1973

The massacre at the Milan Police Headquarters

It is May 17, 1973, a man walks along the stretch that leads from Piazza Duomo in Milan to Via Fatebenefratelli, the headquarters of the police headquarters, where the commemoration of the leader of the political team of the police headquarters, killed a year earlier, Luigi Calabresi, is being held. commissioner “Window” as extra-parliamentarians and anarchists call him. The accusation is that of having “committed suicide” by throwing him from a window of the police station, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. He had been stopped by investigators as part of the investigation into the Piazza Fontana massacre on 12 December 1969. Four years have passed since the episode, but the wound is still open, because the trial is ongoing and because the Seventies were years of major political divisions.
Commemorating Calabresi in Milan is Mariano Rumor, who is Minister of the Interior, just as he was on the day of the massacre at the National Bank of Agriculture. Almost four years have passed, but many things have changed. Political violence has increased. On April 12, in Milan, police officer Antonio Marino was killed by a hand grenade thrown by some far-right demonstrators. Just as the man who is going from Piazza Duomo to the commemoration of the Calabresi murder is walking around armed. He carries with him a “pineapple” hand grenade, which he will soon throw at a group of people. The episode will be remembered in the history books as the Police Headquarters massacre.
«Around 11:00 yesterday – states the first judicial report on the massacre – at the end of the ceremony for the unveiling of the bust of the Chief Police Commissioner. dr. Luigi Calabresi, which took place in the courtyard of the Milan Police Headquarters, an individual, who was standing on the pavement opposite to the one where the entrance to the Police Headquarters is located, threw a bomb in the direction of the entrance itself, which exploded. The police on duty immediately arrested the attacker, who, after being rescued from a lynching attempt by the numerous people present, was taken to the police headquarters. Here he was found in possession, among other things, of a passport registered to a certain MAGRI Massimo, born in Bergamo on 7/30/1942, which the attacker himself immediately indicated as false. He then orally declared that his name was Bertoli Gianfranco, in the subject indicated, and that he had arrived in Milan the previous evening from Haifa, via Marseille. The explosion caused the death of Bartolon Gabriella, born in Milan on 6.1.1950 and the wounding of 42 other people, generalized in the attached list”.
In reality, 4 people were killed.
These are the only certain facts about this affair, because a story of lies, retractions and fantasies, which cannot be confirmed, is about to begin. The story of Gianfranco Bertoli, the man who will die almost thirty years after the massacre, bringing with him one of the greatest mysteries in the history of Italy, but who at the same time is still himself a mystery that has never been revealed. Why he actually threw that bomb, where he found it and above all whether he did it alone, are the great doubts that still hover over this affair. Bertoli ends up on trial, he is sentenced to life imprisonment, but the story is not over, because the judicial issue drags on until the 1990s. To begin with, it is not clear whether there is any complicity. Who armed the attacker? Why so many lies? But above all, why so many inconsistencies? Bertoli says he frequented Venetian anarchists, but here too there is no confirmation. Everyone remembers him as a common criminal, with two or three friends on the far right. But other news emerges on the sidelines. For example, Bertoli was until 1960 a source for the Sifar secret service with the code name “Negro”. The source would have been deactivated, but nothing prevents it from being reactivated.
But not only that, the news will remain cloaked in mystery, but the terrorist would have been part of Gladio, the parallel defense structure against communism active in Italy since 1956. His name is not included in the “official” lists, made known in 1990 , but there has always been a strong suspicion that there was a list that was never made public.
90’s. More than twenty years have passed since that massacre. The bombs that bloodied Italy are still there. Now the mafia puts them. But in the corridors of the Palace of Justice, work is still being done on the investigations of the 1970s. Also because something has moved. The veil was torn by Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who for some time in Veneto has been talking about the New Order, contacts with the secret services and the CIA, and even an international network dedicated to subversion.
Vinciguerra, who has already been convicted, is a casting of revelations. Speaks. It’s a lot. Even when the Venetian Ordinovists asked him to commit the murder of Mariano Rumor. The former Christian Democrat leader should have been punished for being afraid to declare a state of emergency in the aftermath of the Piazza Fontana massacre. There were agreements with some state apparatus. After the bombs in Milan and Rome, a state of emergency had to be declared and the military would have taken power. But the too many deaths (no one expected a massacre) sparked public indignation. After attending the funeral Rumor took a step back. And for this he had to pay. Vinciguerra refuses to commit the attack, but there are rumors that the Venetian Ordinovists are falling back on Bertoli, a man defined as “ready for anything”. The ideal culprit, a naive person, prone to alcohol, who can easily be passed off as an anarchist.
Vinciguerra is not the only one speaking. In the nineties, Carlo Digilio, known as “Uncle Otto”, also confirmed that there was a desire to attack Rumor. The perfect man for the operation is Bertoli himself, trained by the Ordinovists. It is enough to reopen a trial that will see Bertoli condemned together with the two leaders of Ordine Nuovo: Delfo Zorzi, and Carlo Maria Maggi. The appeal will overturn the sentence and the Supreme Court will confirm it: according to Italian justice, Bertoli is the only guilty party.