1980
June 23, 1980, Rome
Mario Amato, 42 years old, magistrate, Deputy Prosecutor at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Rome
Career and investigations on the black terrorism
After serving as a deputy prosecutor at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Rovereto from September 1971 to the summer of 1977, on June 30, 1977, Mario Amato was transferred with the same title to the prosecutor’s office in Rome.
He was tasked by the Attorney General Giovanni de Matteo to resume the investigations started by the magistrate Vittorio Occorsio, who had been killed while investigating the right-wing terrorist group NAR and the neo-fascist Pierluigi Concutelli (later investigations would show that Concutelli was indeed the author of Occorsio’s murder). Amato was then promised — a promise that was never fulfilled — to be assisted by one or two other colleagues.
Together with Vittorio Occorsio, Mario Amato was the first magistrate to “attempt a comprehensive reading” of black terrorism. Through the partial successes of the investigations into individual terrorist acts, he stated before the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM) on June 13, 1980 — just ten days before he was killed —:
“I am coming to the view of an overall truth, involving responsibilities far more serious than those of the material executors of the criminal acts.”
Amato managed to reconstruct the connections between right-wing terrorism and the Magliana gang, and he intuited the links between the underground financial and economic sectors and public power. Among other things, he discovered that the NAR were seeking a “tactical” alliance with leftist extremists (as advocated for years by Franco Freda, the theorist of tactical alliance with terrorism of the opposite color and at that time under trial for the Piazza Fontana massacre), and that the group led by Fioravanti was organized similarly to the Red Brigades and was becoming extremely dangerous.
However, he was left alone to conduct these investigations, isolated by his superiors and subject to continuous attacks by his colleague judge Antonio Alibrandi (father of NAR terrorist Alessandro, a loyal follower of Giusva Fioravanti). In a public prosecutor’s office that would later be frequently referred to by the press, echoing the title of a work by Georges Simenon, “The Port of Shadows,” Amato was destined to soon become a target of right-wing subversion and terrorism.
Assassination
Thus, “black terrorism” was investigated by him in the most disheartening solitude and remained alone until the morning of June 23, 1980, a few weeks before the Bologna massacre.
Having been denied the use of an armored car, due to the “difficulties” of having one of the drivers arrive by 8:00 in the morning (they started at 9:00), Mario Amato had no way of safely reaching his office at the prosecutor’s office on Piazzale Clodio. While waiting for a bus at the stop at the intersection of Viale Jonio and Via Monte Rocchetta, the deputy prosecutor was shot in the back of the head by Gilberto Cavallini, who fired a fatal shot with a revolver, and then fled on a motorcycle driven by another NAR member, Luigi Ciavardini, who was waiting for him.
Upon hearing the news of the assassination, the multiple murderers Giusva Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro celebrated, according to their own statements, by consuming oysters and toasting with champagne. They then drafted the claim flyer in which they stated: “Today Amato closed his squalid existence, filled with lead.”
After death
Only after Mario Amato’s death did a team form within the Roman Prosecutor’s Office which, in a very short time, thanks above all to the work and intuitions of the magistrate, achieved extraordinary investigative results, radically changing the way of working in all investigations of political subversion and terrorism, both right-wing and left-wing, as well as in those of organized crime.
The Assize Court of Bologna with sentence no. 1/2020 sentenced Gilberto Giorgio Cavallini to life imprisonment for the massacre committed in Bologna on August 2, 1980.