CONTENTS:

Preface by Leonardo Sciascia

The Courage of Fear

A City Under Siege

The Appointment With the Violent

Flowers in the Court Room

In the Bunker

The Next One Will Be Adelaide Aglietta

Justice For Giorgiana Masi, Justice For Marshal Berardi

The Via Fani Massacre

The Question of Self-Defense

The Debate Is Open

Tragedy in the Country, Illegality in Parliament, Boredom in the Courtroom

Curcio: An Act of Revolutionary Justice

Friar Machine-gun

The Referendum Campaign: The Schizophrenia of a Jurywoman

The Contending Parties Have The Word

The Court Retires, My Job Is Finished

The Reason For This Book

ABSTRACT: Adelaide Aglietta, a woman of Turin, joined the Radical Party (PR) in 1974. After being active in the CISA (Italian Centre For Sterilisation and Abortion) for legalising and liberalising abortion and in the Piedmont branch of the Radical Party, she was the leading candidate on the Radical election list for Turin in the June 20, 1976 elections. The following November she was elected secretary of the PR and reconfirmed in that post for 1978 at the Bologna Congress. Her name was drawn by lots in March 1978 to be a juror in the Turin trial of the Red Brigades and she accepted the task after more than one hundred other citizens had refused it, thus allowing the trial to take place.

Thus Adelaide Aglietta was the first secretary of a party to be a member of a popular jury: her diary originates from this experience on the borderline between public and private life, from the tensions and the contradictions that are necessarily part of the role of juror, above all in a political trial.

At present she is a deputy to the European Parliament.

(<> - Adelaide Aglietta - Preface by Leonardo Sciascia - Milano Libri Edizioni - February 1979)

FRIAR MACHINE-GUN

Saturday, May 13. The testimony is read of Silvano Girotto who by now is considered a missing person. There is a dramatic courtroom confrontation between Carletti (1) and a youth who for years was closely connected to her and then became a police informer. After winning her good faith in the most insidious way he then pointed his finger at her. He screams "Grandma Mao" into her face, indicating all of his disdain. The hearing is suspended and the witness dismissed. Several lawyers appear to want to protest the intimidation of the witness, but the thing is so patently ridiculous that the dispute is quickly dampened. After this episode Carletti will disappear from the Lamarmora barracks.

Sunday, May 14. Municipal elections are held in many Italian towns: the DC makes significant gains and there is also notable growth of the PSI. The PCI on the other hand loses heavily. It is clear at once that a large part of the electorate which had voted for the PCI in '76, allowing it to make the "great leap forward", has not renewed its trust. In a certain sense the elections of May 14 are the first symptom of a situation that is taking shape and will explode with the June 11 referendums and the subsequent elections.

Tuesday, May 16. At the court. As soon as Barbaro sees me, he whispers to me that Silvano Girotto (2) has turned up. Stunned, I ask him how come, what has impelled Dalla Chiesa (2) to pull him out of hat? He doesn't know either and he seems very annoyed at this nth episode of interference in the trial from the outside. The news spreads among the lawyers and the jury. On the one hand there is indignation and on the other curiosity and expectation. Several of the lawyers interested in this deposition are absent and it is decided to inform them and postpone this testimony until the afternoon. In the courtroom Ognibene has just made an ironic comment on the fact that the witness cannot be found.

At two o'clock in the afternoon the courtroom is chock full of lawyers and curious representative of the press. Barbaro, annoyed, points out the presence of several lawyers who refused the court's appointment as defense lawyers and doesn't spare them his negative comments.

Thin and covering his face with his hand, Girotto enters to begin his show. From two until six he will narrate his vicissitudes and answer questions from the defense lawyers with precision and exactness in comparison to his earlier testimony, using the same, identical, incisive expressions, words from the famous anticipated testimony as if he had gone over them the day before. There are discrepancies with the testimony of Capt. Pignero. He adds nothing to what was already known, no elements that are of greater use for understanding and proving the accusations against the Borgomanero group.

As he speaks non-stop, except for taking refuge from some of the contestations by the defense with "I don't remember, it is too long ago", I watch him attentively, trying to put him into focus, and I feel a deep unease growing in me. It is not only due to a conformist and obvious aversion to someone in his profession. It is his Jesuit-like manner of speaking sotto voce, the shifty look escaping in a thousand different directions, the concentration of ambiguity and hypocrisy in his narration, his superfluous attempt to justify ideologically his work, all make it hard for me to get close to the personality. Greater clarity about himself, his actions, his motivations, even if hard to esteem or accept by common standards of respectability, would have certainly made his figure more credible.

At the end of the hearing - very long and tiring - which took place in the total and impassive silence of the defendants, I go home in a pensive mood after having verified that I am not the only one to feel uneasy and to chew over the question "cui prodest?".

The trial of Camilla Cederna (3), meanwhile, was opened and immediately adjourned. It was brought against her by President Leone's children, naturally not on the most serious charges made in the book, but on marginal ones. Cederna's book and the <> (4) campaign have brought to light facts concerning which the Radical deputies, more than a year ago and formulating precise charges, had asked the commission of inquiry to investigate further. We were accused of wanting a "destabilising" campaign and the charges were filed away. Today, thanks to Cederna's book, this case is reopened and will be concluded when it is politically "useful": Leone will be made the scapegoat to be sacrificed to the 43% of the "yes" votes on public financing.

In the midst of the polemics surrounding Leone, the post-election analyses, the trial in Turin, what is literally suffocated, not accidentally, is the referendum campaign. There has been tacit agreement among the parties to suppress and delay the opening of the debate. The newspapers are silent and the television as well. The broadcasts of Political Tribune have been reduced to the bone by the Vigilance Commission and have not yet begun. No posters are to be seen, ours for lack of funds and those of the others to delay the clash and thus information as long as possible in the hopes of turning the referendum into a plebiscite.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) An eccentric leftist woman, and well known character in Turin's largest market place, called "Grandma Mao" with affectionate humour by the denizens of the market where she ran a stall. Her sufferings in the war as a partisan and concentration camp prisoner had possibly left her slightly deranged. For more on her see BR-1644.

2) Silvano Girotto infiltrated the BR on behalf of the Italian government; Caro Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a general of the Carabinieri close to the DC was responsilbe for this operation. For more details on these two, see BR-1646.

3) The journalist Camilla Cederna's was author of a book entitled simply <>. Leone, President of the Italian Republic at the time, eventually resigned in the wake of a series of scandals that involved him.

4) A popular weekly magasine.