Paolo Cucchiarelli presenta: L'ultima notte di Aldo Moro - Roma 12/04/2018

ROME, APRIL 13 - PAOLO CUCCHIARELLI, ALDO MORO'S LAST NIGHT (Ponte alle Grazie. 439 pages. €18.00) Aldo Moro's last night is never over. Even today, forty years after the assassination of the DC president, doubt and darkness shroud the search for the truth about his death. Trials have convicted the Red Brigades members who kidnapped him on March 16, 1978, and killed him fifty-five days later. But how? And where? By whom? And why? No one has provided definitive answers to these and other questions that follow. We have now resigned ourselves to the fact that the mysteries surrounding the Moro case are an integral part of Italian history, a bit like the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is for the United States. Investigative journalist Paolo Cucchiarelli has been trying for several years to clear away the jungle of falsehoods that have grown up around Moro. In his previous book ('Death of a President'), he demonstrated that Moro could not have been killed in the trunk of the red R4 in which his body was found. Now he presents another piece of the puzzle regarding the Christian Democrat statesman's end: Moro was killed in Rome, not in the hideout on Via Montalcini, as the Red Brigades claim, but in a state-owned building used by the Finance Police, near Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Three sources support the scoop: the intelligence historian Peppino De Lutiis, who received a confidant from Prefect and former Police Chief Vincenzo Parisi; the former venerable P2 maestro Licio Gelli; and a qualified and highly authoritative source (known as "Contessa") who worked for the American and Israeli intelligence services and who confirmed the whole thing in 2014, on his deathbed, to a Judicial Police officer working for the Moro II Commission. If, as Montalbano would say, Cucchiarelli "confused us," another question immediately arises: why would the Red Brigades keep these truths quiet? The author of "The Last Night of Aldo Moro" (Ponte alle Grazie) is convinced that the American secret services were behind Moro's killing, having somehow manipulated the Italian terrorists. Thus emerges the sinister Stars and Stripes 'Secret Team', US government envoy Steve Pieczenick, the P2, and the more or less deviant secret services. Among hideouts set up in Vatican buildings, terrorists roaming Rome and its province without ever being caught, and criminal figures appearing and disappearing, Cucchiarelli finds the clues that lead him to conclude that on the night of May 8-9, 1978, Moro was about to be freed. The prisoner is taken to the garage of the building near Corso Vittorio, on Via dei Banchi Vecchi. There, the rendezvous is held with those to whom he was to be handed over. But no one shows up. The Americans probably don't want Moro to survive and have arranged to block the operation. The sun is about to rise. The men holding Moro (De Vuono and Tony Chicchiarelli, two criminal figures to whom the Red Brigades have contracted the return) are nervous. And De Vuono, "pressed by the need to avoid being arrested with Moro alive in his hands," shoots him while the DC president is sitting in the back seat of the car. Then, before the first rays of the sun light up the Roman sky, they drive the car with the body to Via Caetani. Forty years later, the mysteries remain. But Moro's words also remain: "When nothing more can be done and all is lost, you must at least try to understand." (ANSA).