Luigi Calabresi (14 November 1937 – 17 May 1972) was an Italian Polizia di Stato officer in Milan. Responsible for investigating far-left political movements, Calabresi was assassinated in 1972 by members of Lotta Continua, who blamed him for the death of anarchist activist Giuseppe Pinelli in police custody in 1969. The deaths of Pinelli and Calabresi were significant events during the Years of Lead, a period of major political violence and unrest in Italy from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Early life and education Calabresi was born on 14 November 1937 into a middle-class Roman family. His father was a wine and cooking oil merchant. He attended the classical secondary school San Leone Magno and then the Sapienza University of Rome to study Law. In 1964, he successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on the Sicilian Mafia. Having been part of Catholic associations during his years in school, he enrolled, while studying at the Sapienza, in the Oasis movement, founded in 1950 by Jesuits.
Police career After finishing his studies, Calabresi, feeling himself, as he'd confided to friends, unsuited for the forensic work of jurisprudence, chose to try to enlist in the police. In 1965, he won the competition to enter L'istituto superiore di polizia and, after completing his studies there, he was assigned to the position of deputy commissioner in Milan. During his time in the police force, he occasionally wrote articles that were published under a pseudonym in the newspaper Momento-sera.
Calabresi, in the course of his work in the political section of the police, cultivated contacts with various persons of the Italian left. Journalist Giampaolo Pansa, who knew him, described Calabresi as having a "cordial and easygoing air," someone who "reads a lot and tries to understand the ideas and the men of the extra-parliamentary left," ideas that had become "his job".
In 1967, after a series of contacts with the organisers of an event in Colico, Calabresi supported their request for a camping license, subsequently provided by the Como Police. During these contacts, Calabresi, according to his son Mario, met railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist activist and organiser. At next year's Christmas, Calabresi gave Pinelli as a gift Enrico Emanuelli's book 1000 Millions of People, a gift reciprocated by Pinelli the following August with Edgar Lee Masters' poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, ostensibly Pinelli's favorite book.
On 19 November 1969, the funeral of murdered policeman Antonio Annarumma in Milan was attended by large crowds and a number of prominent politicians.22-year old policeman Annarumma had been killed during the violent clashes between demonstrators and the police during a large rally held by Italy's three major trade unions. The death, according to the subsequent official investigation, was caused by blows to the head with a metal tube. See Brambilla (1994). See Montanelli et al (2018). Mario Capanna, of the Marxist group Movimento Studentesco joined the funeral procession in a public gesture of denunciation of political violence, but was physically attacked by a number of attendees. Calabresi was present and escorted Capanna away from the attacks. He'd previously met Capanna on 16 November 1967 while in charge of the police force that had evacuated Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, occupied for a few hours by students led by Capanna.
Family In 1968, Luigi Calabresi married Gemma Capra, whom he'd met at a celebratory party hosted by a friend in Milan. Genna had found him "witty, like Alberto Sordi." They had three sons: Mario, who grew up to become a journalist and author, and also an editor of La Repubblica; Paolo; and Luigi, born a few months after his father's death.
Piazza Fontana bombing
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of intense political agitation in Italy, characterised also by frequent acts of violence, including assassinations. On 12 December 1969, at 16:37 hours local time,UTC 17:37 hrs a bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (the National Agricultural Bank) in Piazza Fontana, near the Duomo cathedral, in Milan, Italy, killing seventeen people and wounding eighty-eight. The same day, three more bombs were detonated while a fourth was found unexploded, in Rome and Milan. No organisation declared itself responsible for the attacks.Neo-fascist militants, among whom most prominently were Franco Freda, Guido Giannettini, and Giovanni Ventura, were eventually indicted for the Piazza Fontana massacre and tried in 1977 in Catanzaro, where they received prison sentences of up to life imprisonment. See Patrimonio. The verdicts were appealed many times over until all defendants were acquitted in 1985 on account of "insufficient evidence" against them. See Bale (2018). Calabresi, having already undertaken investigations into other bombing attacks, was assigned the inquest for Piazza Fontana. MP Francesco Cossiga of the Christian Democrats believed the terrorist attack had been undertaken by the "extreme right," as he testified in the Parliament decades later. There has not yet been a final judicial verdict as to the culprits of the massacre.
Arrest, interrogation, and death of Giuseppe Pinelli
Despite the July 2000 denial expressed at the Italian Parliament's commission of inquiry on terrorism in Italy and the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for the massacres by Antonio Allegra, Calabresi's superior officer at the time of the massacre, the investigation on the Milan bombing focused initially on militant anarchists. Directed by his superiors in Rome to investigate the anarchists that were part of the so-called Ghisolfa Bridge group, Calabresi ordered the round up of approximately eighty suspects. Twenty-seven of the anarchists were taken to the San Vittore Prison while the rest were kept at Milan police headquarters on Via Fatebenefratelli. Among those held there for interrogation were a number of Anarchist Black Cross members, including Giuseppe Pinelli.
Pinelli was allowed to come to the station on his Vespa; he was then illegally held in custody for more than 48 hours before being brought for questioning in Calabresi's office, at the 4th floor of police headquarters. In commissioner Calabresi's office were present Antonio Allegra and four policemen from the political section, Vito Panessa, Giuseppe Caracuta, Carlo Mainardi, and Pietro Mucilli, as well as Carabinieri lieutenant Savino Lograno, subsequently identified as a SISDE agent. The interrogation began the same day that a group of Milan anarchists gave a public press conference at the Circolo Ponte della Ghisolfa where the Piazza Fontana massacre was described as a "State massacre". On the night of the 15th of December 1969, and a little before midnight, the body of Pinelli was seen by l'Unità journalist Aldo Palumbo falling from the 4th floor window and crashing on the pavement below. Pinelli was taken to the hospital Azienda Ospedaliera Fatebenefratelli e Oftalmico where he was pronounced dead on arrival. According to the Fatebenefratelli hospital's duty doctor Nazzareno Fiorenzano, Pinelli had suffered "abdominal injuries and a series of gashes on the head." The autopsy ostensibly showed that Pinelli had been "either dead or unconscious" as he hit the ground, with a bruise like one, Fiorenzano claimed, caused by a kick, "possibly a karate blow," found on his neck.
On 30 December 1969, thousands of mourners and sympathisers followed Pinelli's funeral procession to the Cimitero Maggiore di Milano.
Accusations and recriminations after Pinelli's death Police press conference On 16 December 1969, the day after Pinelli's death, Milan's chief of police Marcello Guida called a press conference that was also attended by Antonino Allegra and commissioner Calabresi. Guida stated that Pinelli had committed suicide:Suddenly, Pinelli made a feline leap towards the window that had been left ajar due to the heat and threw himself into the void. Guida speculated that the suicide could have been the result of Pinelli's frustration when his alibi about the day of the Piazza Fontana bombings was shown to be false. This speculative interpretation was subsequently retracted by Guida when Pinelli's alibi turned out to have been, in fact, true. Allegra spoke of Pinelli as having "changed" from the person he once knew among the anarchists and added that "some reports" showed Pinelli was "possibly" implicated in the Piazza Fontana bombing.
L'Unità reporter Renata Bottarelli noted Calabresi's contribution to the press conference: "First, [Calabresi] said that at the time of [Pinelli's] fall he was elsewhere; he had momentarily gone to Allegra's office to brief him on the crucial progress that, he reckoned, had been made. He had cited [to Pinelli] his dealings with a third person whom [Calabresi] obviously was not in a position to name, leaving [Pinelli] with the impression that he knew a lot more than in fact he did. [Calabresi] observed that Pinelli seemed startled and, disturbed by this [change], so he ordered the interview suspended while he went up to brief Allegra on this turn of events. In any case, Calabresi observed, this was not a proper interrogation." Nearly a month later, on 8 January 1970, Calabresi told reporters: "We were caught off guard by his action, not least because we did not think that [Pinelli's] position was serious. As far as we were concerned, Pinelli was still a decent guy and would probably have been going home the next day. I can say that we did not regard him as some key witness, but merely as someone to be heard."
Lawsuit by Pinelli's family On 27 December 1969, Pinelli's widow Licia and his mother sued and filed a complaint against Milan police chief Marcello Guida in relation to actions that, as they asserted, constituted "ongoing and aggravated defamation" as well as "breaches of professional confidentiality and conduct". Deputy prosecutor Giuseppe Caizzi closed the investigation into Pinelli's death on 21 May 1970 with the verdict that the death was the result of "a wholly accidental circumstance." The file was forwarded to the chief examining magistrate Antonio Amati who closed the file on 3 July 1970. A few days later, on 17 July 1970, Caizzi had the case of Pinelli's wife and mother against police chief Marcello Guida also closed without reaching the courts, as having "no merit."
Indictments In 1971, and following a June lawsuit by Pinelli's widow in which she formally accused the policemen ostensibly present in Calabresi's office of murder, kidnapping, assault, and abuse of authority, the inquest into the death of Pinelli was re-opened by magistrate Gerardo D'Ambrosio, who had previously been assigned also the criminal investigation of the Piazza Fontana bombing itself. On 4 October 1971, D'Ambrosio brought charges of manslaughter against Calabresi, Lo Grano, Panessa, Giuseppe Caracuta, Carlo Mainardi, and Pietro Mucilli. D'Ambrosio ordered Pinelli's body exhumed on 21 October for a second autopsy, which failed to discover anything new, such as signs of the supposed "karate blow" to the neck. It was remarked that the "advanced state of [the body's] decomposition" had rendered the second autopsy futile but also that the "bruising" that some considered suspect was a frequent consequence in corpses housed in morgues because of the compression of the head on the marble table. In October 1971, D'Ambrosio changed the indictment from murder to homicide and set a trial date for 1972.
In 1975, D'Ambrosio closed the investigation by establishing that Calabresi had not been present in the room at the time of Pinelli's fall and that the "suicide thesis" was unlikely due to the lack of any plausible motivation. D'Ambrosio considered instead as most probable a death causata da un malore, "caused by an active illness," thus ruling out defenestration homicide; consequently, all those accused or present in the room were exonerated.