Mauro De Mauro, an emblematic story of hidden Italy

50 years have passed since the disappearance of Mauro De Mauro, journalist from Hour kidnapped on the night of September 16, 1970 and was never found again. Its history has nurtured the great well of Italian poisons. He parks his BMW by the front door, on Viale delle Magnolie, his daughter sees him from the window, then he realizes that two guys surround him and get into his car, they all leave. From that moment on, one of the most intricate cases in Italian history opens, made up of many events whose context is now well known but about which it seems impossible to write the ending. De Mauro’s death becomes a symbol of this.

Forty-nine years old, originally from Foggia, arrived in Palermo after the war, he first collaborated with Sicily Time and then to Sicilian morning. Has a past very fascist: first in the Tenth Mas of June Valerio Borghese, after the armistice in the Republic of Salò – he named his two daughters Junia and Valeria, in honor of the former commander. He supports the regime with conviction, then he is accused of having participated in the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, acquitted in 48 by the Corte di Assise in Bologna. A past like this, perhaps more than that, has had many other fascists who have re-entered the Republic.

In any case he is good and is hired by the left wing newspaper Hour where he specializes in the most difficult investigations on mafia, poking his nose everywhere. But before disappearing, she goes through a difficult professional moment. For a couple of years he has no longer been involved in the mob. Would you like to move to Rome, a Evening countryYou may be trying to open some doors by spreading the rumor that you have “something big” on your hands. Or you really have something in your hand. Something about your investigation into the assassination of Eni’s president, Enrico MatteiBecause he mentions it to several people, he says that he is doing “a theme for a Rosi movie, a great thing, a great thing. Things to make Italy tremble “.

For a long time his disappearance has no trace, he sails in the dark: carabinieri and police follow divergent paths. According to the police, the journalist came across a large drug dealing and for this he would have been eliminated by the mafia. The police, on the other hand, are focusing very carefully on the “Mattei track”, of which the superpentito also speaks. Tommaso Buscetta to Giovanni Falcone in 1994: “I don’t know anything about the death of Mauro De Mauro. It’s not a mob business. When I discussed it with my interlocutors, they seemed astonished. I have heard that his disappearance is linked to the death of a well-known Italian politician, I think his name was Enrico Mattei”.

You know a lot about Mauro about the assassination of the president of Eni – see Giuseppe Pipitone’s excellent book Mauro’s case, not without having read the unmissable Deep black of the two Sicilian journalists Peppino Lo Bianco and Sandra Rizza. This is why the director Francesco Rosi – who had already appreciated it during the writing of his film on Salvatore Giuliano – turns to him, towards the end of July 1970, asking him for a detailed reconstruction of the last two days of Mattei’s life in Sicily: why does he return to the island where he was only a week before? Who calls you in the middle of the night to invite you without delay to return to Milan as soon as possible?

In this case, there is no lack of recurring elements of the Italian “assassins”, as the late Sandro Provvisionato points out on his website, still active today: the disappearance of his desk drawer of material crucial to understanding the meaning of the events, torn from the notebook. pages of meeting notes I had in the preparation of Rosi’s work, a mole who can plan a sabotage because he knows the takeoff time of his plane that Mattei only makes known to his pilot.

In short, De Mauro understood many things in 1970. Really remarkable if we think that the last important investigation on Mattei carried out by the Prosecutor Vincenzo had it was shelved in April 2005, but definitively silencing those who claimed that Mattei’s plane had crashed, proving that it was sabotage. Just Calia has collected important testimonies collected in a book by Egidio Ceccato, Mafia crimes, state diversion, these days in bookstores with Castelvecchi. Its about minutes of questioning from the former senator of Padua Graziano Verzotto that he looked after Eni’s interests in Sicily.

After having been around the bush for three years, Calia cornered him and in September 1998 made very forceful and direct statements: De Mauro’s murder, he explains, would be the consequence of a sudden and unexpected complication of a blackmail operation that he himself had concocted together with the journalist, to convince the Eni executives -Eugenio Cefis and Vito Guarrasi to whom he points with his finger- to desist from the opposition to the Algeria-Sicilia oil pipeline to which Verzotto is dedicated so much behind the tracks by Mattei.

But Verzotto, who is undoubtedly one of De Mauro’s sources, is by no means a saint: a great piece of Christian democracy, sent to Sicily to direct the Sicilian Mining Authority, linked to the French secret services, involved in the investigation of the black funds of the banks of Michele Sindona, a friend of the boss Giuseppe Di Cristina, is one who plays his game, is a ring of hidden Italy. Inside which Mauro De Mauro disappeared 50 years ago.