Mauro De Mauro (; 6 September 1921 – disappeared 16 September 1970) 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.
Several explanations for De Mauro's disappearance are current. One is related to the death of Enrico Mattei, the president of Italy's state-owned oil and gas conglomerate Eni. Another is that De Mauro had discovered a drug trafficking network between Sicily and the United States. A third explanation links his disappearance with the Golpe Borghese, a 1970 foiled right-wing coup d'état. De Mauro was apparently convinced that he had got hold of a story of a lifetime and had told colleagues at L'Ora, "I have a scoop that is going to shake Italy."Revealed: how story of Mafia plot to launch coup cost reporter his life , The Independent on Sunday, 19 June 2005 De Mauro ucciso per uno scoop: scoprì il patto tra boss e golpisti , La Repubblica, 18 June 2005
Fascist past Mauro De Mauro was born in 1921 in Foggia, Apulia. His father Oscar De Mauro belonged to a reputable family of doctors and pharmacists that had been living in Foggia for several generations. His mother Clementina Rispoli came from Naples and was a math teacher., La Repubblica, 19 February 2009 Curriculum vitae Tullio De Mauro (accessed 29 January 2011) His younger brother Tullio De Mauro (31 March 1932 – 5 January 2017) was a linguist and politician who became minister of education in 2000–2001.
De Mauro was a supporter of the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. After the armistice with the Allied Forces in September 1943, he chose to follow the hard-line fascist regime of the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI) in German-held northern Italy. During the German military occupation of Rome in 1943–1944, he was vice-commander of police under Commander Caruso, informant of Captain Erich Priebke and Colonel Herbert Kappler of the SS. De Mauro was also a member of the Koch Band, a special unit of the Home Security in the RSI. Documenti statunitensi e italiani sulla Banda Giuliano, la Decima Mas e il Neofascismo in Sicilia , by Giuseppe Casarrubea, November 2005 A 40 anni dalla scomparsa del giornalista De Mauro, eliminato dalla mafia mentre indagava sulle trame nere d’Italia , Arcoiris TV, 16 September 2010 Using a variety of aliases, De Mauro managed to infiltrate several resistance organizations in Rome and Milan in order to hunt the partisans.
De Mauro and his wife Elda volunteered to join the Decima MAS, a brutal anti-partisan force under the command of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, also known as the "Black Prince". He worked for the journal La Cambusa (The Galley) of the propaganda unit of the military formation. Chi era Mauro De Mauro , Il Post, 11 June 2011 De Mauro was arrested during the liberation in Milan in April 1945. He escaped from the prison camp Coltano (Tuscany) in December 1945 and took refuge in Naples with his young wife, along with his two daughters, Junia and Franca Valeria (the names referred to Junio Valerio Borghese). Mauro De Mauro , by Antonella Romano, in: Giornata della Memoria dei giornalisti uccisi da mafie e terrorismo, Rome: Unione Nazionale Cronisti Italiani, 2008, pp. 28–35 Accused of having participated in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in March 1944 in which 335 people were executed, Mauro De Mauro al tempo della Rsi , blog by Giuseppe Casarrubea, 7 July 2010 he was absolved by the court in 1948.
Journalist in Sicily
In 1948, De Mauro moved to Palermo, Sicily, under an assumed name, and worked for local newspapers such as Il Tempo di Sicilia and Il Mattino di Sicilia. In 1959 he started working for L'Ora, a communist-oriented paper. Other journalists were puzzled about De Mauro's presence at the newspaper, as he had been a supporter of Mussolini until the bitter end and fought in the brutal war against the anti-Fascist partisans. Rumour had it that his nose had been broken by partisans.
At L'Ora, De Mauro joined a group of crack investigative reporters that included Felice Chilanti and Mario Farinella. From the mid-1950s to the 1970s, the left-leaning newspaper often hit the national spotlight for its investigations and denunciations of ties between corrupt politicians and the Sicilian Mafia. Era L'Ora della mafia in prima pagina , La Stampa, 18 June 2012 In 1960 De Mauro was among the winners of the Premiolino, one of the most important Italian journalism awards, for his crime investigations. Premiolino website De Mauro also wrote pieces on drug trafficking and on the Sack of Palermo, the construction boom in the 1950s and 1960s that led to the destruction of the city's green belt and ancient villas.
In 1962, De Mauro was the first to publish a detailed map of the Mafia, which was confirmed 22 years later by the Mafia pentito (turncoat) Tommaso Buscetta in his testimony to Judge Giovanni Falcone. In January 1962 he published a series of articles in L'Ora disclosing the testimony of Melchiorre Allegra, a medical doctor and a member of the Mafia from 1916 until his arrest in 1937. Upon being arrested, Allegra disclosed his membership and testified about Mafia activities. It was one of the first testimonies about the Mafia from within, but the document had been neglected until De Mauro republished it. Mauro De Mauro e la mafia; gli estratti del dossier del 1937 , La Repubblica (Palermo), 20 February 2009Testimony of Melchiorre Allegra , ExLEGI website
After these and other revelations, De Mauro became a target for the Mafia. "De Mauro was a walking corpse," said Buscetta. "Cosa Nostra had been forced to 'forgive' the journalist because his death would arouse too much suspicion, but at the first opportunity, he would have to pay for the scoop. The death sentence had only been temporarily suspended." Lucky Luciano, il dracula della mafia , Il Giornale, 22 November 2010
Mattei affair
In 1962, De Mauro investigated the mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, the powerful president of Italy's state-owned oil and gas conglomerate Eni, who died in suspicious circumstances in a plane crash on 27 October. During his controversial tenure of Eni, Mattei had tried to break the oligopoly of the "Seven Sisters" (a term Mattei coined to refer to the dominant oil companies of the mid-20th century).The new Seven Sisters: oil and gas giants dwarf western rivals , Financial Times, 11 March 2007 and in 1959, in the middle of the Cold War, brokered an oil import deal with the Soviet Union over intense protests from the United States and NATO, while supporting independence movements against colonial powers such as Algeria.Algerian Gas to Europe: The Transmed Pipeline and Early Spanish Gas Import Projects , by Mark H. Hayes, May 2004, prepared for the Geopolitics of Natural Gas Study, a joint project of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University. The U.S. National Security Council described Mattei as an irritation and an obstacle in a classified report from 1958, while the French could not forgive Mattei for his Algeria involvement. Responsibility for his death has been attributed to the Mafia, the CIA, and the French nationalist group the Organisation armée secrète (OAS).Autopsy may solve deadly mystery of the Mattei Affair , The Independent, 29 August 1997
In September 1970, De Mauro was again investigating the case upon request of the movie director Francesco Rosi for the movie Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair), which would eventually be released in 1972.Carlo Lucarelli, novelist, makes use of Italy's unsolved crimes , The New York Times, 23 October 2007 He was convinced that Mattei's aircraft had been sabotaged and looked into possible links between the Mafia and the crash. Two days before his disappearance, De Mauro interviewed Graziano Verzotto, a Christian Democrat politician and former right-hand man of Mattei as head of public relations for Eni. Uno spiraglio di luce sui misteri d'Italia , Corriere della Sera, 14 May 2008Servadio, Mafioso, pp. 147–48 Verzotto knew Mafia boss Giuseppe Di Cristina quite well; he had been best man at De Cristina's wedding.Servadio, Mafioso, pp. 165–66 Verzotto had been with Mattei on his airplane the day before it crashed. De Mauro was convinced that he had got hold of a story of a lifetime. Before his disappearance, he told colleagues at the newspaper L'Ora, "I have a scoop that is going to shake Italy".
Disappearance
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.Investigator of the Mafia Is Kidnapped on Sicily , The New York Times, 22 September 1970 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.Vain Search Angers Italian Crime Board , The New York Times, 14 October 1970
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 U.S.
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 Miceli, allegedly involved in the Borghese coup. Omicidio De Mauro, assolto Totò Riina , La Repubblica, 10 June 2011 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. La verità del pentito su De Mauro , La Repubblica (Palermo edition), 12 June 2011
Italian mystery