms of material execution for the attacks of 12 December 1969, and for those which preceded them and continued to operate … causing … the slaughter outside Milan’s questura on 17.5.1973, very probably the slaughter of Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, and the chain of major and minor attempts, including some near-slaughters on trains from the beginning of the 1980s’. A more catch-all accusation could hardly have been hoped for: over a decade of bombings laid at the door of the avowedly Fascist organisation, Ordine Nuovo and, indirectly, its leader, Pino Rauti.
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 a
ccused – 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:
What happened in 1969 was a phenomenon … which for many years was assumed to be extremist neo-Fascism. But … there appeared if not one director, at least a centre of fomentation, instigation, finance and partial co-ordination. The mutation of radicalism of the right was a phenomenon induced by sectors of the security services … belonging to a strategic dimension of international inspiration.13
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 apparent
ly 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.”’
