The Regime & Uncle Giuseppe

For almost four years the mysterious drowning of a Roman carpenter's daughter has been postwar Italy's biggest political scandal. The discovery of the half-clad body of 21-year-old Wilma Montesi on a beach near Rome in April 1953 very nearly brought down the government of then Premier Mario Scelba. Because of it, the chief of Italy's national police, the chief of the Roman police force and Foreign Minister Attilio Piccioni resigned. When the Communist daily L'Unita solemnly declared that the Montesi case was a symbol of the moral bankruptcy of "the entire clerico-capitalist regime," millions of Italians agreed.

At the bottom of all the fuss was the accusation that Foreign Minister Piccioni's son Piero, a 35-year-old jazz pianist, had abandoned Wilma Montesi to the waves while she was stupefied by drugs. The fact that the police had at first declared her death accidental was attributed to pressure brought to bear by Ugo Montagna, a bogus Sicilian marquis of inexplicable wealth and impressive contacts among the upper reaches of the Christian Democratic Party.

The Black Swan. The principal source of these accusations was Montagna's discarded mistress, Milanese Socialite Anna Maria Caglio, known to Italy's avid scandal readers as "the black swan." In September 1954, largely on the strength of Anna Maria's circumstantial tale of sex orgies, dope trafficking and corruption in high places, Piero Piccioni was formally charged with "culpable homicide." Arrested along with him were Montagna and the ex-chief of the Rome police.

By the time Piero Piccioni was finally brought to trial in Venice early this year, it was clear that in the eyes of the Italian people his trial would be a test of the government's willingness to administer equal justice under the law. As witness after witness--some 200--contributed his piece of the puzzle, all Italy read column after, column of newsprint on the trial, searching suspiciously for signs of favoritism or a fix. And, under the eyes of all Italy, the Montesi affair slowly but unmistakably changed from "Italy's Dreyfus case" to a sordid little family scandal.

The first fact to emerge was that there was nothing but the unsupported word of Anna Maria Caglio to indicate that Piero Piccioni had ever even met Wilma Montesi. He himself swore that he had not. In her testimony Caglio tangled herself up in so many contradictions that the crowd which had cheered her arrival watched her depart in cold silence save for a single shout of "basta" (enough).

"A Little Saint." Wilma Montesi's grief-stricken parents, at first the object of great sympathy, proved to be shifty witnesses. Stubbornly they insisted that Wilma could not possibly have been involved with any man except the young police sergeant she-was engaged to marry. She was a "santarellina" (little saint), sobbed Mamma Montesi. Only under relentless hammering from the judge

--"Don't play the tragedienne. Don't lie" --did Mamma finally admit what the whole Montesi clan had been trying to conceal--the fact that Wilma had often been invited out for rides by her Uncle Giuseppe, a 32-year-old government functionary who fancies himself a Don Juan.

Until Mamma Montesi cracked, Uncle Giuseppe had stubbornly clung to his original alibi: on the fatal day he had been out with his fiancee. Now under sharp questioning he changed his story, said that instead he was with his fiancee's sister (who, trying to help him out, admitted on the stand that Giuseppe was in fact the father of her illegitimate child). Almost at once, this alibi, too, began to fall apart. What remained was the damning testimony of one of his fellow employees that on the day of Wilma's death Uncle Giuseppe had left his office early, announcing that he was going down to Ostia, near the beach where his niece's body was later found.

Gateway to Justice. Last week, after a thorough restudy of the evidence, Public Prosecutor Cesare Palminteri marched into the Renaissance courtroom on Venice's Grand Canal-and demolished his own case. Anna Maria Caglio, he said flatly, was a liar--"a perfidious woman intent on vengeance and dedicated to mud-slinging." The fact was, declared Palminteri, that "there is absolutely no evidence, direct or indirect, against Piero Piccioni." He hinted broadly that the police would want to talk some more with Uncle Giuseppe ("What is he hiding?"). Then he asked that the charges be dropped against Piccioni and his codefendants.

Palminteri's decision--all the more convincing because it was reluctant--lifted the shadow of corruption from Italy's Demo-Christian government. Wrote Rome's Messaggero: "Of all the terrible suspicions which tormented public opinion nothing is left: no orgies, no white slavery, no boatloads of prostitutes, nothing." But before the Montesi affair could finally be left to history a new inquiry was in order: How satisfactory was a system of justice which forced Piero Piccioni to suffer three years of public humiliation and judicial jeopardy on the basis of gossip alone?

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