Costa 08 - City of Fear (51 page)

In March 1979, Pecorelli was murdered in the Prati district of Rome. The distinctive ammunition that killed him proved to be easily traceable. The journalist was assassinated by the Banda della Magliana, a group involved with all three arms of the Italian organized crime community, the Cosa Nostra, Camorra, and ’Ndrangheta, as well as a number of Fascist groups and the notorious P2 Masonic Lodge. The four bullets that killed Mino Pecorelli came from a cache of arms hidden in the basement of the Italian Health Ministry in Rome. The Mafia informant, Tommaso Buscetta, who grew up in Palermo and was later associated with the New York Gambino crime family in the United States, testified in Palermo in 1993 that Pecorelli was killed as a favor to Giulio Andreotti, on the orders of two Mafia cousins, Nino and Ignazio Salvo, who were the links between organized crime and Andreotti’s Christian Democratic Party.

Buscetta was one of the first and most important Mafia members to break the code of
omertà
. His testimony, to two judges who would later be murdered by the Mafia, resulted in the imprisonment of almost 350 gang members. It also served to increase the pressure on Giulio Andreotti.

The former prime minister denied ever having met the Salvo cousins. However, two photographs showing him with Nino Salvo were found in the archives of Letizia Battaglia, the legendary Sicilian photographer
who has spent a career documenting the lives and deaths of the Mafia and their victims.

In 1995, five years after he first confirmed the existence of Gladio, the man who was a giant of postwar Italian politics was charged with ordering Pecorelli’s assassination out of fear that the journalist was about to reveal damning information confirming his connections to organized crime. Andreotti was acquitted in 1999 but found guilty on appeal in 2003. At the age of eighty-three he was sentenced to twenty-four years in jail. He was then immediately released pending a further appeal, and one year later was acquitted of all charges.

After Andreotti finally confirmed the existence of Gladio, the European Parliament drafted a resolution criticizing the fact that “these organizations operated and continue to operate completely outside the law since they are not subject to any parliamentary control.” It went on to call for “a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of those clandestine organizations.” Since that call was issued in 1990, only Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland have carried out parliamentary investigations.

Apart from the Quirinale Palace and the Ministry of the Interior, most of the government buildings featured in this book are imaginary. The Quirinale is open to the public once a week, on most Sunday mornings. The visit includes the Salone dei Corazzieri and is one of the great sights of Rome—a free one too.

The real-life tomb of the Blue Demon lies close to the Etruscan necropolis site on the outskirts of Tarquinia, and was discovered in 1995. At the time of writing, it is one of the few tombs on the site that is closed to the general public.

DAVID HEWSON is the author of eleven novels. Formerly a weekly columnist for
The Sunday Times
, he lives in Kent, England, where he is at work on his next crime novel,
The Fallen Angel
.