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How P2 and its fascist henchmen murdered Pasolini
Published on Thursday, 05 April 2012 13:16 Written by Alfio Bernabei
Neofascists played a role in the killing of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the writer and film director, who was found battered to death on the night of 1 November 1975 on a stretch of beach at Ostia, near Rome.
Thirty seven years after the event that shook Italy’s cultural and political world, a picture is gradually taking shape of a planned execution carried out by a gang of up to six people. At least two of them frequented a branch of the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), the party founded after the Second World War by the diehard nazifascists of Mussolini’s Salò Republic.
Some testimonies also point to links with individuals who were later to be found connected to the terrorist organisation Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR – Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari), as well as with the Roman underworld associated to the far right, in particular the Banda della Magliana, a criminal gang that was subsequently named during investigations into some notorious murders, including those of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the banker Roberto Calvi.
Pino Pelosi, the only man convicted for the killing
The disappearance of documents belonging to Pasolini, and the hastily discarded testimonies gathered by an undercover agent who obtained confessions from the two neofascists of responsibility in the murder, also cast doubts on the role of the Italian Secret Service and members of the judiciary. Both were at the time heavily infiltrated by P2 (Propaganda Due), a Masonic lodge that was using rightwing terrorists and petty criminals to carry out atrocities and executions as part of the so-called “strategy of tension”.
Suspicion is mounting that Pasolini’s murder was carried out within the framework of P2’s plans to subvert the constitutional order. According to the 1981-1984 parliamentary investigation led by the MP Tina Anselmi, P2 was acting as a clandestine “parallel government” or “a State within the State”.
Interest in Pasolini’s murder was reignited last December when Pino Pelosi burst into a crowded room during the presentation of a book in Rome and announced that the killer was still alive. Pelosi, now 53, was arrested on the night of the crime and told police he had acted on his own to protect himself from sexual advances. He was 17 at the time. With his nine and a half year jail sentence well behind him, Pelosi is now admitting that he was used by people who had devised a plan to silence the author.
At the time of his death Pasolini was vehemently attacking destructive forces in Italian society which, in his opinion, were creating a wasteland for a whole generation of young people, a process amounting to a kind of mental rape for which much of the responsibility rested with the politically corrupt ruling Christian Democratic Party and its cronies.
In books and articles he was proclaiming the need to put “the State on trial”, by which he probably meant the entire Cabinet, the heads of the then publicly owned companies and a large chunk of the military and even of the judiciary. Endowed with a clear insight into the riddles and obfuscations of power games, he was convinced that Enrico Mattei, President of ENI, the Italian Petrol Company, had been assassinated in a staged plane crash. A book he was working on at the time of his death, Petrolio (Oil), published posthumously, dealt with the Mattei affair. After Pasolini’s murder 78 pages disappeared from the only manuscript in existence. They have never been found.
Rumours have circulated for years that the man who took over from Mattei, Eugenio Cefis, was the real head of the P2 Masonic Lodge, part of the Stay Behind/Gladio organisation. The purpose of this network was to prevent the Communist Party from gaining enough strength to form a government. Among the “gladiators’” tasks was to maintain a climate of fear through terrorist acts with the objective of making a military intervention appear justifiable for the restoration of law and order.
Acting through a variety of neo-Nazi outfits, the P2/Stay Behind/Gladio network was targeting those who were getting too close to unmasking its plotters at the top. Journalists and leftwing investigative magistrates were the victims of attacks and assassinations. As a novelist and film maker reaching for truths outside the purely forensic, Pasolini could be perceived even as a bigger threat. Moreover, he had a huge following among the intelligentsia. Though capable of embarrassing blunders, like his servile interview with the poet Ezra Pound, his firm stance against fascism was to be found in virtually every book he wrote. Many of his films also focused on a critique of oppressive forces, whether in the shape of social conventions (Theorem, Pigsty) or perverse political power (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom).
At the time of his death he was completing the latter film, perhaps the most eloquent and disturbing attack on fascism in the history of cinema. The plot dealt with the sexual components of power and its maintenance taken to murderous extreme. Using the literary framework of one of the Marquis de Sade’s libertine novels, he was showing how even sophisticated cultures ranking high in the production of the arts – music, literature, architecture, all referred to in the film – can succumb to the unscrupulous manipulation of power hungry thugs who, by imposing their will on supine populations, can abuse and destroy whole generations.
With unprecedented directness, Pasolini was warning audiences that while nazifascist threats can be easily detected when dressed up in the conventional garbs of brutal domination, enabling a counter reaction, it is far more dangerous when the process of subjugation is carried out in ritualistic forms of apparent ordinariness by seemingly innocuous people, until they turn into monsters, by which time it’s too late and everyone feels complicit and compromised with the fait accompli. This is why the message of Salò was and remains so shocking.
Particularly in Italy, where no purge had occurred after the Second World War, the film contained an exhortation to remain vigilant about nazifascists lurking in every office, in every street, in schools, at newspaper desks, among intellectuals and in the Church.
Seen in the light of Pelosi’s most recent revelations, Pasolini’s murder was planned with extreme care. First, there was the theft of film cans from the shooting of Salò. Pasolini wanted to retrieve the material. The youth he had befriended, Pelosi, already in contact with petty criminals and neofascists, was probably used as the go-between to let the author know that the cans could be retrieved, but if he called the police or made too much noise everything would be destroyed. As Pasolini and Pelosi remained in contact, the chances were that sooner or later the latter would entice the homosexual author to some secluded place where the killers could step in and commit the crime undetected, thus allowing the “killed by his own depravity” version of events to prevail in the investigations and in popular belief.
On the night of 1 November Pasolini and Pelosi drove to a beach in Ostia. Pelosi now says that soon after they parked, a scooter arrived with two men. Then a car pulled in with three or four men on board and finally a second car arrived carrying only its driver. “We had been followed all the way”, Pelosi says. The trap having been set, Pasolini was savagely beaten up. One of the cars drove repeatedly over his body to crush the thorax and make sure he was dead.
Police examine the murder scene on a beach at Ostia
Pelosi maintains that he took the blame for the killing because his family received threats. At his trial it was found that he could not have acted alone. No investigations followed to find his accomplices. A confession of responsibility in the crime obtained by a lone undercover policeman, Renzo Sansone, who questioned two brothers, Giuseppe and Franco Borsellino, was quickly discarded. Pelosi now confirms the two brothers, who frequented the MSI branch in the Tiburtino district of Rome, were indeed present at the scene of the killing. Among others named is a man called Sergio Pinna, who vanished soon after, never to be found again, and Giuseppe Mastini, still in jail because of a string of murders.
According to some testimonies, Mastini’s links with neofascists went as far as being friendly with Gilberto Cavallini who was to become one of the leaders of NAR, the nazifascist armed group whose members were later to be found guilty of the 1980 Bologna massacre in which the P2/Gladio organisation was involved.
There are many aspects of Pasolini’s murder that are still unclear. But little doubt remains that those who decided to silence him relied on some neofascists for his execution.
