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Deep black, intense yellow: Mattei, De Mauro, Pasolini (1)

By hollisterclothingoutlet 06/05/2022 780 Views

Lies, oversights and manipulations in the investigation of the murders of the Italian State Profondo nero, intenso giallo: Mattei, De Mauro, Pasolini (1) Profondo nero, intenso giallo: Mattei, De Mauro, Pasolini (1)

In early July 2021, he was reading an article in the New York Times titled “To Solve 3 Cold Cases, This Small County Got a DNA Crash Course. Forensic genealogy helped nab the Golden State Killer in 2018. Now investigators across the country are using it to revisit hundreds of unsolved crimes." The coroner helped catch the Golden State Killer. Now investigators across the country turn to her to review hundreds of unsolved crimes.") The lead and photo of an ordinary-looking middle-aged American man and woman looking with a certain pride in the distance —the two wore the mythical sheriff's star pinned on their shirts, above their hearts— I couldn't summarize the content better.

Halfway through the page I found myself wondering what I was doing reading that article, since I'm not attracted to crimes or morbid cases or deep America. I remembered having read another article that same week, dated April and published by La Repubblica, whose headline was reproduced by all the Italian newspapers and agencies: “Reopen investigation into Pasolini's death. It's in someone's interest to keep it a mystery." These were the words of the writer Dacia Maraini in an interview with the journalist Elvira Terranova during her participation in the festival La via dei librai, in Palermo. Maraini, now eighty-four years old, demanded the application of new techniques to analyze the remains of Pasolini's clothing that have been preserved since his murder in the Idroscalo on Ostia beach, on the night of November 2, 1975.

This is how the unconscious works: I read Maraini's about a topic I've been interested in for years, an interview that seemed to me to routinely deal with the "Pasolini crime," and when I saw myself focused on the report on how effective advances in analysis DNA tests have allowed cold cases to be reopened, I discover that in reality I also find it intriguing that a murder that Sergio Citti, a friend of Pasolini, described as a "perfect crime" remains unsolved.

"The traces of blood could be enlarged and DNA extracted, since the stain is still there," explained Maraini. "The evidence has not been destroyed, although it is clearly in someone's interest that this death remains a historical mystery." "Some evidence is missing," she added; “If a real in-depth investigation had been carried out at the time, other data would probably have come to light. But since Pino Pelosi claimed all the blame then, the investigation stopped there."

Why does the veteran writer, who was Alberto Moravia's wife and friend of the poet and filmmaker, demand today the umpteenth investigation? Official investigation, it is understood, because from the first day there were several independent inquiries. When Maraini speaks of "historical mystery" she means that the murder of the night of Ostia was reopened several times; the last one, in 2010, was also closed without conclusive evidence.

By the height of 2021, Pier Paolo Pasolini has largely become a cultural totem, a figure widely known and understood and interpreted, beginning with an atrocious death that made him a martyr for various progressive causes of his time — from the open defense of his homosexuality to the character of an intellectual outside of all subordination—and a talisman for a certain intellectually lazy sector of the left. Respected by the traditional right, which accepts that much of his work has great artistic value, including films such as The Gospel According to Matthew, awarded by the Vatican itself, after the innumerable complaints and persecutions he suffered from year one of his career. As a poet, forgiven by the most reactionary who see in his death a divine punishment to which no more can be added, he has also been a subject of study since his murder, which has been slow to produce convincing results and answers.

Pasolini is a totem and in some cases his death, his assassination, is used as a key to reading and interpreting his work —poetic, narrative, cinematographic, theatrical, essayistic or even pictorial—, which cannot be simplified into isolated categories. That the surviving friends of the poet, like Maraini herself or the long list of those who have written monographs dedicated to the famous crime, call for an in-depth investigation supported by the most advanced technology, which explores genetic material, is a way of to ask that it be Pasolini himself —that his body speak, what remains of it forty years after the ambush in Ostia, of those remains on which so many writers, journalists and analysts from different countries, but above all from Italy, have fattened themselves — who reveals the name, the names of those who killed him.

In mid-November 2021, the newspapers echoed the discovery, in a lava cave of Etna, of a mysterious body of a man dressed in a suit and tie. Immediately, Franca de Mauro, the eldest daughter of the journalist Mauro de Mauro, who disappeared in September 1970, demanded a DNA analysis of those remains, since the data released on malformations in the nose and mouth of the corpse could correspond to those of her father. If it were him, he would deny the latest versions about the disappearance and execution of the L'Ora journalist, made by successive repentant gangsters, according to which the journalist's body was buried in the estate of a gangster, and ten years later dug up to be dissolved in acid. The clothes and newspapers dated 1977 found next to the man from the volcano forced us to rule out that it was Mauro de Mauro.

The "Pasolini crime", or Il delitto Pasolini, has generated such an extensive bibliography that it would not be an exaggeration to speak of a branch within the Italian giallo, the literary genre of political and mafia assassinations. This year of 2022 marks the centenary of the birth of the author of Theorem, so a flood of articles, reissues of his work, new translations, exhibitions and even “canonical” biographies with new revelations that will only be so for those who, Despite being interested in the case, he doesn't know Italian. A large part of the data that is intended to be sold as novel in Spain comes from a chronicle that I have been drawing attention to for some time so that it can be translated so that the Spanish reader can directly access the work of several brave and scrupulously honest professionals.

Profondo nero, intenso giallo: Mattei, De Mauro, Pasolini (1)

This is Profondo nero, (Chiarelettera, 2009), by Giuseppe Lo Bianco and Sandra Rizza, journalists from Palermo specialized in judicial chronicles. They are authors of other books signed together or separately, always around the great Sicilian theme, the mafia and its infiltration in politics, and Berlusconism, a derivative of the first. The title has its namesake in an italo disco compilation, which in turn pays homage to Dario Argento's Profondo rosso (1975). It is not surprising that with so many literary, musical, and later cinematographic references, the sensation of a fictional plot has led to treating Pasolini's murder as an endless serial.

The epigraph of Profondo nero is revealing and glosses over the attractiveness of the book, which is confirmed by reading: Mattei, De Mauro, Pasolini. Un'unica track all'origine delle stragi di stato. The Spanish translation should necessarily clarify something: Enrico Mattei, Mauro de Mauro, Pier Paolo Pasolini. A single clue at the starting point of the state murders. Enrico Mattei was the charismatic, astute and extremely powerful director of ENI, the national energy company Ente Nazionale de Idrocarburi, who died on October 27, 1962, in strange circumstances, at the height of Bascapè when the plane exploded, a Morane Saulnier twin-jet , which was transferring him back to Milan from Gagliano Castelferrato. Along with him, the pilot Irnerio Bertuzzi and the English journalist William McHale died, since Time-Life magazine was soon going to dedicate its cover to the intrepid Italian. Mattei was scheduled to travel to Algeria a few days later to close a very important oil deal that made the so-called Seven Sisters of the global oil cartel uncomfortable. Surely Dacia Maraini is aware that advances in DNA detection techniques and analysis of explosive residues made it possible to demonstrate, three decades later, what many suspected since Mattei's death, so timely, became known: that the The explosion of the plane was an attack and the death of the three occupants of the twin jet was a murder.

Mattei, the condottiero

Several records have been left of Mattei's charismatic personality —in addition to company graphic reports, where he stands out for his height, bearing and self-confidence— in television interviews. In 1960 he went to the program Political Tribune to explain the work of the ENI. The director establishes a parallelism between the organization he directs and the image of a kitten surrounded by big dogs that eat with two cheeks and do not hesitate to destroy the starving intruder with one bite, a well-brought memory of his childhood. The parable of the gattino who represents Italy against the American and British giants, fattened up during and after the war, permeates public opinion and arouses a wave of sympathy and solidarity for Mattei's patriotic policy.

Kittens aside, the always dapper Mattei displayed his intelligence, his ability to seduce and his enormous ambition during his career, which he used both to secure the support of key sectors such as the press —which he subsidized— and certain economic circles, linked to the DC in his minus ultra orientation. So that the reader can draw their own conclusions when comparing trajectories, projects and destinations, I invite them to read the documented and entertaining biography that Enrique Faes published in 2020 dedicated to Demetrio Carceller, founder of one of the richest families in Spain: A businessman in the government (Gutenberg Galaxy). Faes recounts the role of Carceller as Minister of Industry during the first Franco regime, when our country pursued a certain oil autonomy, and the preference and sympathy of the Spanish for the United States in the face of pressure from Germany. Contrasting Spanish policy with Mattei's initiatives, the challenge posed by the Italian becomes more clear.

Mattei's initiatives in favor of greater energy autonomy in Italy determine his death. In 1957 he obtained permission to search for oil in three areas of Iran. The US State Department wrote that “Mattei's goals in Italy and abroad should raise concerns. Mattei represents a threat to the objectives that the United States pursues in Italy." The following year il condottiero also arrives in Jordan. On September 19, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was born, OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) made up of Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Arabia. They dream of the world unification of the energy heritage, that is, to create a cartel based on fairness and ethics, a purpose that receives the support of the world and that in later years and until today has conditioned geostrategic balances.

That same year, Mattei dares to do something that the Seven Sisters could not foresee: he closes an agreement with the USSR to obtain a very considerable volume of oil, with which he expects to cover 25% of the ENI's needs at a price never seen before. seen. The Seven Sisters understand it as a definitive blow to the cartel and, on November 12, an article in the New York Times accuses the leader of being "philo-Soviet" and Italy of "not respecting the post-war pacts", in addition to compromising "future political balances.

It couldn't be more clear. The United States and the United Kingdom counted on Italy as a docile ally in the face of an economic colonization that would help dispose of the enormous surplus of American production, the result of its industrial and commercial recovery accelerated by the war. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States made its control plans of the allied governments a reality by supporting or sponsoring the coups d'état that imposed military dictatorships in several countries in Latin America, with special relevance in large countries such as Argentina, Brazil or Chile. But it is not necessary to do the same with Italy when less obvious methods are going to allow it to win this particular battle of the cold war: that of keeping Italy on the western side.

This is how a journalist dies (and disappears)

Mauro de Mauro (1921-1970), a journalist for the Palermo communist newspaper L'Ora, disappeared on September 16, 1970. De Mauro had a family to support: a wife and two daughters. Since the eldest, Franca, was going to get married, the well-paid commission from film director Francesco Rosi (1922-2015) seemed like manna from heaven: to investigate Mattei's last days in Sicily, when he moved to Gagliano Castelferrato, where the discovery of methane gas deposits led to the illusion of hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs that would be created in the area.

Rosi was working on the script for a film that many readers today may remember: The Mattei Affair (1972), a reconstruction of the executive's final days with a convincing, and no less charismatic than the original, Gian Maria Volontè as the lead. Few will know that Rosi received veiled threats that De Mauro's disappearance forced her to consider a serious warning. If Rosi, then at the height of his career, managed to blow out the ninety-two candles and be declared the "pride of Naples", it was because he chose to leave the case "open" instead of unequivocally proposing the trail of the attack, audacity or recklessness that many expected. "We are not heroes" declared the lucid and eloquent director of Excellent Corpses (1975), although he later actively and passively denied that the intellectual authors of Mattei's murder rewrote the script of the film, winner of the festival's Palme d'Or of Cannes of 1972 exaequo with The working class goes to the Paradise, of Elio Petri.

In an interview with Serena d'Arbela, Rosi explained:

Visconti's former assistant was more aware than those who threatened him that the films he was interested in directing were going to become period documents, in such a way that even traces of his timidity —or cowardice, for some— would be read as testimony and complaint. The director of Lucky Luciano and Hands on the City worked to build future memory and this project involved transcending the literal nature of the facts.

The chronicle of the investigation of the Mattei case and its many labyrinths, the case file, its reopening and its definitive reclassification as an attack, is extensively collected in a book titled the same as the film, whose cover sports the yellow of the genre Italian police It is signed by the now famous magistrate Vincenzo Calia and the journalist Sabrina Pisù. Although published as a book in 2017, its content extensively feeds the section dedicated to Mattei and De Mauro in Profondo Nero. In the prologue, Calia and Pisù draw attention to the fact that, even though it had been proven "in court" that it was a attack, certain sectors and media outlets insist on calling the explosion that took the lives of the three occupants of the twin-reactor an "accident".

The chapter of Profundo nero that best describes the impact of mafia crimes and the risks involved in investigative journalism in Palermo is the one titled "This is how a journalist dies."

In journalism, sources are of paramount importance and it is not surprising that unexpected testimonies provide the key that will facilitate the resolution of the case. The last time he saw his father alive, her eldest daughter, Franca De Mauro, was in the doorway of her home with her fiancé finalizing details of the wedding that was to be held the following day. She was used to strangers approaching her father for work reasons, she was not surprised by the presence of those who required her attention and took him away in her own BMW, which would appear abandoned days later. Franca always insisted on the dialect word —amunì— with which they invited him to get into the BMW, a word that betrayed the Neapolitan origin of the kidnappers.

The journalist's youngest daughter, Junia, soon understood that not all old friends and acquaintances who called or visited to express support were trustworthy and that some were trying to find out where the family and the police were in the investigation. Such intriguing movements made her decide to keep a diary in which she wrote down, with impressive intelligence to capture misleading details and slips, everything related to the case since Mrs. De Mauro reported the disappearance of her head of the family. Without a doubt, its content deviates from the usual intimate feminine diary.

According to Lo Bianco and Rizza, the disappearance of De Mauro became in Palermo the symbol of the excessive power of the Cosa Nostra. Disappeared from the face of the earth, his body can never be found according to the confession of the repentant Gaetano Grado, who pointed to his brother Nino as one of the three kidnappers who acted on the orders of boss Stefano Bontade. De Mauro not only asked many questions, but also boasted of having found out something about Mattei's last days that would be a journalistic scoop of those who win prizes and cause earthquakes in high places. A certain Guarrasi, a lawyer, conveyed to the boss his concern about some questions and inquiries that threatened the impunity with which they had acted until then.

Since the disappearance of the chronicler and for years, the mafia fan, through his ramifications in the media, dedicated himself to confusing public opinion, tarnishing his reputation: his involvement in drug trafficking and a settling of scores would explain his disappearance; he linked it to the neo-fascist movements (with which he was related during the war), involved in that decade in bombings and involutionist moves. Rumors suggested that his past had come looking for him. The smear campaign complicated, as was intended, the resolution of the case until the confession of another repentant, Francesco Marino Mannoia, who detailed the methods imported from North America to dissolve in acid the bodies of so many executed by the mafia. Mannoia was one of those in charge of unearthing the remains and making them disappear with the new chemical solvents, which he did with those of the chronicler ten years after his kidnapping and execution. Salvatore Totò Riina (1930-2017), as the only survivor of the triumvirate of capi that ruled in Palermo in the 70s, was the only accused until the date of writing the book.

Through successive declarations of repentance, the puzzle of how and why De Mauro's murder is put together. He had spoken with a tax advisor who in turn spoke with two lawyers, who spoke with il boss Salvo, a member of an enemy clan of the former president of the region who should have traveled with Mattei on which his last flight resulted. The Salvos spoke with Bontade and he ordered the journalist's death. One of those two lawyers mentioned above was Vito Guarrasi, who alerted the Salvos to the danger posed by De Mauro's questions, who were just a few steps away from finding out their involvement in following Mattei during the days before the accident.

This is how the authors of Profondo nero summarize: «It is a typical Palermo story. A tax consultant, a well-known lawyer and the most powerful collectors in Italy act in conspiracy with a Cosa Nosta boss to cover up the great Italian plot that has decided the end of Mattei in Sicily. And they do it by covering the mouth of an uncomfortable journalist who has discovered something big, who has come too close to the truth.

(To be continue)


Sources

Books and websites:

Deep black: Mattei, De Mauro, Pasolini, a single track all'origine delle strage di stato, by Giuseppe Lo Bianco and Sandra Rizza. Editorial Chiarelettere, Milan, 2009 (there is a new edition for 2020).

The Mattei case. Le prove dell'omicide del Presidente dell'Eni dopo bugie, depistaggi e manipolazioni della verità, by Vincenzo Calia and Sabrina Pisu, Milan, 2017.

«Irnerio Bertuzzi ed Enrico Mattei stessa morte, stesso sogno: Un'Italia libera en Secolo d'Italia».

«When Enrico Mattei e l'Italia facevano paura al mondo», by Nico Zuliani.

Interview with Francesco Rosi:

«Francesco Rosi e il suo estraordinario cinema della verità», by Serena d'Arbela in Patria Indipendente, January 2015.

Dacia Maraini, article reproduced by La Repubblica

«Dacia Maraini: “Riaprite l'inchiesta sulla morte di Pasolini. A qualcuno fa comodo che resti an enigma».

«To Solve 3 Cold Cases, This Small County Got a DNA Crash Course. Forensic genealogy helped nab the Golden State Killer in 2018. Now investigators across the country are using it to revisit hundreds of unsolved crimes”, in New York Times, May 3, 2021.

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