ABSTRACT: On hearing of Adriano Sofri's (1) arrest, the author says he immediately thought: "If he is really guilty... he will confess". Since Sofri did not confess, he is "fully convinced of his innocence". He states that he met Sofri ten years after the "roaring years" (2) and found him to be a religious man. Even the article, published immediately after the murder of Luigi Calabrese, rather than accusing him acquits him: Sofri would not have been so stupid as to leave the investigators a clue. At the most, that article can be accused of being an illegal apology for a crime. A case such as Sofri's unfortunately suffers from internal contradictions. The search for truth in fact is entrusted entirely to subjective impressions and these lead the author to believe Sofri to be innocent. Next he examines the elements that are used to incriminate Sofri (which are reduced to the confession of a penitent, Marino) and he also tries to analyse the behaviour of the latter. Unfortunately Marino seems to be a character

who has found his author in the law regarding penitents (3).

(L'ESPRESSO, August 28, 2988)

As soon as I heard of Sofri's arrest I immediately thought: if he is really guilty, as soon as he stands before the judge he will confess. And it is not that the fact that he did not confess makes me entirely convinced of his innocence, but it is an intuitive element, an impression which is joined by other more rational ones.

I did not know Sofri during the "roaring years" around 1968. I met him about ten years later. And he appeared to me to be a "religious" man in his relation to life, to books, to people. Had he really been so different earlier? I cannot bring myself to believe it. I once had a friend who had also been a friend of Vitaliano Brancati (4) and whom Brancati, giving him a pseudonym, writes about in a story saying that he would have set fire to the world for the sake of his idea and his feeling about revolution, especially during the Fascist period. But there was no man, however he might feel about him, who did not merit his respect. This is my feeling about Sofri, about his character as well as his ideological disappointment and his reflections concerning that disappointment. And I can imagine his former intemperance, but between intemperance and homicide - not to mention cold-blooded homicide commissioned by others - there is a big difference. If the article is his that was published in »Lotta continua (5

) immediately after the assassination of Calabresi (1) and which can appear to be taking credit for the act, it seems to me to correspond to the abstract revolutionary canons and it also seems to me to be a point in favour of the defence rather than the prosecution. In the sense of the question that we are immediately obliged to ask: Is it possible that Sofri and those closest to him - if it was their decision that brought about the murder of Calabresi - would have been so stupid as to immediately draw the attention of the police to their little group?

I know from the way the inquiry does its work what the answer is: they needed to show their hand in order to take over the leadership of the entire movement, and as heroes almost to claim credit for fathering that crime. But assuming that they were not stupid even at that time when the revolutionary spirit was ablaze, for me the opposite hypothesis is credible: that they were sure the police could not find any clue to their organising that crime, and this simply because that it had been organised and perpetrated by others. And since they could not be accused of homicide, they could allow themselves to take on the accusation of illegal apology for a crime - a laughable charge, particularly at that time. And this apology was excited, one must admit, by a "provocation" on the part of the state that not only hit at the revolutionaries, but at the majority of Italians. Even today, what do we know of the truth of the anarchist Pinelli's death if not the one that each and all has easily been able to figure out

for himself, and with more or less grave versions that weigh on the heads of his interrogators? Pinelli could not hold out against the moral and physical tortures and threw himself out the window - that is the lightest version. Or he could not hold out against the physical tortures and seized a moment when those present were distracted and threw himself out the window. Or he died from the tortures and was thrown out the window. This last is a hypothesis that is substantiated with some probability by the more recent and verified case which is known to have taken place in the quarters of the Palermo police. And one must emphasise that a crime thus perpetrated "inside" the institutions is incommensurably more serious than any crime committed on the "outside". (Alberto Savinio (6) said: "I warn all imbeciles that their protests will fall at the feet of my gelid indifference." But can one only call those people imbeciles who disapprove of this statement of mine?) And anyway, is this not the moment to tell the t

ruth about Pinelli's death, thus restoring honour to the memory of Calabresi if, as has been said, he had nothing to do with it? Is it not possible to find among those who were present a "penitent" who will finally tell the truth?

But to get back to Sofri, one must say that his is one of those cases that not only seem ambiguous at once, but are destined in the minds of most people to remain so. They have internal contradictions, two-faced truths. Because it is not in the factual data, the concomitance of the evidence, the convergence of more or less direct testimony, that the truth can be sought and expected to reach a solution "beyond all doubt", but rather in the subjective impressions one can get from finding one faced with the accused and the accuser, to have known them, or as is happening with the judges, getting to know them now, by conversing with them, scrutinising them. And it is within this sphere - of having known him, of esteeming him, of believing him incapable of having ordered an assassination - that a letter has been signed, I too signed it, which will be more of comfort to Sofri than of help. Never, as some have given to understand, as an affirmation that intellectuality and innocence are equivalents. Not even e

sprit de corps or caste, which in any case I do not possess, can distort one's vision to that degree. There have been intellectuals capable of the most ignoble and ferocious crimes; and any intellectual who wanted to deny this would be no intellectual but a cretin. And it is needless to say that with that letter one was far from yearning for his impunity or invoking pardon. One wanted and continues to want, solely and absolutely, just justice.

From what the so-called secret inquiry let leak out to the press, the condition of Sofri and the other two defendants seems to be this: there is a fourth man who accuses himself and them of the Calabresi killing. Two instigators, Sofri and Pietrosanti, and two killers, Bompressi and Marino. And Marino is the one who accuses himself and the others. But after sixteen years and with a law in force that benefits penitents. There seems to be nothing else to support Marino's accusations except the confidences made to the police and the magistracy by other penitents who go back to the prehistory of "repententism". But to stay with the present situation: to what degree would Marino pay for his participation in the crime once it were established? What have his relations with Sofri been during these sixteen years? When was the last time he turned to him for financial help and what was the day when he was first disappointed? Did he also ask Pietrosanti for help? What is hsi financial and moral situation at the mom

ent when he accuses himself and the others, his family situation, and particularly his relations with his wife?

But the man-in-the-street does not, as the judge does, have either the opportunity or the means for getting an answer to this and similar questions. Anyone who knows and esteems Sofri will feel that he has a right to the opinion, until the contrary is clearly proved, that Marino is a character who has found his author in the law regarding penitents. With regard to the psychological motivations that may have excited his decision to accuse himself and the others, many can be found in the light of life experience as well as in literature from the feeling of gratitude, which is difficult and unbearable for many people and which they frequently discharge with opposite feelings, to rancor into which it is not uncommon for admiration, devotion and imitation to turn; from getting the fixed idea that the revolutionary past has been profitable for the cagey and harmful to one's ingenuous self, to the desire to become famous, to achieve a kind of success which one can get in no other way and from the one of making

open judicial revelations. And so on. And that is not to say that Marino's motives are necessarily these, but they could have been if we believe in Sofri having had nothing to do with that crime.

The tree of repentence can bear, and has born, such fruits as these. We might have hoped that the judges would quickly dissolve the signs of the "first-I-will-arrest-you-and-then-get- the-proof" tactics that unfortunately we are beginning to glimpse in this case too. But the judicial message sent to Boato and others does a lot to dispel this hope.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Sofri, Adriano - (1942) - Leader of the far left extraparliamentary Italian political movement »Lotta continua . Journalist and writer. Arrested in 1987 along with Giorgio Pietrostefani and Ovidio Bompressi as the presumed instigators of the assassination of police commissioner Luigi Calabresi (killed in Milan on May 17, 1972 - Calabresi was identified by Lotta continua as responsible for the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, which occurred in Milan's police headquarters December 15, 1969). Sofri was accused on the basis of the confession of Leonardo Marino, a »Lotta continua militant. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison during the first trial. The conviction was upheld by the appeals court and finally annulled by the Court of Cassation.

2) The roaring years - The years of student and workers dissent that began in 1968.

3) An allusion to Pirandello's play »Six Characters In Search Of An Author .

4) Brancati, Vitaliano - (1907 - 1954) - A Sicilian writer of grotesque satirical fiction, particularly with regard to Italian and Sicilian myths and attitudes.

5) Lotta continua - A far left political movement and the newspaper it founded of the same name.

6) Savinio, Alberto - (1891 - 1952) - pseudonym of Andrea De Chirico, writer, painter, musician, brother of painter Giorgio.