Moro Case, Judge Narducci Dismantles the Hunt for the Ghosts of Via Fani

Half a century after the investigations and maxi trials conducted against militants of the armed struggle, the time is now ripe to subject the sentences of justice to the critical scrutiny of history. The time that has passed, the important documentary mass, the additional oral testimonies and the most serious historical studies allow us to be able to evaluate whether "judicial truth resists, and to what extent, the extraordinary force of historical truth". In this month's June issue of Questione giustizia, a magazine of Magistratura democratica, an important study in two parts by Pino Narducci, president of the review section of the Court of Perugia, appeared, who in the past had already tried his hand at judicial cases that involved the subversive movements of the Seventies.

Narducci 's work dismantles one of the most widespread clichés, polemically waved by exponents of conspiracy theories against those who try to do historical work: that is, that the latter hide behind the sentences because " the trials have said everything that there was to say". Just think of the divergences between the first procedural reconstructions on the dynamics of the action in Via Fani and the subsequent historical works that have specified in detail the logistical preparation, the number of individual participants, the dynamics of the action, the escape route. Three years ago, in the volume La polizia della storia, I analyzed the five investigations and the four trials that characterized the activity of the judiciary in the Moro kidnapping affair. In that study I indicated that twenty-seven was the number of people convicted for the kidnapping, the killing of the escort and the final murder of the president of the national council of the DC, events that occurred between the morning of 16 March 1978 and the dawn of 9 May. A twenty-eighth person had been acquitted because at the time of the trials no evidence had emerged against him. In reality, only 16 of these were directly involved in the affair, the other eleven had not participated nor knew of the kidnapping.

The excavation and analysis work carried out by Pino Narducci tells us that thirty-one people were sanctioned. Twenty-seven convicted both for the events in Via Fani (killing of the escort, attempted murder of Alessandro Marini and kidnapping of Aldo Moro ) and for the murder in Via Montalcini, the other four found responsible for only two of the four main crimes. If to the list of convicted people – Narducci writes – we add the defendants acquitted in the preliminary investigation or acquitted in the trials, « we discover that the judiciary investigated a total of over 50 people, perhaps even more. A decidedly disproportionate figure» . This tells us that the inquisitorial activity of the judiciary and the police forces was impressive, even if initially imprecise, even if the incessant conspiracy propaganda about the permanence of « mysteries», «dark areas», «denied truths», «pacts of silence» has obscured this significant fact in the years that followed. There was no inaction or distraction at all, much less episodes of clemency agreed upon on the basis of a renunciation of uncomfortable or unspeakable truths. The only reductions in sentences granted were the result of the reward legislation that was introduced and applied to those defendants who collaborated in the trials or dissociated themselves with declarations of abjuration that distanced themselves from their past militancy.

Narducci's work - after having fully investigated the sentences of each degree of the five trials - captures the numerous inconsistencies present. The main crimes contested in the trials concerned the assault in Via Fani with the multiple homicide of Moro 's escort agents and the various corollary crimes, the actual kidnapping of the Christian Democrat statesman and finally his killing. Narducci also contests the use of the aggravating circumstance of premeditation in the killing of the DC exponent, which is historically shown to be unfounded or in any case valid only starting from a certain date: April 15 with press release number 6, which announced the end of the people's trial and the sentence of conviction. A statement that was actually denied by the continuous search for a political dialogue and exchange of prisoners (Moro's letters sent after that date and Moretti 's phone call on April 30), or again the meeting of the executive of the column on May 8 in via Chiabrera, which in fact sanctioned the real decision to kill Moro, arranging the logistics.

Those who were directly involved in the daily management of the kidnapping were not necessarily in Via Fani. Despite this, in the first sentences of conviction issued in the 80s, this distinction was not made. «Singular principles of the complicity of persons in the crime are applied, the judges considered that the adherence to the political-military program of the “spring campaign” was a sufficient element to condemn the two Red Brigade members for all the crimes contested to the real protagonists of the operation of Via Fani […] In other words, it seems that the reasoning of the judges was that the militancy in the Red Brigades, that is the conduct of participation in the armed gang foreseen by the Penal Code, allowed the Red Brigade member to be charged with any crime committed by other members of the organization, even those that he was unaware would have occurred and with respect to which, in any case, he had not provided any help or support» . This will no longer happen in the trials conducted in the second half of the 90s, when the principles of personal responsibility will once again be applied to the detriment of the "positional responsibility " used in the sentences of the previous decade.

The crime of complicity and membership in an armed gang will be punished with less extensive criteria and more in line with the constitutional dictate. Several of the 27 convicted in the first trials, Moro one-bis and Moro ter, would not have received the same punishment or would have been acquitted if judged in the following decade. In his study Narducci underlines the disconcerting conviction of 25 defendants found guilty of the attempted murder of engineer Alessandro Marini , the witness of Via Fani who declared that he had been hit by gunshots fired by two motorcyclists on a Honda. Shots that had destroyed the windshield of his scooter. Marini changed his version 12 times during the course of the investigations and trials. Historical studies have recently confirmed that he always declared falsehoods. In a 1994 report – found in the archives – he admitted that the windshield had broken due to a fall of the scooter in the days preceding March 16. The forensic police recently confirmed that no shots were ever fired at Marini.

These new historical acquisitions have not, however, pushed the justice system to start procedures for a correction of the sentence. On the contrary, the Public Prosecutor's Office is considering new lines of investigation (some of which are reportedly subject to a request for archiving), inherited from the activities of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry chaired by Fioroni, to identify other people who may have taken part in the kidnapping: the two phantom motorcyclists, a hypothetical passenger sitting next to Moretti in the Fiat 128 estate car that blocked Moro's convoy at the intersection with Via Stresa (one of the first gross errors committed by the first sentence of Moro one-bis, possible front men renting garages or apartments located in the area where the three cars used by the Red Brigade members were abandoned in Via Fani). They are still looking for 4, perhaps 5, culprits to whom they can assign other life sentences. Not content with having investigated 50 people, convicted 11 people totally unrelated to the kidnapping and others only partially involved, justice continues its hunt for the ghosts of a past that does not pass.

FROM

Paul Persichetti