1978

February 10, Prato
Gianfranco Spighi, 57 years old, notary

The action.

On February 10, 1978 around noon, two young people enter the historic Palazzo Fiorelli from the door of Via del Ceppo Vecchio 5, in front of the Emperor’s Castle. A third, probably, remains on the road to be the post. The two go up the stairs and reach the first floor, drop the balaclava on their faces and break into the apartment where the studios of a notary and a surveyor are located. Their target is the notary Gianfranco Spighi, Florentine, 57 years old, a well-known professional in the city. The two young men enter holding their guns. One of the two, with the green balaclava, goes to pick up the surveyor Piero Serafini and takes him to the room of the notary office where three employees work, Giuseppe Gigli, Gherardo Caramelli and Pietro Raddi. There gathered he keeps them under the threat of the weapon: ‘Don’t move, you dirty bastards.’

I’ll shoot him.

Meanwhile, the other, “low and skinny” with the blue balaclava, enters the room where the notary is signing some documents assisted by secretary Gina Cavalenza. They are sitting at the table and turning their backs on the front door, the carpet damps the young man’s steps, the notary doesn’t hear him coming. He finds himself behind the boy pointing the gun at him: ‘Don’t move, you’re the same bastard too.’ Spighi reacts on impulse as if it were not a serious matter: ‘Let’s not make jokes, Carnival has long since passed’. ‘I’m not kidding,’ the young man replies. Spighi gets up, there is a short scollusion, the notary takes the young man by the arm and pushes him into the atrium: ‘Take your balls out of your balls’. The young man wriggles and looks at him, ‘Okay, you send me away and I’ll shoot you.’ And it does. A 7.65 caliber gunshot to the chest from close range, the bullet slits the pulmonary artery. Spighi falls into an armchair in a lake of blood, asks for help, then falls forward on the floor. He will die as the ambulance takes him to the emergency room. The two young people run away, one of them loses his green balaclava on the stairs, then they see them running up in the direction of Piazza delle Carceri.

Robbery, indeed not.

Prato is affected by the murder, but the shadow of terrorism does not appear. The next day, the newspapers title ‘notary killed by young robbers’. That evening in the city there is Bettino Craxi, new secretary of the Psi, in the handicraft hall in Piazza Ciardi to present the economic program of the party, that news does not arouse interest. In the same hours the police find at the Adalgisa Bar in via Pallacorda, a small street behind Palazzo Fiorelli, two pistols, a loden and a balaclava in a leather bag. From the bag you go back to Elfino Mortati. And the perspective changes.

The aspiring terrorist.

His face as a kid ends up in all the newspapers but Elfino in Prato already know him well. Even the police. He is just over 18 years old, attends the Magistrali and is the leader of Autonomy in the city. It has already been pointed out for its presence in other actions of the previous months: the occupation of the headquarters of the Union of merchants, an attack on the carabinieri barracks, another on a lanificio. He has already been arrested because they found at home the flyers claiming an assault on the Magni & Gori cleaning company in via Strozzi. And only a few days before a device had exploded in front of the Dc headquarters in Piazza San Domenico. A rosary of episodes that had also reminded the prateses how those were difficult years. On March 29 of the year before only fortunately there had been no victims in an assault on the headquarters of Tecnotessile, in the building of the Industrial Union in via Valentini, when a commando of the Communist Combatant Units had made an uncovered face locking up the employees in the bathroom and detonating a timed device that had set fire and destroyed all the machinery. But this time there is a dead person. Indeed two, since two years after the Spighi murder, the widow of the notary, Laura Sandri, 59, will kill herself by firing a gunshot at the house in Florence. “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t live,” he leaves written in a note.

Matrix and objectives.

Elfino’s name gives a political matrix to the action. Then will also come the claim signed by the ‘Group of Armed Struggle for Communism Dante Di Nanni’ (an old partisan), in the orbit of Workers’ Autonomy. In the statement, the murder is referred to as a ‘technical accident’. The objective of the action, as Mortati will reiterate years later, was ‘to make some writing on the walls and burn the bills of exchange of the workers that Spighi kept in the safe’. Always Mortati admitted that there was probably also the will to ‘get into the light’ in the eyes of the real terrorists, the Red Brigades.

Atitance and Moro case.

Elfino gives himself to the fugitive, is hosted in Florence, Bologna and Rome by the ‘companions’. His escape ends at Pavia station on July 2, where he is arrested. In those 5 months he also finds a way to enter the Moro investigation. He says he came into contact with the Br and slept in a den in the ghetto of Rome, a step away from Via Caetani, where Moro’s body was found. Those are the days of Moro’s kidnapping. It would be a sensational novelty, but the scoop will not find confirmation, despite the commitment of judges Priore and Imposimato who will spend days scouring the streets and palaces of the ghetto together with Mortati.

Conviction and prison.

After the investigation into the Spighi murder, the trial opened on April 9, 1980 in the Corte d’Assise in Florence with 19 people on trial for armed gang and subversive association. Mortati takes the opportunity to take the scene and play the part of the revolutionary leader: he refuses the defense and the trial, insults the president of the Court, tries to read a statement by being kicked out of the courtroom, makes analysis, exposes strategies and invites the Autonomy to go underground, to make the leap into the armed struggle. He must also be forgiven for collaborating with law enforcement immediately after his arrest, telling his version of the facts and naming the names of those who helped him during the abate. Some of them are at the bar with him. Mortati will be sentenced to 30 years, to which he will later add another 4 years, participating in 1979 in an attempt to escape from Trani prison. In jail he studied, graduated in the History of Christianity and after 14 years he obtained semi-freedom and a job thanks to the Curia of Prato.

The mysteries.

On the murder of the notary Spighi there are still many shadow areas and points never clarified. Two fundamentals: who were, with Elfino, the other two boys in the commando? And who killed the notary? Mortati has always refused to name names. He also always claimed that he wasn’t the one who shot. But the notary’s secretary, Gina Cavalenza, will say that she recognized in Elfino the boy with the gray loden who shot Spighi.