The Scandal of the Century Read online

  Adelmira Biaggioni revealed that the night Anna María Caglio thought Montagna had poisoned her, she wrote a will that she presented to her the next day, before leaving for Milan, with the task of taking it to the attorney general if she turned up dead. The landlady held on to the letter for several days. Then, not wanting to bear that responsibility, she put it in another envelope and addressed it to Anna María Caglio, at the convent where she’d taken refuge.

  The police ordered the seizure of that letter and called Anna María Caglio again, to identify it as hers. Among many other things, the letter said, “I want everyone to know that I have never been aware of the business dealings of Ugo Montagna […] But I am otherwise convinced that the one responsible is Ugo Montagna (with the collaboration of many women […]) He is the brains behind the organization, while Piero Piccioni is the murderer.”

  Loud Kinky Parties with Alida Valli

  Anna María Caglio’s dramatic will started an earthquake in public opinion. The press, and especially the opposition newspapers, began a barrage of heavy artillery fire against the judicial establishment, against the police, against everything that had anything to do with the government. Between the blasts, Ugo Montagna and Gian Piero Piccioni were summoned to testify.

  Well dressed, in a dark pinstriped suit and with a smiling seriousness, Ugo Montagna responded to the inquiry. He said he had never met Wilma Montesi. He denied that she was the lady Anna María Caglio said she’d seen him with on January 7, 1953, in his car and at the door of his apartment building. He emphatically denied that “pleasure parties” had taken place at his Capacotta estate. He said it was not true that Piccioni would have telephoned him on the night of April 10. He ended by saying, without losing his cool, in a sure and convincing voice, that he did not remember having attended an interview with Rome’s chief of police at the Ministry of the Interior, as Anna María Caglio had said, and that it was absolutely false that he had ever been in contact with any narcotics traffickers. He also made the observation that Piccioni and the chief of police were old friends and it was neither necessary nor reasonable, therefore, that he should have had to serve as an intermediary between them.

  THE FATAL DATE

  Less serene than Montagna, dressed a little sportily, and in a sonorous Italian with a Roman accent, Gian Piero Piccioni declared himself to be an absolute stranger to the Montesi case. On the day of her death, he said, he was taking a short break in Amalfi, returning from there to Rome, by automobile, at 3:30 on the afternoon of April 10. He later declared that same afternoon he had to take to his bed with a bad case of tonsillitis. To prove it, he promised to show them the prescription from Professor Di Filippo, the doctor who had visited him that afternoon.

  As far as his supposed visit to Rome’s chief of police in Montagna’s company, Piccioni declared that it had not been carried out in the malicious way Anna María Caglio told it. Several times, he said, he had visited him alone or with Montagna, but only in order to request his intervention in the way the press was compromising his name in the Montesi case. “Those attacks from the press,” he said, “have no other aim than a political one: to harm my father’s prestige.”

  CASE SHELVED!

  In light of the charges not offering any new perspective or seeming sufficiently valid to rule out the hypothesis of accidental death while taking a footbath, the Wilma Montesi case was shelved for the second time on March 2, 1954. But the press did not shelve their campaign. The trial of the journalist Muto proceeded, and each time someone showed up to testify, the Montesi case was stirred up again.

  The Reader Should Remember

  The date on which Piero Piccioni said he returned from Amalfi.

  The prescription from Professor Di Filippo, which Piero Piccioni promised to show the police.

  Among many others summoned to declare, Franccimei, a painter, said he had lived for a week with Andrea Bisaccia, one of the two women who Muto named as his sources of information. Franccimei told the police an intense story. Andrea Bisaccia—he said—suffered from nightmares. She talked in distressed tones while she slept. In one of those nightmares, she began to shout in terror: “Water…! No…I don’t want to drown…No, I don’t want to die the same way…Let me go!”

  While the painter was making his dramatic declaration, a woman driven mad by the abuse of narcotics threw herself off a third-story balcony of a hotel in Alessandría. In her purse, the police found, written down on a little piece of paper, two telephone numbers that were not listed in Rome’s telephone directory. Both were private numbers. One belonged to Ugo Montagna. The other to Piero Piccioni.

  A WHOLE LIFE

  The woman who jumped from the third floor was Corinna Versolatto, an adventurer who in less than a year had practiced all sorts of trades. She was a nurse in a respectable clinic; a coat-check girl at the Piccolo Slam nightclub, later closed by the police; and in her leisure time, a clandestine prostitute.

  At the moment of her suicide attempt, Corinna Versolatto was the private secretary of Mario Amelotti, a Venezuelan who was fond of traveling and suspected of involvement in narcotics trafficking and the white slave trade. In a moment of lucidity, Corinna told journalists, in the presence of the doctor at the clinic she’d been driven to and an Alessandrian police officer, that in recent months she had fallen out of favor with Amelotti, her boss, because she had refused to collaborate in his illicit undertakings. She said, “That’s all I can say. Mario is an unscrupulous man. He has bought off the police and he is a friend to many influential people.”

  Finally, Corinna revealed that her boss was a friend of someone who smoked marijuana cigarettes. And that together with a photographer friend of his, he ran a studio that made and sold pornographic postcards.

  THIS SEEMS LIKE A MOVIE

  While this was going on, the press continued shouting. And the police carried on receiving anonymous tips. When Wilma Montesi’s case was shelved for the second time, they received more than six hundred anonymous tips. One of them, signed Gianna la Rossa, said, “I am in the know about the events that occurred in April 1953, concerning the death of Wilma Montesi. I am terrified at the cruelty of Montagna and Piccioni, who tried to put her in contact with narcotics traffickers in the province of Parma, specifically in Traversetolo. I made a corresponding denunciation to the Parma police, in good time. But they buried it. A few months ago, I deposited a second letter for safekeeping at the office of the parish priest, in a little village in the region of Traversetolo. I sent that letter because I was convinced that I would suffer the same fate as Wilma Montesi. The priest will hand that letter over to whoever presents the attached half ticket. The other half is in his hands.”

  Gianna la Rossa went on in her letter explaining the reasons she preferred to shelter behind a pseudonym. The letter ended: “My hide is worth nothing, but it happens to be all I have.”

  HOW HIGH DOES THE WATER GO?

  The police conducted a swift investigation of the two previous cases. In relation to the background of the woman who attempted suicide, they established that in Rome she frequented the Victor club and in the hotel where she lived she organized loud kinky parties, attended by notable personalities and two movie actresses. One of them was Alida Valli.

  The hotel where Corinna lived in Alessandria, and where she’d jumped out the window, was searched by the police. In the suicidal woman’s room they found two press cuttings. One was the news of the closure of Piccolo Slam. The other was about the Montesi case.

  “LET’S SEE, FATHER”

  In relation to the letter from Gianna la Rossa, the police discovered that the parish priest was Tonnino Onnis, curate of Bannone di Traversetolo and an engineering student. And along they went to his parish, with the half ticket included in the letter, a fifty-lire entry ticket to the Ministry of Education’s general headquarters of antiquities and fine arts. The parish priest showed them the lette
r, on the envelope of which he had written: “Deposited into my safekeeping on May 16, 1953, to be handed over only to whomever presents the other half of the attached ticket, which must have the number A.N.629190.” On the back of the envelope he had made a second explanation: “Sealed by me. I do not know the name or address of the person who wrote it.”

  The letter was opened and its sensational text read.

  The Dark Histories of the Witnesses

  The letter handed over by the parish priest to the police was dated May 16 and said, among other things, “If you are reading this letter, I am dead. But I want it to be known that I did not die a natural death. I have been finished off by the Marchese Montagna and Piero Piccioni…I have lived my last months under the nightmare of suffering the same death as Wilma Montesi…I am putting into practice a plan to unmask the band of narcotics traffickers…If this plan fails, I will meet the same fate as Wilma…

  “This letter will only be handed over to whomever is in possession of a special password…”

  THE TRICK

  Father Onnis was not satisfied with merely showing this letter to the police, but took the opportunity to tell a story that sounded like a bandit movie. He said that in August or September 1953, on a Friday, when he was getting ready to leave Parma on his motorcycle, two individuals approached him who had just gotten out of a car with French license plates. With simulated foreign accents, through which the parish priest believed he detected the accent of southern Italy, the two individuals begged him to take a package. He refused, started up his motorcycle, and took off at full speed. But when he reached the village he was arrested by the police and taken to the precinct. The officers on duty searched the package that the priest had on his back seat. It was a radio to repair.

  Then the police showed him an anonymous note they’d received a few hours earlier with the license plate number of his motorcycle, the time he would pass through the village, and the accusation that Father Onnis was in contact with a gang of drug traffickers.

  ALIDA VALLI ON THE PHONE

  The investigators made something very important immediately clear: the letter presented by Father Onnis was dated May 16, when the name Piero Piccioni had not yet been associated with that of Montagna. Ana María Caglio’s declarations were made in October.

  Around the same time, the newspapers were insisting on another important event in the Montesi case: the telephone call the actress Alida Valli made from Venice to Piero Piccioni, with whom she had an intimate friendship. Alida Valli had been with Piccioni in Amalfi during the trip he told the police about to defend himself. Later the actress traveled to Venice to work filming the movie The Stranger’s Hand. Two days after Alida Valli arrived in Venice, the Montesi scandal broke at. A journalist, an actor, a film director, and a parliamentary deputy all declared that the actress had phoned Piccioni from a Venetian tobacconist shop. The actress denied the conversation had taken place.

  NO ROOM FOR DOUBTS

  According to the witnesses, Alida Valli, obviously quite worked up, said to Piccioni:

  “What the hell have you done? What happened to that girl?”

  The actress carried on the conversation in a loud voice, because it was a long-distance call. It was a public place. When she hung up, she was in such a state of agitation that she said out loud, as if she were still calling long distance, “You’ll see what a mess that imbecile’s got himself into.”

  The Reader Should Remember

  The telephone call Alida Valli made to Piero Piccioni from Venice.

  The results of the first autopsy performed on Wilma Montesi, published in the second installment of this series.

  Wilma Montesi’s family’s declarations, after her body was found on Torvaianica beach.

  The items of clothing found on the body.

  The organ of the Italian Communist Party, L’Unità, reported on the scandal of the telephone call. According to that newspaper, the call had been placed on April 29, 1953. The actress wrote a letter to the editors protesting the ease with which they spread “fantastical and tendentious news.” And she stated that on April 29 she had been in Rome. But the police had seized her telephone book and established that, in effect, the call had been made.

  DARK STORIES

  Another declaration was heard at the trial of the journalist Muto: that of Gioben Jo, who according to Ana María Caglio had lost thirteen million lire playing cards at Capacotta, with Montagna, Piccioni, and a high-ranking police official. Gioben Jo declared that an acquaintance of hers, Gianni Cortesse, who had emigrated to Brazil, and written from there to say that he was “very well settled in,” had been “ship’s purser” in Genoa several years ago, and a notorious narcotics dealer. She said that the aforementioned Cortesse supplied a dentist friend with large quantities of cocaine. That friend, according to Gioben Jo, had introduced her to Montagna, who was a close friend.

  Another witness finally declared that several years before he had been a guest of Montagna. There had been a lawyer, a friend of both, known for his fondness for drugs, who even suffered attacks of delirium tremens due to his abuse of narcotics. In April or June of 1947, according to the witness, Montagna, the lawyer friend, and a woman came into his room, completely naked, and had woken him up with vulgar phrases and dark words.

  WHOM TO BELIEVE?

  The journalist Muto’s trial really turned into a many-legged creature. Each time someone was summoned to testify, more witnesses had to be called, to establish the truth of the testimonies. It was like a game of da que te vienen dando (give as good as you get). New names kept coming up. And the press, for its part, conducted spontaneous investigations, and every day dawned on new revelations. Among the people testifying at Muto’s trial was Vittorio Feroldi de Rosa, who said he had driven, in July or August of 1953, from Rome to Ostia, along with several people, one of whom was Andrea Bisaccia. According to Feroldi, Bisaccia had told her travel companion that narcotics were trafficked along the Ostia-Torva coast; that she had met Wilma Montesi; that she had participated in some of the “pleasure meetings” at Castelporziano, and that she had seen Montesi’s garter “in someone’s hands.”

  The other occupants of the automobile were summoned to testify, and one of them, Silvana Isola, declared that she hadn’t heard anything, because she was fast asleep for the whole trip. But another of the travelers, Gastone Prettenati, admitted that, in fact, Andrea Bisaccia had revealed some confidences during that trip. She had told them, among other things, that Montesi, on “a pleasure outing” she’d attended and during which she’d smoked “certain cigarettes,” had suffered a collapse. Then she’d been left on the beach, because the others there thought she was dead.

  Another witness, Franco Marramei, declared finally that one night he’d found himself in a small bar on Vía del Balbuino and had heard Andrea Bisaccia say in a loud voice, “The Montesi girl couldn’t have died by accident, because I knew her very well.”

  BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  Faced with the tremendous uproar in the press and public opinion’s evident disapproval, Rome’s Court of Appeals demanded that the attorney general reopen the twice-closed case. On March 29, 1954—almost a year after Montesi’s death—the examining office took charge of the confusing and hefty dossier and began the formal proceedings of the Montesi case.

  For a year, the voluminous and smiley presiding magistrate, Rafaelle Sepe, working day and night, put that chilling mountain of contradictions, errors, and false testimonies in order. He had to start over again from the beginning. Wilma Montesi’s cadaver was exhumed for a new autopsy. What Magistrate Sepe did was put the deck in order, with the cards facedown.

  Twenty-Four Lost Hours in Wilma’s Life

  Since he was starting from scratch, Magistrate Sepe began by trying to establish the precise hour that Wilma Montesi left her house on the afternoon of April 9. Up until that
moment there were two different testimonies: that of the victim’s father, who on the night of the 9th told the police that the concierge Adalgisa Roscini had said that Wilma left at 5:30; and that of the Salaria police department, which in their first report on Tuesday, April 14, declared that the concierge herself had said another time: five o’clock on the dot.

  The investigating magistrate called Adalgisa Roscini directly and she declared without hesitation that Wilma had not left the house before 5:15. The concierge had a reason for that categorical statement. During the days when the events occurred, a group of laborers were working on the building and stopped at exactly five o’clock. Then they went to wash up at the fountain in the courtyard and took no less than ten minutes. When the laborers finished their work on April 9, Wilma had not yet gone out. When they finished washing up and left the building, she still hadn’t gone out. Adalgisa Roscini saw her leave a few minutes after the laborers. Shortly after 5:15.

  “A HARD BONE”

  In this investigation, the concierge of number 76 Tagliamento made another revelation that cast shadows of doubt onto the Montesi family’s behavior. In reality, the attitude of the victim’s relatives had changed fundamentally since the day her body was identified. Adalgisa Roscini declared that a few days after Wilma’s death, her mother had pressed her to modify her earlier declaration that the girl had left at 5:30. The concierge refused. And then Wilma’s mother said to her: