Pasquale Laporta, a Marshal of the Carabinieri, had the courage to say loud and clear “No, sir!” more than half a century ago, when there was no protection other than the integrity of one’s commanding officers. Worth remembering at a time when obedience has curdled into servility, while insubordination passes for a right. A Corps that no longer exists, in an Italy that is disappearing.(Versione italiana)
We arrived on April 10, 1965, in the early hours of the afternoon. After the final climb between two walls of carved rock, there it was—San Giovanni Rotondo, spread out beneath Monte Nero, Monte Castellana, and Monte Calvo, the highest peak on the Gargano.
My father had been assigned to command the local Carabinieri station. I knew only some of what had led us there, and only part of the role played by General Giovanni de Lorenzo, Commander General of the Corps, in an Italy already destined for decline—a decline fully visible to everyone today.
Some time earlier, an officer from the high command in Bari had called my father to ask whether he “would be pleased” to go to the “town of Padre Pio”—those were his exact words—and leave his station in Latiano, in the Brindisi area of Salento. I am sure the unusual procedure did not particularly strike my father, even though in those days no one could conceive of a senior officer lowering himself to “ask” a marshal whether he “would be pleased” to carry out an order. My father, however, was deeply moved by the destination itself. He accepted on the spot. He had been to San Giovanni Rotondo on September 10, 1949, for his honeymoon. My mother reminded me of that often. He asked only to be transferred there after the birth of his fourth child, Maurizio, expected in February. It was easy to accommodate him, since the colleague he was to replace was retiring at the end of March.
When Latiano learned of my father’s departure, many expressed regret—no small number of them among those he had prosecuted over nine years: murder suspects, cattle thieves, jewelry thieves, prostitution rings, fraudsters, loan sharks, and parties to a string of shootouts, both among criminals and against the Carabinieri themselves. He had prosecuted, but never persecuted, applying the law with humanity.
Three bicycles guaranteed the mobility of the four Carabinieri under his command. On those bikes they patrolled day and night, through town and countryside, with no fixed hours. My father often went out alone at night, on his bicycle, armed with a 9mm Beretta, model 1934, reassuring my mother: “Don’t worry—nobody will shoot me in the back.” In the back, never. He was never ambushed, not even at night while discreetly checking here and there; nonetheless he was involved in half a dozen shootouts with criminals caught in the act. He slept with his submachine gun—a MAB 38—beside the nightstand; I managed to peek at it and touch it only twice, drunk with curiosity. No particular fear drove him to that company, as he told my mother, who was horrified; yet he could never know what to expect when a call came in the night and there was no time to retrieve a weapon from the armory.
The Corps Will Be Pulled Back to the Castle Walls
After six years in San Giovanni Rotondo, in 1970 I decided to apply the following year to the Military Academy in Modena, for the Carabinieri track. To surprise my father, I submitted the application to the Corporal on duty while he was out. A few hours later, he summoned me through that same Corporal. To understand the nature of our relationship: I addressed him as “you” the way one might address a superior. In his presence I felt like an open book, and he was a man of few words. “Sit down,” he said as I walked in, pointing to a chair in front of his desk. That was usually the ritual prelude to a dressing-down—neither brief nor calm. Instead, he spoke to me with a smile: “You’ve put in an application for Modena, for the Carabinieri track.” He studied me for a moment; was he about to compliment me? Did he welcome the surprise? “I know you very well,” he said deliberately. “You, as a Carabinieri officer, with that temperament of yours, will get yourself into trouble whose consequences you cannot even begin to imagine.” The smile disappeared. I had no time to reply: “And you should know that the Corps is no longer what you think it is. And it will get worse. The Corps will be pulled back to the castle walls”—his tone suddenly shifted, his voice rising—“and what happens outside those walls will be of absolutely no concern to anyone!” The word “no” was capitalized; startling, because profanity was anything but welcome to him. It was 1970, and nothing in my knowledge could have given the slightest meaning to those words, even though I knew my father never spoke carelessly—which only multiplied my uncertainty.
With time I came to understand that his closeness to Padre Pio—an intimacy he cultivated at every opportunity—had led him to ask the friar how to guide me. In that moment, however, I understood nothing, absolutely nothing, in bold capitals. What did my father mean by the Carabinieri “on the castle walls”? It was clear he did not want me to join the Corps, and that surprised me; yet the reason remained entirely opaque to me, like a vast and unsettling blackboard. We sat in silence for a moment. He was watching me; I could not read his expression. He was not angry—far from it—I could feel how much he cared for me.
I’m not sure whether it was Padre Pio himself—who watched me sternly from the photograph behind my father’s desk, above a portrait of Giuseppe Saragat and Enrico Mino, below the Crucifix—but I had a quick, uncharacteristic thought: “Come on, it’s your father, he loves you—listen to him.” As if he had heard me, he handed me the form I had already filled out. I took the pen from his hand, crossed out “Carabinieri,” and wrote “Various Arms.” My father nodded: “Good. For you and for me. In time you will understand.”
Why Did They Change the Oath?
I entered the Academy a few months later. The Carabinieri cadets’ company was an elite selection I could have joined with my eyes closed, given my standing in the entrance exam. Once again I asked myself why my father had stopped me. I chafed all the more under the command of a foolish captain from Viterbo who called everyone from Rome south “terrone”—a slur for southerners—and I never missed a chance to let him know exactly what I thought of him, which earned me punishment after punishment. I spent two rather difficult years at the Academy, perpetually disciplined thanks to my charming captain, and on the verge of resigning. But I refused to let that fool win, so I spent my evenings in the music room (with its excellent stereo and record collection) and in the library, where I began a serious study of the Soviet Union and Soviet military strategy. I enjoyed it enormously, but the assignment—forced on me in some measure by my father’s intervention—left a bitter aftertaste for a long time.
I was eventually assigned to the Corps of Engineers; the work thrilled me, and the regrets evaporated. On March 16, 1978, sometime around mid-morning, I was at the officers’ club of the Vittorio Veneto barracks in Motta di Livenza—a charming little town in the Treviso area, on the banks of the Livenza River, which gives the town its name. My captain and I were having coffee while our soldiers rested briefly from the bridge-laying exercise we were about to resume on the river.
The radio announced the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and we were both stunned. We had repeatedly witnessed what security measures looked like around even the most minor undersecretary visiting the troops: armored vehicles and bodyguards wrapped around him as if he were behind enemy lines. How had it been possible to so easily abduct the de facto president-in-waiting, slated to succeed Giovanni Leone?
A further observation from my colleague struck me: “If they strike the President of the Senate, Amintore Fanfani, the Republic falls into the hands of the President of the Chamber, Pietro Ingrao—a Communist.”
I said nothing, but began preparing for the worst. In absolute secrecy, I drew up a simple but effective plan: identify the men, secure the weapons, ammunition, and explosives, and have everything ready to begin a resistance in the event of a coup. I had sworn an oath to the Republic; I was—and remain—bound by it.
On July 11, 1978, two months after the assassination of Aldo Moro, Law No. 382 was enacted—the “Principle Rules on Military Discipline”—altering the oath formula and dismantling the Military Disciplinary Code of 1964, a small masterpiece that had genuinely protected the dignity of servicemen. Until Law 382/78, one swore “loyalty to the Italian Republic and to its Head of State”; afterward, one swore “loyalty to the Constitution”—that is, to whoever happened to be in power. Was this a prelude to a coup? My alarm grew. Nothing apparently happened; I gradually calmed down. From that moment on, I never lost sight of the circles that had emerged from Aldo Moro’s death onward. I refreshed my studies of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and of the Soviet Spetsnaz—as I had begun doing on my own in Modena, to “study the enemy”—keeping myself occupied in the vast and well-stocked library on the evenings my beloved captain, with generous consistency, punished me and denied me leave. I bought and studied a notorious book of the time: “In Case of a Coup d’état: A Guerrilla Manual,” published by the communist Savelli press. “Fight the enemy with his own weapons,” I thought—and stayed on alert.
A People Crushed Between Landowners and Corrupts
That summer I had no chance to speak with my father because we did not take a vacation; I had the conversation instead the following year, when he had been retired for two years. It turned to Aldo Moro, and I told him about the exchange I’d had on March 16—without revealing my heroic neo-partisan plans. He looked at me with evident pain, his sad smile unforgettable: “You see I was right?” Once again I did not fully understand: “They killed General Enrico Mino, they sidelined General de Lorenzo and then General Vito Miceli, then they killed Moro after isolating him completely. Without the complicity of senior figures inside the Corps, it would have been impossible.” The words he had spoken the day I submitted my Academy application came back to me, and I began to connect the pieces. We had a long conversation—long, at least, by his standards, since he was rather sparing with words.
I finally asked him why, at the end of September 1963, I had been left behind. He had been transferred from Latiano to Iglesias, in Sardinia, within a single day—today that seems unimaginable; back then it happened precisely that way: we received the news in the morning before lunch. The following day my father left for Iglesias. I had just started the school year and there was no time to arrange enrollment elsewhere. In any case, where? In Iglesias? I was placed with a kind woman, and they all disappeared within hours: my father to Sardinia; my mother, my brother Giuseppe, and my sister Anna went to Putignano, guests of Aunt Maria and Uncle Ciccio, two unforgettable figures—two guardian angels.
To be clear: I was the only one delighted by that family upheaval. I was not yet fourteen, left on my own, looked after by Angela, a wonderful woman who made sure I lacked for nothing and did not keep too close an eye on me; I was intoxicated with freedom.
My father had never given me details about what happened. But that day in 1979, he opened up. Latiano lived on agriculture—grapes, tobacco, wheat, almonds, and dried figs—with its attendant artisan trade. Power rested with the “beati possidentes”—a small number of local notables, as was common in southern towns at the time, and to a considerable extent still today. To escape, there were four or five paths: land a government job, emigrate to work at Fiat or abroad, become an entrepreneur, become a criminal, or both. The labor shortage caused by emigration should have made life easier for the farmhands who remained. It did not, not at all. The machine that ground down the poor was explained to my father by a cobbler, Luigi Zacheo, secretary of the local Italian Communist Party chapter. My father was supposed to monitor him because a Carabinieri circular required it, as he was a prominent Communist activist. He was above all a sharp mind and an honest person, my father certified. Everything revolved, Zacheo explained, around credit that slid into usury, enslaving entire families to “caporali”—labor bosses—behind whom stood notables with clean hands. A farmhand, to find work, surrendered part of his wage to the caporale; the amount was set by the caporale himself, without negotiation, calibrated to undercut any rival boss who might be more profitable for the landowner. When that happened, there were brawls, stabbings, and shootings in what people called the “piazza del sangue”—the square of blood—where today a statue stands to commemorate Blessed Bartolo Longo. Alongside the caporalato ran freelance crime: prostitution, theft, extortion, robbery, often degenerating into murder, not excluding the occasional alliance of convenience with one powerful faction or another.
The cobbler was not a spy or an informer; he helped my father read the events unfolding around him. There were plenty of informers among the criminals, who were inclined to wage war on one another. The priority was prevention—a firm hand with repeat offenders and, above all, stopping troubled young men from being recruited into criminal organizations. My father did not play dirty. Honesty and loyalty were non-negotiable for him. No one was ever tortured under his watch, as happened and still happens. No one was ever set up with fabricated evidence, as happened and still happens. Everything went more or less well until the summer of 1963.
A Burned Door Announces a Storm
After my middle-school exams, I was waiting for the end of July to go to Putignano, to Aunt Maria and Uncle Ciccio’s trulli. I waited in vain, along with my siblings; the tension at home was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and we children could not understand why.
My father unexpectedly suggested I spend two weeks at the Stella Maris summer camp in Campomarino, on the Ionian Sea. It had been founded and was run by the unforgettable parish priest of the local church, Don Giovanni Mauro, and was available in summer to young members of Catholic Action and to the needy. We were about thirty boys and had a wonderful time—a gorgeous sea, wholesome food, boisterous games, and daily prayers. By evening we arrived exhausted, collapsing onto our beds. One of the last nights, however, I lay awake with the window open, through which the two Catholic Action delegates who supervised us were having a conversation outside. I sensed they were talking about my father; I strained to listen and clearly heard one of them say: “We will get Marshal Laporta transferred, since he refuses to understand.” When I returned home, I tore up my Catholic Action membership card and told my father. He asked for the name of the one who had spoken and said nothing more. As I already mentioned, two weeks after starting high school, my father was transferred to Iglesias within twenty-four hours.
“Why were you transferred to Sardinia?” I finally asked, after so many years, knowing this time he would answer me.
One of Latiano’s criminals had severely intimidated four farmhands who were causing problems for a local notable who was not paying their wages. The unfortunate men had finally bowed to the threats of T***. Everyone in town knew how it had gone; no one was filing a complaint or coming forward as a witness. What is more, the notable—notorious for his tightfistedness—had not paid T*** the full agreed amount for the dirty work, so T*** cleaned out one of his farmhouses and cut down three fairly young olive trees. There were countless centuries-old trees on the property, and the warning was clear: if you don’t pay, I’ll cut down the rest.
The notable showed up at the station demanding that my father act against T***. He obviously said nothing of the background and produced no evidence. My father conducted an investigation; he identified a couple of farmhands who knew the details but made no admissions, letting him understand only in confidence what had occurred. The threatened farmhands admitted to the facts, but no one would sign anything; each insisted on speaking with my father alone, without witnesses.
My father dragged his feet; it was not easy to persuade people to talk, and he was inclined in the end to let the matter drop. Rumors were not evidence, and the facts presented by the complainant were plainly missing too much truth. He drafted his report for the magistrate and his command. The complaining notable found out, returned to the station in protest, and left with a warning: “We’ll talk again soon!”
Two nights later, the front door of our home was badly burned. A carpenter across from the station, known as Mestru Llucciu, was called in; the door was repaired. My father paid the craftsman and said nothing. He said nothing to his superior command, which had evidently informed the landowner about the complaint.
A lieutenant appeared at the station. He was well aware of the damage to the door and of the whole affair; he was even informed of the existence of two new witnesses: “And why haven’t you identified them?” My father did not hesitate: “Because they are false witnesses.” The lieutenant ignored this: “That’s not your concern. I am ordering you to arrest T*** and make him confess by any means necessary.”
“No, sir.”
“What did you just s—? Did I hear you correctly? Obey!”
“You heard perfectly, Lieutenant: No. Sir. As long as I command here, we do not do things like that.”
My father’s office was separated from our family’s kitchen only by a door. We heard the lieutenant screaming like a madman: “You will do what I order, or I’ll have you shipped off to Sardinia!” My mother had gone white; I could not understand what was happening.
A few days later the order arrived: my father was to “immediately” surrender command of the station to his corporal and depart the following day for Iglesias. Minutes after he read the transfer order, the lieutenant called: “So—have you changed your mind?” My father did not let him finish: “No, sir”—and hung up the phone.
An unforgettable whirlwind began, for which my father seemed oddly prepared. A Fiat 1800 arrived; he first drove me to Francavilla Fontana, to Angela. The same car then took my mother, my sister Anna, and my brother Pino to Putignano, to Aunt Maria and Uncle Ciccio’s house. The next day my father traveled to Brindisi, then to Bari, then to Rome, then to Civitavecchia, and finally boarded the ferry to Sardinia and continued on to Iglesias.
In Front Of General de Lorenzo
Communications among us depended entirely on telephone—still rather primitive in those days. Then things went from bad to worse. My sister was admitted shortly afterward to the Bari polyclinic with a very serious illness. My mother, pregnant, made constant trips between Putignano and Bari. She bombarded the Carabinieri Legion in Bari with daily calls. Her contacts there kept soothing her with empty words. My mother knew the details of the dirty affair and threatened every day to expose them to the press. My father had expressly forbidden her to do so—the Corps must not be tarnished because of scoundrels—and so my mother’s threats, however alarming at first, soon proved as futile as her desperate phone calls. Her interlocutor went on placating her without giving her a second thought.
My father had requested an audience at every level of the chain of command. Before going to the final authority, he called me and asked me to relay a message to the lieutenant: it was pointless to keep him in Iglesias, because what the lieutenant wanted done would never happen—my father would testify in court.
I remember repeating the words my father had dictated to me several times, having written them down to relay them faithfully, even though I did not fully grasp them.
The lieutenant received me with the condescension befitting a small boy. I delivered my father’s message; he was briefly taken aback, then dismissed me: “Your father stays in Sardinia.”
My father requested an audience with the Commander General of the Corps, Giovanni de Lorenzo. Several weeks passed and then the summons arrived to Rome, where he arrived the previous day after disembarking at Civitavecchia. Early in the morning he presented himself at Viale Romania, where the Corps General Command has its headquarters. The appointment was at eleven, but he refused to risk being even a minute late. At eleven o’clock sharp he entered the Commander’s office.
“It was an enormous office. De Lorenzo was standing, wearing his monocle, the fingertips of both hands resting on the desk. After I introduced myself, he said only one word: ‘Speak.’” My father recounted this as though he had relived the scene a thousand times. “As I spoke, I felt reassured—he had a stern but honest face. I noticed among his decorations one that matched mine; we had both fought in the Russian campaign. I felt at ease; while the aide-de-camp took notes, I laid out all the facts, the names, the circumstances. I told him how I had been transferred to Sardinia. I made a brief mention of your mother’s condition and Anna’s—only a brief mention. I was detailed on the facts and the individuals—nothing more. I also relayed the message I had entrusted to you for the lieutenant.” My father smiled cheerfully. “He dismissed me with a nod of his head, without a word, without a sound—not a single muscle in de Lorenzo’s face moved. All the confidence I had felt at the start vanished; I was convinced I had hit another dead end—the final one, sealing disaster for the family, for me, and for all of you.”
After Despair, Justice
My father continued to smile as he described his despair, which left me slightly dazed: “The return journey was hellish. I didn’t sleep a wink, asking myself what would become of me and all of you. I was desperate; Anna in the hospital, your mother expecting Maurizio, Pino with the aunts and uncle, you in Francavilla.” He repeated “I was desperate” many times, then said with an unforgettable smile: “If I hadn’t had faith in God, I would have killed myself. Through the entire night I prayed, calling on Padre Pio, while I was tempted to throw myself off the ferry.” And he continued, inexplicably, to smile. “When I arrived in Iglesias and went to my room, there was an envelope on the bed: I was ordered to return ‘immediately’ to Latiano, resume command of the station, and await a new assignment.” At that point we were both laughing: “I went down on my knees to thank Almighty God, who had heard my prayers. When I reached Latiano, the lieutenant had already left for Iglesias. I can’t be certain, but I believe our ferries crossed paths.”
De Lorenzo had put the entire chain of command on the boil. Confirmation came a few days later in the form of a honeyed phone call from the head of personnel, asking him: “Would you be pleased to go to the town of Padre Pio?” It was the same officer who had repeatedly strung my mother along.
“When the SIFAR–de Lorenzo scandal broke, I didn’t know what to think. In August 1968, a month before Padre Pio died, an officer from the general command asked me to help arrange a meeting with Padre Pio; he was anguished, deeply anguished. We were both witnesses to extraordinary events when Padre Pio assured him of his protection. He confided to me what was happening inside the Corps and was convinced it was an unstoppable decline. He confirmed to me that General Giovanni de Lorenzo was a man of honor.” My father then shared with me what he had been told, after I gave him my word not to reveal it. I could not have imagined how useful it would prove for “reading” reality without prejudice, when I later found myself at the Military Policy Office of the Defense General Staff.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
And yet, despite all he had told me, I was still convinced that my father had overreacted in discouraging me from joining the Corps. Of course I held nothing against him—he had done it for my own good, after all—but still, he had overreacted.
It took years to understand that he had done it for my good and that, no, he had not overreacted at all. Everything he told me is coming to pass. Day after day we have seen commanders conspire to seize power at any cost. We have seen Marshal Antonino Lombardo, driven to suicide and forgotten like a dog on a highway. We have seen commanders genuflecting before anti-mafia campaigns that reek of the same perfect symmetry that Ennio Flaiano and Mino Maccari denounced in fascism and anti-fascism alike. We have seen commanders who claimed not to know that Stefano Cucchi had been tortured, offloading responsibility onto the most marginal members of a broken-down cart. We have seen commanders review their troops while led on a leash by a corporal from the co-determination committee. We have seen commanders indignant because the unions got involved, forgetting the miserable quality of their own command. We have seen commanders ignore the suicides of Carabinieri. We have seen commanders shirk moral responsibility for sexual violence committed by non-commissioned officers whose sense of honor and discipline perfectly mirrors the decadence in the upper ranks. We have seen commanders look the other way in the face of homicides.
We have seen commanders order raids on churches, trampling the laws and the Constitution to which they swore an oath. We have seen commanders express solidarity with a general whose past is shrouded in darkness, and fall silent before the house arrest at the beach of an American murderer who gutted Carabinieri Corporal Cerciello like an animal. This long list of outrages must be updated frequently, enriched by episodes ever more disgusting than those before.
These filthy acts are justified with the last refuge of scoundrels: rhetoric. “We are trained to obey in silence” and “we risk our lives”—neglecting to add “the lives of others.” For never have so many Carabinieri been seen on the streets, with helicopters, as in these days of constitutional outrages; never have so many been seen raiding drug distribution points, protecting homes violated by murderous thieves and robbers. Never have commanders been seen defending the work of their own men—work undone by lax judges.
The Corps’ motto “Faithful Through the Centuries” demands a question: Faithful to whom?
My father, if anyone ventured to say “Carabinieri and Police,” would cut them off abruptly, whoever they might be: “We are not the same thing: the police answer to the Government; the Carabinieri answer to the State.” Today the Carabinieri are pulled back to the castle walls, defending those who insult the Constitution, standing shoulder to shoulder with the State Police—which, all things considered, has at least always been consistent in its role as a government instrument. What are we to conclude but that we have a pointless duplication of police forces? “Divide and rule?” Come now, let us be serious: the zeal of both sides could only be doubled by merging them, while saving what is being squandered. Is this truly what the real Carabinieri want—those still existing and still at work, who in silence perform and wish to perform their duty to the fullest, whatever the cost, just as my father did?
It may happen that circumstances bring an officer before the choice of whether or not to betray his oath of loyalty. In such a case, it would be desirable for those responsible to have the decency to follow the example of Commander Carlo Fecia di Cossato—a dignity nonetheless recovered by countless ordinary Carabinieri who took their own lives, innocent and dignified victims to whom our respectful thoughts go.
Commanders, if you are incapable of restoring the spirit of the Corps beyond empty rhetorical displays, if you cannot put a bullet in your own temple, at least fill out a resignation letter and retire with a generous pension. That would be the desirable course of action for the good of the Fatherland, the Constitution, and whatever remains of the Corps—now perfectly ready to merge with the State Police, doubling the zeal of that ramshackle Italian constabulary.
