Mauro De Mauro was an Italian investigative journalist. Originally a supporter of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, De Mauro eventually became a journalist with the left-leaning newspaper L’Ora in Palermo. He disappeared in September 1970 and his body has never been found. The disappearance and probable death of the "inconvenient journalist" (giornalista scomodo) – as he became known as a result of his investigative reporting – remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in modern Italian history.
De Mauro was kidnapped on the evening of 16 September 1970, while coming back home from work, in the via delle Magnolie in Palermo. In response, thousands of police and Carabinieri, equipped with helicopters and dogs, combed Sicily in vain in search of the reporter. De Mauro's body has never been found, a victim of the so-called lupara bianca, despite intensive search efforts assisted by top-level forces from Rome and even a special investigative committee of the Italian Parliament.
Over the years, the investigations into De Mauro's disappearance by the Carabinieri and the police followed widely divergent leads. Colonel Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and Captain Giuseppe Russo of the Carabinieri were among the first to work on the case. Years later, and in different circumstances, both were murdered by the Mafia. They focused on the lead of drug trafficking. According to them, De Mauro would have been a victim of lupara bianca after discovering leads on drug trafficking by the Mafia between Sicily and the US.
The first inquiries of the police by Bruno Contrada and Boris Giuliano instead focused on the lead of De Mauro's investigations into the death of Mattei, prompted by the disappearance a few pages of notes and a tape of Mattei's last speech from De Mauro's office. The investigations were seriously hampered due to deviations by people within the Italian police and secret services. According to police inspector Giuliano, there was "someone at the ministry in Rome that does not want to go to the bottom of the death of De Mauro.” According to Giuliano, an order to scale down the investigation was issued by the head of the secret service, Vito Micelli, allegedly involved in the Borghese coup. Miceli had been in contact with the mafiosi Di Cristina and Giuseppe Calderone, who wanted to support the coup, which was scheduled for December 1970.
The disappearance of De Mauro remained a mystery and the focus of many speculations. In May 1994, Buscetta declared that the Sicilian Mafia had been involved in the murder of Mattei, and that De Mauro had been killed for investigating that murder. According to Buscetta, Mattei was killed at the request of the American Mafia because his oil policies had hurt U.S. interests in the Middle East. The American Mafia in turn was possibly doing a favour to the Seven Sisters.
Buscetta claimed that Mattei's death was organized by Mafia bosses Di Cristina, Salvatore Greco "Ciaschiteddu", and Stefano Bontade at the request of Angelo Bruno, a Sicilian born Mafia boss from Philadelphia. Gaetano Iannì, another pentito, declared that a special agreement had been reached between the Sicilian Mafia and "some foreigners" for the elimination of Mattei, which was organized by Di Cristina. These statements triggered new inquiries, including the exhumation of Mattei's corpse.
Buscetta claimed that Bontade organized De Mauro's kidnap, because his investigations into the death of Mattei came very close to the Mafia, and to Bontade in particular. Another pentito, Francesco Di Carlo, declared in 2001 that De Mauro was killed because he had learned that one of his former fascist friends, Prince Borghese, was involved in the planned 1970 coup with like-minded army officers, determined to stop what they considered as Italy's drift to the left. Yet another pentito, Rosario Naimo, who started to collaborate with the Italian authorities after his arrest in October 2010, said that the journalist was killed because of his investigative reporting that damaged the Mafia.
The order for De Mauro's killing came from the heads of the Sicilian Mafia Commission, Bontade, Gaetano Badalamenti and Salvatore Riina, according to Di Carlo and Buscetta. Both Di Carlo and Naimo say that De Mauro was kidnapped by Emanuele D'Agostino, a mafioso from Bontade's Santa Maria di Gesù crime family.
According to Di Carlo, the remains of De Mauro were buried under a bridge over the Oreto River near Palermo. However, the police, after a search, did not find the body. The pentito Francesco Marino Mannoia later claimed that had been ordered by Bontade in 1977 or 1978 to dig up several bodies at the bridge and dissolve them in acid. According to the new testimony of Naimo, De Mauro was taken to a terrain in Pallavicino neighbourhood in Palermo where the Mafia boss Francesco Madonia owned a chicken farm. He was killed there and dumped in a pit.
In 2001, as a result of the declarations of Di Carlo, the judicial inquiry was reopened. In April 2006, more than 35 years after De Mauro's disappearance, the trial on his murder started at the Court of Palermo with the former Mafia boss of bosses Riina as the only remaining defendant. (D'Agostino and Bontate were killed by Riina's Corleonesi in the Second Mafia War; Badalamenti died in a US prison in April 2004.) In 2011 the new Mafia turncoat Naimo testified at the trial saying that the journalist was killed by the Mafia on the orders of Riina.
The "inconvenient journalist" (giornalista scomodo), as De Mauro had become known, was kidnapped and killed because the Mafia and their backers wanted to know his sources of confidential and potentially devastating information, public prosecutor Antonio Ingroia told the court in his closing speech in March 2011. "The death sentence on De Mauro was passed because of a convergence of two elements," Ingroia said. Riina, Bontade and Badalamenti decided to eliminate De Mauro because he was about to go public about Mattei's 1962 murder as a result of research for Francesco Rosi's landmark movie, as well as the fact the journalist had uncovered the plans for staging the Mafia-backed far-right Borghese coup d'état, thanks to his former wartime Fascist connections.
"De Mauro was very busy piecing together the elements of the plot, and his death stopped it being uncovered," according to Ingroia. "The other 'convergent' element in his death was the fact that he knew, from its inception, about the subversive project involving spies, neofascists and Mafia groups," to stage the Borghese Coup," Ingroia said. "From his sources in neofascist circles, from his past in Prince Junio Valerio Borghese's crack Decima Mas unit, as well as from tip-offs from Mafia boss Emanuele D'Agostino, he knew something was in the offing".
The "preventive crime" might even have had other motives, such as other events that concerned the "friends in Rome" of the Corleonesi headed by Riina, as emerged from documents retrieved from the former mayor of Palermo, Vito Ciancimino. Cosa Nostra was behind the murder of De Mauro, but there were other backgrounds and individuals, allied with the Mafia, such as deviated freemasons and corrupt public officials. "De Mauro was not killed out of revenge, but to prevent harm to the Mafia. The Mafia did not just execute instructions of others, but also because his investigations affected Cosa Nostra itself and other powers associated with it," according to Ingroia. He said the investigations for the trial had unearthed an "institutional cover-up" in the initial probe into De Mauro's disappearance.
On 10 June 2011, Riina was acquitted of charges for ordering the kidnap and killing of De Mauro by the Court in Palermo because of insufficient evidence. "It's certainly a surprise, but we'll see the reasons for this ruling," said Franca De Mauro, daughter of the journalist. "I am very upset because after 40 years we still have no answer about what happened that day." In their explanation of the ruling that became public in August 2012, the judges of the Court of Palermo decided that De Mauro had died because he had gone too far in his quest for the truth about the last hours of Mattei in Sicily. They pointed to Graziano Verzotto as a possible man behind the killing of De Mauro and Mattei, but without a clear conviction. Verzotto had died in June 2010.
The prosecution, which had requested a further life term for Riina, appealed against the acquittal. The appeal trial began in April 2013. On 27 January 2014, the Palermo Appeal Court confirmed the acquittal of Riina. The court was convinced of the involvement of Cosa Nostra in De Mauro's murder, but attributed the murder to the group that was headed by Stefano Bontade and identified the likely motive in the discovery by the journalist of important facts about the death of ENI president Enrico Mattei. There was insufficient evidence for the involvement of Riina, due to contradictory evidence, lack of clarity of the evidence gathered and conflicting statements by government witnesses, in particular those of Di Carlo.
In June 2015, Riina was absolved by the court of last instance, the supreme Court of Cassation. The evidence collected by the prosecution did not allow to establish a direct or indirect role of the accused in the crime. The Court concluded, however, that De Mauro most likely had been killed by the Mafia because he knew of their involvement in Enrico Mattei's death, rather than the Borghese coup attempt. De Mauro's disappearance and likely death remains one of the unsolved mysteries in Italian history. The Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia once summarised the puzzle of De Mauro's death: "He said the right thing to the wrong man and the wrong thing to the right man."
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