The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  What surprised Spezi most of all was the many parallels between Mignini’s arguments before the Tribunal and the accusations made by Gabriella Carlizzi on her conspiracy website months before. Sometimes even the wordings were similar, if not identical.

  The three judges in robes listened impassively, taking notes.

  After a break for lunch, the hearing resumed. At one point Mignini rose and went into the corridor. And there, outside the courtroom, Myriam had been waiting. When she saw the public minister walking alone in the corridor, she rose in a fury and, like an avenging angel, pointed an accusing finger at the man. “I know you are a believer,” she cried out in a voice full of fire. “God will punish you for what you have done. God will punish you!”

  Mignini’s face flushed a deep red, and without saying a word he walked stiffly down the corridor and disappeared around a corner.

  Later, Myriam said to her husband that she couldn’t be silent when “I heard Mignini shouting inside the courtroom, saying terrible things about you, that you were a criminal.”

  When Mignini returned to the courtroom, he resumed his brief, and it began to sound more like an inquisition than a judicial proceeding. He spoke of Spezi’s “high intelligence, which renders even more dangerous his great criminal capacity.” He concluded his speech with “The reasons for Spezi to remain in prison have become even more urgent. Because he has now demonstrated his enormous dangerousness by succeeding, even when locked up in a prison cell, in organizing a mass-media campaign in his favor!”

  Spezi remembered that moment. “A pen fell from the hand of the president of the Tribunal and made a little click on the table . . . from that moment on, she took no more notes.” She had clearly come to some kind of conclusion.

  At the end, after everyone else had spoken, it was Spezi’s turn.

  I had long admired Spezi’s abilities as a public speaker—his witty turn of phrase, his light and impromptu delivery, the logical organization of his information, the facts presented one after another like the paragraphs of a perfectly written news story, neat, concise, and clear. Now he turned those considerable gifts on the court. Facing Mignini directly, Spezi began to speak. Mignini refused to meet his eyes. Those who were there said he demolished Mignini’s accusations, one after another, with an edge of quiet contempt in his voice, bulldozing his rickety conspiracy logic and pointing out that Mignini lacked any physical evidence at all to back up his theories.

  As he spoke, Spezi told me later, he could see his words were having a visible effect on the judges.

  Spezi thanked the public minister for praising his intelligence and memory, and he pointed out, word for word, the phrases in Mignini’s brief that were identical to those posted, months before, by Gabriella Carlizzi on her website. He asked if Mignini could explain this singular coincidence between his words now and her words then. He asked if it was not a fact that Carlizzi had already been convicted of defamation, having written ten years before that the writer Alberto Bevilacqua was the Monster of Florence? And was it not also a fact that this same Carlizzi was currently on trial for fraud against incapacitated persons?

  Then Spezi turned to the president of the Tribunal. “I am only a journalist who tries his best to do what is right in his work, and I am a good person.”

  He was finished.

  The hearing was over. Two guards in the courtroom escorted Spezi down the elevators, into the ancient basements of the medieval palace, where they locked him in a tiny, barren cell that had probably been holding prisoners for centuries. He leaned his back against the stone wall and slid to the ground, utterly exhausted, his mind empty.

  After a while, he heard a sound and opened his eyes. It was one of his guards, standing with a cup of hot espresso that he had purchased with his own money. “Spezi, take it. You look like you need it.”

  CHAPTER 56

  That night they loaded Mario Spezi into the van and carried him back to his cell in Capanne prison. The next day was Saturday, and the Tribunal closed at one o’clock. The judges would issue their decision before that time.

  That Saturday, as one o’clock neared, Spezi waited in his cell. His fellow prisoners in his cellblock—who had come to know him even if they couldn’t see him—were also waiting to hear the verdict. One o’clock passed, and then one-thirty. As two o’clock neared, Spezi began to resign himself to the fact that the verdict had gone against him. And then a cheer went up among his fellow prisoners at the far end of the row of cells. Someone had heard something on an unseen television blaring somewhere. “Uncle! You’re free! Uncle! You can go! Uncle, they’ve let you go without conditions!”

  Myriam, waiting in a café for the news, received a call from a colleague of Mario’s at the paper. “Fantastic news! Congratulations! We won! Won! On every single point!”

  “After twenty-three days in prison,” RAI, the national television station of Italy reported, “journalist Mario Spezi, accused of obstruction of justice in the serial killings of Florence, has been set free. Such is the decision of the Tribunal of Reexamination.” The three judges hadn’t even attached conditions to his release, as was normal—no house arrest, no passport confiscation. He was absolutely and unconditionally freed.

  It was an enormous rebuke to the public minister of Perugia.

  A guard came to Spezi’s cell holding a big black garbage bag. “Hurry up. Put all your stuff in here. Let’s go.”

  Spezi threw it all in and turned to leave, to find the door blocked by the guard. One more indignity remained. “Before you leave,” the guard said, “you have to clean your cell.”

  Spezi thought he must be kidding. “I never asked to come here,” he said, “and I was put here illegally. If you want it clean, clean it yourself.”

  The guard narrowed his eyes, yanked the metal door from Spezi’s hands, and slammed it shut. He turned the key and said, “If you like it so much, go ahead and stay!” He began to walk off.

  Spezi could hardly believe it. He seized the bars. “Listen, you cretin. I know your name, and if you don’t let me out immediately, I’ll denounce you for false imprisonment. You understand? I’ll report you.”

  The guard paused, took a few more steps toward his post, then turned slowly and came back, as if graciously conceding the point, and unlocked the door. Spezi was passed off to another stone-faced guard, who escorted him to a waiting room.

  “Why aren’t you letting me out?” Spezi asked.

  “There’s some paperwork. And . . .” The guard hesitated. “Then there’s the problem of keeping public order outside.”

  Spezi finally emerged from Capanne prison, holding the big black garbage bag, and was greeted by a roar from the waiting crowd of journalists and onlookers.

  Niccolò was the first to call me. “Extraordinary news!” he cried. “Spezi is free!”

  CHAPTER 57

  Spezi and I had a long conversation that day, and he said he was going off with Myriam to the sea, just the two of them. But only for a few days. “Mignini,” he said, “is hauling me back to Perugia for another interrogation. On May 4.”

  “About what?” I asked, aghast.

  “He’s preparing new charges against me.”

  Mignini had not even waited for the written opinion of the Tribunal of Reexamination to be issued. He had appealed Spezi’s release to the Supreme Court.

  I asked a question I had been wanting to ask for weeks. “Why did Ruocco do it? Why did he make up that story about the iron boxes?”

  “Ruocco really knew Antonio Vinci,” he said. “He said it was Ignazio who told him about the iron boxes. Ignazio is a kind of padrino to the Sardinians . . . I haven’t spoken to Ruocco since our arrest, so I don’t know if it was Ruocco who made up the story, or if Ignazio was involved in some way. Ruocco might have done it for money—from time to time I gave him a few euros to cover his expenses, buy gas for his car. But it never amounted to much. And he paid a heavy price—he was jailed too as my ‘accomplice.’ Who knows? Maybe the story is
true.”

  “Why the Villa Bibbiani?”

  “Sheer chance, perhaps. Or perhaps the Sardinians really did use the old farmhouses at some time.”

  Spezi called me on May 4, immediately after the interrogation. To my great surprise, he was in an expansive mood. “Doug,” he said, cackling with laughter, “the interrogation was beautiful, just beautiful. It was one of the finest little moments of my life.”

  “Tell me.”

  “That morning,” Spezi said, “my lawyer picked me up in his car and we stopped by the newsstand for the paper. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the headline. I have it here. I’ll read it to you.”

  There was a dramatic pause.

  “ ‘Chief of GIDES Giuttari Indicted for Falsifying Evidence.’ Bello, eh?”

  I laughed gleefully. “Fantastico! What did he do?”

  “It had nothing to do with me. They say he doctored a tape recording of a conversation with some other person in the Monster case—an important person, a judge. But that’s not even the best part. I folded the newspaper so that the headline was displayed and carried it into Mignini’s office for the interrogation. When I sat down, I placed the paper on my knees, so that the headline was turned toward Mignini.”

  “What did he do when he saw it?”

  “He never saw it! Mignini never once looked at me, he kept his eyes averted the whole time. The interrogation didn’t last long—I invoked my right not to answer questions and that was it. Five minutes. The funny thing was, the stenographer did see the headline. I watched the man as he arched his neck like a turtle to read it, and then the poor fellow tried frantically to signal Mignini’s attention! No luck. Not a second after I left the office, when I was still in the hall, the door to Mignini’s office flew open and a carabinieri officer went hurtling down the stairs toward the door, without a doubt heading to the nearest newsstand.” He laughed wickedly. “Apparently, Mignini hadn’t read the papers that morning! He knew nothing about it!”

  Back outside the public minister’s office, following the brief interrogation, a crowd of journalists awaited. While the cameras whirred and clicked, Spezi held up the paper and opened it to the headline. “This is all the comment I need to make today.”

  “Is it not as I said?” Count Niccolò told me the next day. “Giuttari is taking the fall. With your campaign, you have sputtanato [cast aspersions on] the Italian judiciary in front of the whole world, with the risk of making them an international laughingstock. They don’t give a damn about Spezi and his rights. They just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. All they care about is preserving face. La faccia, la faccia! The only surprise to me is that it happened a great deal sooner than I expected. My dear Douglas, this is the beginning of the end for Giuttari. How swiftly does the pendulum swing!”

  That very same day, our book, Dolci Colline di Sangue, hit best-seller lists in Italy.

  The pendulum indeed had swung in our direction, and it swung hard. The Supreme Court of Italy summarily rejected Mignini’s appeal with a curt opinion that it was “inadmissible,” and dismissed all the proceedings against Spezi. There would be no trial and no more investigations of him. “An enormous load has been lifted,” Spezi said. “I am a free man.”

  A few months later, Giuttari’s and Mignini’s offices were raided by the police, who carried away boxes of files. They discovered that Mignini had been invoking a special antiterrorist law to order wiretaps of journalists who had written critically about his Monster of Florence investigation—wiretaps carried out by Giuttari and GIDES. In addition to wiretapping journalists, Giuttari had also been taping telephone calls and conversations with a number of Florentine judges and investigators, including his counterpart in Florence, the public minister Paolo Canessa. It seemed that Mignini suspected them of being part of a vast Florentine conspiracy working against his investigation into the masterminds behind the Monster killings.

  In the summer of 2006, both Giuttari and Mignini were indicted for abuse of office. GIDES was disbanded, and questions were immediately raised that indicated it had never been officially authorized in the first place. Giuttari lost his staff and the Monster of Florence case was taken away from him. He became a chief inspector a dispozione, that is, with no portfolio and no permanent assignment.

  Mignini so far has retained his position of public minister of Perugia, but two more prosecutors were added to his staff, allegedly to help him with his workload; their real assignment, everyone knew, was to keep him out of trouble. Both Mignini and Giuttari will have to stand trial for abuse of office and other crimes.

  On November 3, 2006, Spezi was awarded the most coveted journalistic prize in Italy for Dolci Colline di Sangue and named Writer of the Year for Freedom of the Press.

  CHAPTER 58

  The article in the Atlantic Monthly was published in July. A few weeks later the magazine received a letter on old-fashioned stationery, hand-typed on a manual typewriter. It was an extraordinary letter, written by Niccolò’s father, Count Neri Capponi, the head of one of Italy’s most ancient and illustrious noble families.

  When I first met Niccolò, he had mentioned the reason for his family’s long success in Florence: they had never thrust themselves into controversy, remained discreet and circumspect in all their dealings, and never tried to be first. For eight hundred years the Capponi family had prospered by avoiding being “the nail that sticks out,” as Niccolò had put it in his drafty palace seven years earlier.

  But now, Count Neri had broken with family tradition. He had written a letter to the editor. This was no ordinary letter, but a ripping indictment of the Italian criminal justice system from a man who was himself a judge and a lawyer. Count Neri knew whereof he spoke, and he spoke plainly.

  THE COUNT CAPPONI

  Sir

  The travesty of justice undergone by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi is the tip of the iceberg. The Italian judiciary (which includes the public prosecutors) is a branch of the civil service. This particular branch chooses its members, is self ruling and is accountable to no one: a state within a state! This body of bureaucrats can be roughly divided into three sections: a large minority, corrupt and affiliated with the former communist party, a large section of honest people who are too frightened to stand up to the political minority (who controls the office of the judiciary), and a minority of brave and honest men with little influence. Political and dishonest judges have an infallible method of silencing or discrediting opponents, political or otherwise. A bogus, secret indictment, the tapping of telephones, the conversations (often doctored) fed to the press who starts a smear campaign which raises the sales, a spectacular arrest, prolonged preventive detention under the worst possible conditions, third degree interrogations, and finally a trial that lasts many years ending in the acquittal of a ruined man. Spezi was lucky because the powerful Florentine public prosecutor is no friend of the Perugia one and, I am told, “suggested” that Spezi be freed: the Perugia court, I am told, accepted the “suggestion”.

  It may be of interest to know that miscarriages of justice in Italy (excluding acquittals with a ruined defendant) amount to four million and a half in fifty years.

  Yours sincerely,

  Neri Capponi

  P.S. If possible I would ask you to withhold my signature or reduce it to initials because I fear reprisals on myself and my family. If withholding my signature is not possible, then go ahead, God will look after me! The truth must out.

  The Atlantic printed the letter, with his name.

  The British newspaper the Guardian also ran an article on the case and interviewed Chief Inspector Giuttari. He said I had lied when I claimed to have been threatened with arrest if I returned to Italy, and he insisted that Spezi and I were still guilty of planting false evidence at the villa. “Preston did not tell the truth,” he said. “Our recordings will prove this. Spezi,” he insisted, “will be prosecuted.”

  The Atlantic article attracted the attention of a producer at Dat
eline NBC, who asked Mario and me to participate in a program on the Monster of Florence. I returned to Italy in September 2006 with some trepidation, traveling with the Dateline NBC film crew. My Italian lawyer had informed me that given Giuttari’s and Mignini’s legal troubles, it was probably safe to return, and NBC promised to raise hell if I were arrested at the airport. Just in case, an NBC television crew met me at the airport ready to capture my arrest on tape. I was glad to deprive them of that scoop.

  Spezi and I took Stone Phillips, the show’s anchor, to the scenes of the crimes, where we were filmed discussing the murders and our own brush with Italian law. Stone Phillips interviewed Giuttari, who continued to insist that Spezi and I had planted evidence at the villa. He also criticized our book. “Evidently, Mr. Preston did not do the least bit of fact-checking . . . In 1983, when the two young Germans were killed, this person [Antonio Vinci] was in prison for another crime unrelated to the monster crimes.” Phillips managed a brief interview with Antonio Vinci, off camera. Vinci confirmed what Giuttari said, that he had been in prison during one of the Monster’s killings. Perhaps Giuttari and Vinci didn’t expect NBC to check the facts. In the show, Stone Phillips said, “We later checked his record and found that [Antonio] had never been in jail during any of the Monster killings. He and Giuttari were either mistaken or lying about that.”