“Tell me what you’re interested in,” Spezi said, “and I’ll show you, so you won’t trash my house.”
“We want everything you have on the Monster,” said Graybeard.
Which meant not only the entire archive Spezi had accumulated over a quarter of a century of researching and reporting on the case, but all the material that we were using to write the Monster book. Spezi was custodian of all the research; I had only copies of the most recent documents.
It suddenly occurred to him what this was about. They wanted to prevent publication of the book.
“Shit! When will you give it back to me?”
“As soon as we have checked through it,” said Graybeard.
Spezi brought him up to his garret and showed him the masses of files that constituted his archive: packages of yellowed newspaper cuttings, mountains of photocopies of legal documents, ballistic analyses, ME reports, entire trial transcripts, interrogations, verdicts, photographs, books.
They began to load it all into big cardboard boxes.
Spezi called a friend of his at the news agency ANSA, the Italian equivalent to the Associated Press, and had the luck to catch him. “They’re searching my house,” he said. “They’re taking away everything that I need to write my book with Douglas Preston on the Monster. I won’t be able to write another word.”
Fifteen minutes later the first story about the search broke on the computer screens of every newspaper and television station in Italy.
Meanwhile Spezi called the president of the Order of Journalists, the president of the Press Association, and the director of La Nazione. They were more scandalized than surprised. They told him they would raise hell with the story.
Spezi’s cell phone began to ring like mad. One after another his colleagues called, even as the search plodded on. They all wanted to interview him. Spezi assured them that as soon as the search was over, he would meet with them.
The journalists began arriving under the house even while the search was still in progress.
The police didn’t content themselves to taking only documents that Spezi had showed them. They began to rummage through drawers, pull books off the shelves, and open up CD holders. They went into his daughter’s room and searched her closet, her files, her books, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and photographs, scattering stuff on the floor and making a mess.
Spezi put his arm around Myriam. His wife was trembling. “Don’t worry, this is just routine.” Myriam was wearing a jacket and at the opportune moment he dove for the diskette, extracted it, and slid it into one of her pockets. He then gave her a kiss on the cheek as if to console her. “Hide it,” he whispered.
Several minutes later, pretending to be upset, she sagged into a low ottoman that was coming apart at one of the seams. When the police had their backs turned she quickly slid the floppy disk into the ottoman.
After three hours of searching, they seemed to be finished. They strapped the loaded cartons onto luggage carriers and asked Spezi to follow them to the carabinieri barracks, where they would make an inventory, which he would be required to sign.
In the barracks, while he was seated on a brown Naugahyde chair waiting for the list to be ready, he received a telephone call on his cell phone. It was from Myriam, who was trying to put the house back in order, and who unwisely spoke to her husband in French. Spezi and his wife habitually spoke French in their home, as she was Belgian and they were a bilingual family. Their daughter had gone to French schools in Florence.
“Mario,” she said in French, “don’t worry, they didn’t find what really interests you. But I can’t find the documents about the scagliola.” A scagliola is a type of antique table, and Spezi owned an extremely valuable one dating back to the seventeenth century, which they had just had restored and were thinking of selling.
It wasn’t the most felicitous thing to say at that moment, in French, when it was obvious their cell phone was being tapped. He cut her off. “Myriam, this really isn’t the time . . . not now . . .” Spezi flushed as he closed the phone. He knew his wife’s comment was completely innocent, but that it could be interpreted in a sinister light, particularly since it had been spoken in French.
Not long after, Graybeard came in. “Spezi, we need you in here for a moment.”
The journalist rose from the chair and followed them into the next room. Graybeard turned and stared at him, his face hostile. “Spezi, you’re not cooperating. This isn’t working at all.”
“Not cooperating? What’s that supposed to mean, cooperate? I left my entire house at your disposal so you could put your grubby hands wherever you pleased, what the hell more do you want?”
He stared at Spezi with his hard, marblelike eyes. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Don’t feign ignorance. It would be much better for you if you would only cooperate.”
“Ah, now I understand . . . It’s about what my wife said in French. You think she was trying to tell me something in code. But you see, that’s my wife’s language, and it’s normal for her to speak French, we often speak French at home. As for the contents of what she said”—Spezi figured that Graybeard wasn’t bilingual—“if you didn’t understand it, she was referring to a document that you didn’t see, which was my contract with the publishing house for my book on the Monster. She wanted to tell me that you hadn’t taken it. That’s all.”
Graybeard continued to fix him with narrowed eyes, his expression unchanging. Spezi began to think that the problem might be with the word “scagliola.” Not many Italians outside the antiquarian field knew what it meant.
“Is it the scagliola?” he asked. “Do you know what a scagliola is? Is that the problem?”
The policeman didn’t respond, but it was clear that this was, in fact, the problem. Spezi tried to explain, to no avail. Graybeard was not interested in explanations.
“I regret to say, Spezi, that we’re going to have to start all over again.”
They turned around. The policemen and carabinieri got back into their vehicles, and they all drove back to the apartment with Spezi. For four more hours they turned the place upside down—and this time they trashed it for real.
They didn’t miss anything, not even the space behind the books in the library. They took the computer, all the floppy disks (except the one still hidden in the ottoman), and even the menu of a Rotary Club dinner where Spezi had attended a conference on the Monster. They took his telephone book and all his letters.
They were not in a good humor.
Spezi was also beginning to lose his temper. When he passed through the door to the library, he gestured to the stone doorstop that he had borrowed from his German friend, the one he had waved about on the television show. It was sitting behind the door, doing what it was supposed to do—being a doorstop. “You see that?” he said sarcastically to the detective. “It’s like the truncated pyramid found at the scene of one of the crimes which you insist on claiming is an ‘esoteric object.’ There it is, take a good look: can’t you see it’s only a doorstop?” He gave a mocking laugh. “You find them everywhere in Tuscan country houses.”
It was an extremely serious mistake. The detective seized the doorstop and packed it away. And thus was added to the evidence against Spezi an object identical to the one that GIDES and Giuttari believed to be of prime importance to their investigation, something the Corriere della Sera had written about in a front-page story, calling it, without a trace of irony, “an object that served to put the earthly world in contact with the infernal regions.”
In the report prepared by the police of the items taken from Spezi’s house, the doorstop was described as a “truncated pyramid with a hexagonal base concealed behind a door,” the wording implying that Spezi had made a special effort to hide it. The public minister of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, justified the retention of the doorstop in a report that stated the object “connected the person under investigation [i.e., Spezi] directly with the series of double homicides.”
In
other words, because of that doorstop, Spezi was no longer suspected of merely obstructing or interfering with the Monster of Florence investigation. Now they believed that an object discovered in his house tied him directly with one of the crimes.
The Chi L’ha Visto? program and the June 23 article had fixed Giuttari’s hatred and suspicion of Spezi. In a book Giuttari published about the case, The Monster: Anatomy of an Investigation, the chief inspector explained how his suspicions developed. It is an interesting look into the way his mind worked.
“On June 23,” Giuttari wrote, “one of [Spezi’s] articles came out in La Nazione, an ‘exclusive’ interview with the lifer Mario Vanni, entitled I Will Die as the Monster but I Am Innocent.”
In the story, Spezi mentioned that he had encountered Vanni once, many years before the Monster killings, in San Casciano. This struck Giuttari as an important clue. “I was mildly surprised that the two had known each other since the days of their youth,” he wrote. “But I was struck even more by the curious coincidence that the bitter public foe of the official investigation into the Monster case and the strenuous defender of the ‘Sardinian Trail’ had not only revealed himself as having excellent rapport with the indicted ex-pharmacist [Calamandrei] . . . but now stood revealed as a longtime friend of Mario Vanni.”
Giuttari went on to say that Spezi had “participated in a television series” that attempted to focus attention back on the Sardinian Trail, “recycling the same old tired and unverified theories” that had been discredited long ago.
“Now,” Giuttari wrote, Spezi’s “interfering presence was beginning to look suspicious.”
With the doorstop in hand, Giuttari and Mignini had the physical evidence they needed to connect Spezi to one of the actual crime scenes of the Monster.
When the policemen had left, Spezi slowly walked up the staircase to his garret, afraid of what he might find. It was even worse than he’d feared. He fell into the chair that I had given him upon my departure from Florence, in front of the empty space where his computer had been, and stared for a long time at the wreck all around him. In that moment, he thought back to that crystal-clear morning of Sunday, June 7, 1981—twenty-three years earlier—when his colleague had asked him to take the crime desk, assuring him that “nothing ever happens on a Sunday.”
Never in a million years could he have imagined where it would end up.
He wanted to call me, he told me later, but by that time it was late at night in America. He couldn’t write an e-mail—he didn’t have a computer. He decided to leave the house, walk around the streets of Florence, and look for an Internet café where he could e-mail me.
Outside the apartment, a crowd of journalists and television cameras awaited. He said a few words, answered questions, and then got into his car and drove into town. In Via de’ Benci, a few steps from Santa Croce, he went into an Internet café, full of pimply American students talking to their parents through VOIP. He seated himself in front of a machine. From somewhere, a little muted, came the sad trombone of Marc Johnson playing “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” by Charlie Mingus. Spezi connected to his mail server, entered the information for his mailbox, and saw that there was already a message from me, with an attachment.
While writing the Monster book, we had been exchanging e-mails on what we had corrected of each other’s chapters. What he found was the last chapter of the book, which I had written, about the interview with Antonio. He sent me an e-mail telling me of the search of his home.
The next morning, after receiving the e-mail, I called and he related to me the story of the search. He asked for my help in publicizing the seizure of our research materials.
Among the documents taken by police were all the notes and drafts of the article we had written for The New Yorker, which had never been published. I called Dorothy Wickenden, the managing editor of the magazine, and she gave me a list of people who could help, while at the same time explaining that, since they hadn’t actually published the article, the magazine did not feel it appropriate to intervene directly.
For days I called and wrote letters, but the response was minimal. The sad truth was that few in North America could get excited about an Italian journalist who had irritated the police and gotten his files taken away, at a time when journalists were being blown up in Iraq and murdered in Russia. “Now, if Spezi had been imprisoned . . .” I heard many times, “well, then we could do something.”
Finally, PEN intervened. On January 11, 2005, the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International, in London, sent Giuttari a letter criticizing the search of Spezi’s home and seizure of our papers. The letter stated that “International PEN is concerned that there has been a violation of Article 6.3 of the European Convention on Human Rights that guarantees the right of everyone charged with a criminal offence to be informed promptly ‘and in detail of the nature and cause of the accusation against him.’ ”
Giuttari responded by ordering another search of Spezi’s house, which took place on January 24. This time they took a broken computer and a walking stick that they suspected might contain a concealed electronic device.
But they never did get the diskette Spezi had stuffed down his undershorts, and we were able to resume working on the book. In succeeding months, the police eventually returned, in bits and pieces, most of Spezi’s files, his archives, our notes, and his computer—but not the infamous doorstop. Giuttari and Mignini now knew exactly what was in the book, since they had captured all the drafts from Spezi’s computer. And it seemed they did not like what they read.
One fine morning, Spezi opened his newspaper to read a headline that almost knocked him out of his chair.
NARDUCCI MURDER: JOURNALIST INVESTIGATED
Giuttari’s suspicions had matured, like wine turning to vinegar in a poorly sealed cask. Spezi had gone from interfering journalist to murder suspect.
“When I read that,” Spezi told me on the telephone, “I felt like I was inside a film of Kafka’s The Trial, remade by Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.”
CHAPTER 43
For a year, from January 2005 to January 2006, Spezi’s two lawyers tried and failed to learn what the specific charges were against him. The public minister of Perugia had sealed the accusations under an order of segreto istruttorio, a judicial secrecy order that makes it illegal to reveal anything about the charges. In Italy, an order of segreto istruttorio is often followed by selected leaks by prosecutors to their chosen reporters, who publish without fear of being charged. In this way, prosecutors allow their side of the story to be told while journalists are barred from publishing anything else. This is what seemed to happen now. Spezi was suspected of obstructing the inquiry into the Narducci murder, the newspapers claimed, which had aroused suspicions that he might be an accessory to the murder and the instigator of a cover-up. The implications of this were unclear.
In January of 2006, our book was finished and sent to the publishing house. The title was Dolci Colline di Sangue. A literal translation would be Sweet Hills of Blood, a play on the Italian phrase dolci colline di Firenze, the sweet hills of Florence. It was scheduled for publication in April 2006.
In early 2006, Spezi called me from a pay phone in Florence. He said that while working on a completely different story, unconnected with the Monster of Florence, he had met an ex-con named Luigi Ruocco, a petty criminal who, it turned out, was an old acquaintance of Antonio Vinci. This Ruocco told Spezi an extraordinary story—a story that would blow the case wide open. “This is the breakthrough I’ve been searching for for twenty years,” Mario told me. “Doug, it’s absolutely incredible. With this new information, the case will finally be solved. They’re tapping my telephone and the e-mail is unsafe. So you have to come to Italy—and then I’ll tell you all about it. You’ll be part of it, Doug. Together we’ll expose the Monster!”
I flew to Italy with my family on February 13, 2006. Leaving them in a spectacular apartment on Via Ghibellina we had borrowed from a friend, owned by one of the
Ferragamo heirs, I went up to Spezi’s house to hear the incredible news.
Over dinner, Mario told me the story.
A few months back, he said, he had been researching an article about a woman who had been victimized by a doctor working for a pharmaceutical company. The doctor had used her, without her permission, as a test subject for a new psychopharmatropic drug. The case had been brought to his attention by Fernando Zaccaria, an ex– police detective who had once specialized in infiltrating drug trafficking rings, and who was now president of a private security firm in Florence. A crusader against injustice, Zaccaria had collected, pro bono, the evidence that helped convict the doctor for injuring the woman with his illegal experiments. He wanted Spezi to write the story.
One evening, when Spezi was at the injured woman’s house with her mother and Zaccaria, he casually mentioned his work on the Monster of Florence case and took out a photograph he happened to be carrying of Antonio Vinci. The mother, who was pouring coffee, peered over at the photograph and suddenly exclaimed, “Why, Luigi knows that man there! And I knew him and all of them too, when I was a little girl. I remember they used to take me to their festivals in the country.” The Luigi she referred to was Luigi Ruocco, her ex-husband.
“I’ve got to meet your husband,” Spezi said.
They gathered the next evening around the same table: Zaccaria, Spezi, the woman, and Luigi Ruocco. Ruocco was the quintessential specimen of a small-time hood, taciturn, with a neck like a bull, a huge square face, and curly brown hair. He was dressed in gym clothes. There was, however, a cautious but open look in his blue eyes that Spezi liked. Ruocco looked at the photograph and confirmed that he knew Antonio and the other Sardinians very well.
Spezi quickly gave Ruocco a summary of the Monster of Florence case and his belief that Antonio might be the Monster. Ruocco listened with interest. In a few minutes Spezi got to the point: did Ruocco know of a secret house that Antonio may have used during the period of the killings? Spezi had often said to me that the Monster had probably used an abandoned house in the country, perhaps a ruin, as a place of retreat to use before and after a killing, where he hid his gun, knife, and other items. At the time of the killings the Tuscan countryside was dotted with such abandoned houses.
The Monster of Florence Page 24