1980
September 2, Rome
Maurizio Di Leo, 66 years old, typographer
Vittorio Emiliani, the newspaper’s director at the time, reconstructs for Il Fatto Quotidiano what happened on the evening of 40 years ago when a statement arrived in the newsroom stating that “the Nar (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) had ‘executed’ a reporter from the newspaper,” he recalls. It was instead Maurizio Di Leo, whose murder, remaining unsolved, Emiliani calls for clarity.
“Late in the evening of September 2, 1980, forty years ago, we received at Il Messaggero, which I was directing, a statement from the Nar (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) of the extreme right in which they communicated that they had ‘executed’ a reporter from the newspaper. However, I had seen him, shortly before, in the corridor, and the head reporter Vittorio Roidi told me that he had sent him to cover a crime in Monteverde. I begged him to call him back because, as we will see, he was going, in some way, to witness ‘his’ death.” This is how Vittorio Emiliani’s account begins, published on ilfattoquotidiano.it on August 29 and today, the anniversary of the assassination, picked up by Articolo21.org, of that distant September 2, the thirtieth anniversary of the Bologna massacre, in which “the Nar kept their word, albeit mistakenly targeting the wrong person.”
Emiliani recounts the threats directed at a young reporter who had dealt with right-wing extremism, arousing heated animosity, and how, at the time, he and his journalists found themselves caught between two fires: “Between the Red Brigades who in the courtroom had threatened, among others, Paolo Gambescia himself, and the Nar who now guaranteed retaliation.”
The victim was the typographer Maurizio Di Leo, “small, thin, always dressed in a jacket and tie, who lived with his mother in Monteverde,” killed instead of the threatened reporter, “for whom he was mistaken,” who, however, was “tall, big, always dressed in jeans and sweaters or jackets and lived near Villa Ada. It seemed more like a strategy aimed at spreading terror in a strongly anti-fascist newspaper: we have murdered one among you, you are all in the crosshairs. So it was widely perceived,” the former director recalls, then asking: “Could the news stemming from recent investigations into the bombing of Bologna’s Railway Station on August 2, 1980, and the funding from Gelli and P2 to ‘black’ terrorism also reopen the Di Leo case, murdered to ‘celebrate’ the thirtieth anniversary of the bomb at Bologna’s Railway Station? ‘We ask ourselves this,” Emiliani concludes, “because it seems profoundly unjust that this vile murder remains of an author as unknown as blatantly fascist at a time of revival, especially in Rome, of the darkest right, with an evident, deliberate underestimation of its consistency and spread.”