the comment
NoonJanuary 18, 2023 – 1:07 pm
The investigations that led to the arrest of the boss Messina Denaro, speak the screenwriters of the fiction on the general killed by the mafia
Of Peppe Fiore and Monica Zapelli
NIn the sensational arrest of Mattia Messina Denaro a parable takes place that crosses the darkest pages of the country’s history. Thousands of victimsme, biographies broken by a destruction that has overwhelmed political alignments, established orders and state powers, fueled only by their own blind desire for power. One of these biographies is the one we have tried to reconstruct in the television series Our Generalthe story of the last ten years of the life of Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa.
That is the man who defeated the BR in Italy, before assuming the role of Prefect of Palermo: his death sentence.
The stature of civil hero, which also has engraved his name in the collective imagination of the country, has over the years obscured one of the most modern features of the figure of the general: from the Church he was first and foremost a great intelligence theorist. On this historic day, all the leaders of the Arma and in particular the Ros – which directly inherits the experience of the anti-terrorism units founded by the general – give him credit by evoking the method from the Church, which proved to be fundamental in the capture of the boss.
Indeed, in the frame of Messina Denaro in line at the hospital for chemotherapy, who is followed by a carabiniere who in turn pretends to be a patient, in that clockwork arrest carried out without fanfare, but with thousands of silent hours of investigation behind it , we felt like we were reliving one of the terrorist captures we covered in our series.
The modernity of Dalla Chiesa’s methods – one of the aspects that most fascinated us in this incredible Italian story – comes from afar: from the years of the Resistance which would have marked his character and values so deeply. after 1943, when he went underground, a partisan carabiniere, who from the Church perfected guerrilla techniques in the field and developed his attention to the silent study of the enemy and to the observation of the territory. The countryside of Ascoli Piceno is his Nunziatella (a shortcoming, that of the official cursus studiorum, which over the years many superiors hostile to him will not fail to make him weigh).
But the real laboratory of the method are probably the years as a colonel in Sicily between 1966 and 1973. For a return from the Church, but since the 1950s of Luciano Liggio the mafia has evolved, no longer para-banditry, it is organizing itself into a structured and hierarchical model that looks at procurement and politics. Dalla Chiesa was the first to understand it, and he repeated it to the point of exhaustion to the anti-mafia commission: to investigate Cosa Nostra, one must think in an excellent systemic way, not limit oneself to a single murder, a single retaliation, but to contextualize the crimes in a broader design. the pre-eminence of intelligence over the search for the immediate operational result: a work of study and observation, which the Church will never be able to finish because in 1973 he will be sent to Turin to deal with a new national emergency.
And here, as a general, I will apply the same approach half experimented with the Cosa Nostra to the fight against subversion. This time, with full powers or almost. Absolutely unprecedented investigative techniques in Italy are born from here. The eternal mapping of hideouts, even with innovative IT tools, the shadowing to reconstruct the structure of the Red Brigades’ cells, the infiltrations in collectives, factories and universities (You have to think like them), the endless stalking in whales, the vans equipped with telephoto and transmitters. And then, the theory of the green branches: postponing an easy arrest if it can serve to draw the map of relationships of that specific militant, and therefore to reconstruct the opponent’s strategy.
Again, the systems approach. Even at the cost of frustrations, sleepless nights, endless waiting.
But there is a deeper layer that has to do with the ethics of the investigation, not considering the opponent as an object to be annihilated, but as an enemy who is owed respect for the rules. Because, let us not forget, even if no one had officially declared it, even if we fought not in the trenches but on the sidewalks of the metropolis, that was a war. Hence the recommendations – After you have arrested them, you must be able to eat a sandwich together – hence the excerpts of humanity between the carabinieri and red brigade members even in the darkest moments, hence the general’s paternal emotion in front of the poor body of Mara Cagol. This too was the method of the Church. Something that has to do with remaining human, despite everything, that we have tried to convey in our story. And that somehow obscurely rhymes today, fifty years later, with Messina Denaro’s note at the time of his arrest.
The carabinieri treated me well.
January 18, 2023 | 1:07 pm
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