ABSTRACT: On 17 May 1972, commissioner of police Luigi Calabresi, from the political office of the police headquarters of Milan, was killed in a terrorist action. During that period, Calabresi was the object of a press campaign, conducted especially by the newspaper "Lotta Continua" (1). In particular, he was accused of having caused the death of the anarchist Pino Pinelli, allegedly "throwing him out of the window" during a cross examination at the police headquarters in the context of the investigation on the massacre of Piazza Fontana of December 1969. The magistracy ruled out any responsibility on the part of Calabresi in the episode, dismissing the investigation.

In 1988 - sixteen years after such events - a one-time militant of Lotta Continua, Leonardo Marino, self-accused himself of the murder, and pointed to a number of former leaders of the movement as the organizers of the murder. The trial is still under way.

Marco Pannella expresses his anger against the murderers of Calabresi, calling them "insane companions who ignore that they are fascists and perhaps even think they are revolutionaries".

(Radical News - June 1972 from "Marco Pannella - Works and speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

We knew him well. For years we had been submitted to his cures. He feigned to be our friend. During the first or second antimilitarist march, from Milan to Vicenza, he marched side by side with Pino Pinelli and myself for a few hundred meters. When a companion asked him to wear a sandwich poster if he wanted to continue marching with us he went back to his car.

In the morning, in Sire Raoul Square, he had introduced himself to me: "I'm commissioner Calabresi from the political office. We are at your disposal. I'm a friend of B... and of L...". In truth, these companions had talked to me about him. They told me he seemed glad of the fact that his political task lead him to "spend time with us" radicals, anarchists, libertarians. Books, speeches, civil rights policy for military and policemen, nonviolence, all our repertoire seemed to interest him, and perhaps it really did interest him.

I was worried about this relationship, about these opinions; they were torbid and dangerous. I refused them at once. After a year, the situation was clearer. In our headquarters we had Sottosanti and Zublene, and a number of human wrecks which we had accepted out of human solidarity, who proposed a change in the party's line, from nonviolence to TNT. They were taking advantage of personal weakness. Once we made a test: we informed all our "companions" that on a Sunday morning we would have received weapons in a mountain hut. At the established hour, political commissioners and police forces arrived with a great number of policemen.

On the evening of 12 December, the day in which the Banca dell'Agricoltura was assaulted, the first place to be searched was the headquarters of the Radical Party in Via Lannone. Clearly, the fact was announced by the television. Merlino, an alleged "anarchist" active in the students' movement, kept appointing radical lawyers from his prison in Rome whom he did not know and who did not know him.

We felt pity and commiseration for such gameplaying. Personally speaking, even before the murder of Pino, I thought Calabresi was basically a "man in good faith". A victim more than an executioner of the system he was meant to serve, of the institutions and methods he was meant to share and uphold, Calabresi was bound to develop a sort of schizophrenia. A man for whom the quest for truth often meant inventing the most practicable truth, for whom inquisition into other people's consciences and lives can at times psychopathically link the torturer to the tortured one; a man for whom the demon to be discovered and destroyed was often his own demon, a mirror of himself. Sartre had perceived this and denounced it in his book "Dead without burial".

More than once, years ago, talking with some fellow-journalists, among whom Enzo Tortora, I said there was something Dostoyevskian in that man, that his ruthless mask of modern and yet old-fashioned policeman hid a sort of "obsession". Today, the tragic conclusion of his existence has reminded me of that.

But I didn't know - and he had concealed it to everyone - of his attending a clerical school, of his relations with Father Virginio Rotondi, of his being against divorce. Nor did I know anything of him after the death of Pino, neither about his wife nor about his children. None of what concerned him personally I knew, took for granted or was interested in. After all, he had stopped being dangerous, because at this point it was clear what he was (perhaps even he realized it). He struck me and strikes me now, as jointly responsible of all the worse things we have witnessed in these years: events in which civil coexistence decays with every hour, in which power replaces dialogue or that minimum of honesty and loyalty in the game of the parts with the most infamous lynching procedures, with violence, with an exacerbation of conflicts and differences. But I say this without hate, without ill-feeling; as I said before, with pity.

On the contrary, those whom I direct my anger against are his murderers, because we all needed Calabresi alive; because we needed and we need truth and civility, because whoever his murderers are (and I think they are the same authors of the constant State massacre of these years, but I cannot exclude that they are insane companions who ignore they are fascists and maybe even think they are revolutionaries) they are, objectively, the companions of the murderers of Pino Pinelli, not his avengers.

Translator's notes

(1) Lotta Continua: Extreme Left political movement founded in Turin in 1969. In 1971 it created the homonymous newspaper.