Arrest in Italy shines a light on the murky ties between the Mafia, neo-fascists and the secret service during the Cold War

In Italy, the past is unpredictable — it is constantly being rewritten, especially when it comes to grave tragedies that never fully come to an end. This is seen most often in the years of the Cold War, when Italy was a crucial battleground because it had the largest Communist Party in the West. In a dark web of mafia, terrorists, secret services, and illegal freemasonry, a series of attacks and assassinations unfolded — crimes for which the truth is still being sought. And so, from time to time, there are surprises.

Like now: on October 24, a former Palermo police officer turned senior official, Filippo Piritore, 74, was arrested, accused of hiding crucial evidence in the 1980 murder of Piersanti Mattarella, then president of Sicily and a heavyweight in the Christian Democracy (DC) party. Prosecutors allege that when Piritore was a young officer, he made a crucial piece of evidence disappear: a glove found at the crime scene and believed to have belonged to the killer. When, a few years ago, in light of advances in DNA analysis, investigators went to look for it in the archives, it was no longer there.

Forty-five years have passed since the murder of Mattarella, yet the news of Piritore’s arrest has caused a major stir in Italy, because everyone knows how to connect the dots and reach the same conclusion: the state — or its dark side — had something to do with the crime. It’s yet another dirty operation of depistaggio (cover-up or misdirection), aimed at diverting investigations, a subgenre unto itself in Italy’s great unsolved mysteries.

What is now emerging is a far-reaching picture that connects the case to the 1978 assassination of Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, and the 1980 Bologna train station bombing, carried out by neo-fascist terrorists, which left 85 dead. There is also a striking personal detail: the Sicilian politician was the brother of Italy’s current president, Sergio Mattarella. In photographs taken by the renowned mafia photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, the first to arrive at the scene, she captured the moment Sergio pulled his brother’s body from the car.

Piersanti Mattarella, who was 44 when he was killed, was seen as a Sicilian Aldo Moro — almost his natural successor within the Christian Democratic Party. Like Moro, he believed in gradually bringing the Communist Party into government institutions, in hopes of averting the danger that, if it ever won an election, Italy might face a coup like Chile’s in 1973.

But neither the United States nor the Soviet Union looked favorably on such a plan. Within Italy itself, as later became known, secret structures existed to safeguard NATO’s interests — among them the Gladio military network, ready to intervene if necessary, and the illegal Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), whose members included the heads of the intelligence services, along with hundreds of politicians, military officers, police, magistrates, and journalists.

Mattarella was elected president of Sicily in February 1978 with external support from the Communist Party. Moro was attempting something similar at the national level, but he was kidnapped in Rome by the Red Brigades a month later, on March 16, 1978, as he headed to Parliament for the investiture of the new government. Minutes after the ambush, an anonymous call came to Mattarella’s home in Palermo: “Next time, it will be your turn.” Moro was murdered on May 9 — a crime that, too, is still shrouded in mystery.

In Sicily, Mattarella launched a clean-up campaign against an administration riddled with mafia influence. His chief of staff, Maria Grazia Trizzino, later recounted that in October 1979, Mattarella traveled to Rome to meet with then-interior minister Virginio Rognoni to discuss an important matter. He returned deeply shaken, pale. He told her something she was to keep secret: “If anything happens to me, connect what happens to me with this morning’s meeting.”

“He realized he had made a mistake, that he had sealed his fate,” Trizzino said in the documentary Magma: Mattarella, the Perfect Crime.

Mattarella had touched the interests of the Corleonesi clan, which also had connections in Rome and within the Christian Democratic Party, Italy’s long-ruling postwar party. Two months later, when he was killed, Trizzino called the Palermo court to say she had crucial information to share. They never called her back.

Mattarella was murdered as he was leaving his home, driving his car with his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law, all of whom saw the killer clearly. Even at that time, the people in Palermo were reading between the lines. At the funeral, the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Salvatore Pappalardo, cried out: “Why was Piersanti Mattarella killed? [...] One thing seems certain: the crime cannot be attributed solely to a Mafia organization; there must be other hidden forces at play.”

The following day, Leonardo Sciascia wrote in Corriere della Sera newspaper that the murder could have been carried out by a terrorist commando.

Nonetheless, investigators focused solely on the Mafia angle and concluded that the killing had been ordered by the Cosa Nostra leadership, though the direct perpetrators were never identified. Yet in the following years, as the first pentiti (mafia turncoats) came forward, all made it clear that no one in the Mafia knew anything about the case — something implausible, since within the clans it is always known who commits a crime, and one needs an order or authorization to act within a family’s territory.

Judge Falcone enters the scene

In 1985, the case came into the hands of Giovanni Falcone, the legendary judge who fought the Mafia and was assassinated in 1992. He immediately realized that this was not solely a Mafia case; the clearest lead was the neo-fascist trail. “Black” terrorists as neo-fascists were called at the time, acted in collusion with Cosa Nostra. To Falcone, it was like “a second Moro case,” he told a journalist.

Minutes after the murder, a neo-fascist group in Rome claimed responsibility through the ANSA news agency. Most importantly, Mattarella’s widow, Irma Chiazzese, who witnessed the crime, identified the killer without hesitation: she said it was Giusva Fioravanti, a terrorist from the neo-fascist group NAR. Fioravanti’s own brother, Cristiano, also a member of NAR, accused him of the crime. Another neo-fascist, Gilberto Cavallini, was tried as an accomplice, but both were definitively acquitted in 1999.

Seven months later, however, Fioravanti and Cavallini carried out the worst attack of all: the Bologna train station massacre on August 2, 1980. They were convicted for that atrocity, which left 85 dead. The attack was seen as a deliberate attempt to destabilize the country and justify a subsequent return to order — a strategy known as the “strategy of tension,” initiated with the 1969 bombing of a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana, which killed 17. Within this scheme, “black” and “red” terrorists, the Mafia, and organized crime were used as secret tools to carry out the state’s dirty work.

The successive rulings in the Bologna massacre case — another long and tortuous judicial process full of misdirection and dark corners (the latest ruling is from 2020, confirmed definitively this year) — reconstruct a context that links Moro’s assassination, Mattarella’s murder, and the Bologna bombing within a hidden Cold War strategy.

Perhaps only in Italy could someone write a book about events that happened 45 years ago and still face the possibility of last-minute developments. That is what happened to historian Miguel Gotor, who publishes an exhaustive book on the case, L’omicidio di Piersanti Mattarella (The Murder of Piersanti Mattarella), on November 18. The latest news did not surprise him; he had already hinted at it in his pages. Gotor suspects Falcone was correct and that the two neo-fascists “are certainly the unluckiest men in the world, because the coincidences in this case against them are incredible.” New evidence of law enforcement erasing proof reinforces the thesis that state apparatuses were behind the crime. In his refined language, Falcone called this poisonous web the “l’ibrido connubio,” says Gotor, or the hybrid union.

Moreover, recent investigations have identified the killers as two mafiosi: Nino Madonia, 72, who was 28 at the time, and Giuseppe Lucchese, 67, who was 22 then. Gotor argues that Madonia was a neo-fascist: “He even participated in the attempted coup in Italy by Junio Valerio Borghese in 1970.” After the uprising failed, the former fascist leader took refuge in Franco’s Spain and died in the Spanish province of Cádiz four years later.

“The state was infiltrated by a criminal network that was at its service, in exchange for favors, naturally,” the historian explains. Interests converged. “In the Mattarella assassination, there are three levels. The Mafia level, which is regional; the national level, involving neo-fascists who wanted to eliminate a successor of Moro; and the third, which in my opinion is less discussed but interesting, is the international level. The assassination is part of a process of significant destabilization of NATO’s southern front, because Sicily was chosen as the site for the Cruise nuclear missiles in December 1979. A president of Sicily governing with the communists was not an option.”

And it doesn’t end there. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was alarmed because he saw the missiles as a direct threat, and, according to Gotor emphasizes, Libya financed and maintained relations with Italian neo-fascists. This peak of Cold War tension continued in June 1980 with the attack by French fighter jets on a plane carrying Gaddafi — according to the most widely accepted thesis, a flight with 81 passengers was mistakenly shot down over the Sicilian island of Ustica. Another Italian tragedy, also shrouded in mystery, from those terrible of Years of Lead.

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