CRACKPOTS #27: POLPO ERRATA (Patreon)

Bit of a birdshot newsletter today...little pellets...what can I say, I've had a busy week focusing on how Musk says "Yeah"...he sort of snarls it, like he speaks the word and then tries to eat it, it's unreal, all of the big famous powerful people in this country are subhuman. Sometimes, even when you do a freak show, you get SICK OF THE FREAKS.

And there are so many freaks right now. Half the time I've written this newsletter, the subject has been: insane people. Even when we were watching that hasbara flick OCTOBER H8TE a couple episodes back, I wondered... the film featured various Zionist talking heads, all the usual scumbags: Hen Mazzig, Bari Weiss, Richie Torres. They make you sick, and more than that they make you wonder if there's any HUMAN BEINGS LEFT ON EARTH.

JESUS CHRIST! Somebody should DO SOMETHING.

Anyways I won't be talking of FREAKS today, though maybe I should, I'm offering up a small bit of Polpo errata...

In the last newsletter I sent out, I deployed the classic showman's technique of “exaggeration” regarding how soon Il Polpo Part III: Truth Is Not a Choice Part II would come out  but it’s finally here. I’m sure you’re enjoying it…it’s wonderful, yes, amazing…there is a great deal of things we want to do with that series, many directions to go, it’s less deadline-intensive than some of our other ones, a little looser, more Italian you might say…

As I've said many times, it's often difficult to convey complex stories in a complex way in audio form. See, when you read a book or something, if you get names or dates confused or just want to check that you're following along alright--you can drag your eyes a little bit up the page. You can even put your finger under the section you're looking for and do a little nod...ah yes, there it is...you even get to make a little noise. Not the case with podcasts! You're hitting that goofy 15 SECONDS REWIND button, you go too far, you're all over the place, it's really a mess...sometimes there's a great, interesting detail that you're forced to sum up by saying "According to his testimony, he heard a gunshot and saw some blood" when in reality the testimony might be stupid and funny and insane---but would take ten minutes to read.

There's a constant push-pull (and this isn't just about podcasts but any form of popular media) of how many details to include vs how understandable you want the story to be. There's a balance! And then sometimes you just get too excited...You want to both do a story justice, include the things you find most interesting (even if they end up being digressions) and make a show that people find both at least somewhat enlightening and entertaining. With some topics, it's very easy, they pratically leap into your hand, with others, well...so you try to make the show entertaining, because even if nobody retains any details at least they had a good time.

And people will always remember a Nicholas Alahverdian/Rossi, aka Arthur Knight

Ah, but back to Giancarlo. there's a number of directions the story can go. The first of those probably being that of the ecomafia in Italy and the EU, an issue not just involving toxic waste but all sorts of trafficking, including exotic animals...this last thing in particular fascinates and horrifies me...illegal snakes and tigers trapped by fat bellied killers in gaudy apartments...horrible! But the trade in toxic waste, the shipping, that connects to Alpi murder in a direct way. Those containers rumored to be buried at certain kilometers on Garowe-Bosaso road...It's just when you start looking at this stuff, you find yourself travelling down another avenue and then you're too far gone, it's late, you've got a deadline after all...but it's difficult to stop staring at this map...

The Giancarlo book was incredible. A bit of hassle to get it translated, yes, and the entire operation so far has involved a huge number of lost articles in defunct newspapers, a nightmare of locked Italian PDFs and then the maddening failures to get some sense out of them by means of various poorly functioning translation programs (if anyone knows a great foolproof one, let me know, especially for PDFs...) but when things click it feels like a coup...

I recently read, too, "The Road to Hell" by Michael Maren, an aid worker and journalist who was one of the last to see Alpi alive over at the Sahafi Hotel. The book doesn't mention Alpi but it's good to get a bit of background from an embittered aid worker in Somalia. Read a good bit from "The Genesis of the Conflict in Somalia" by Muuse Yuusuf, though I haven't finished it yet. I also read "Whatever Happened to Somalia", which has a very arresting cover I referenced in (I think) the first episode. It's by John Drysdale, who was a white boy that fell in some kind of love with Somalia...the strange kind of love that Europeans feel...an odd duck but the book is good. He converted to Islam before his death in 2016.

What a wide world it is...

I was able to get in contact with a journalist for Fanpage (big news site in Italy, don't ask me about the name, they're European, everything's named something silly like that) who has done a lot of work on the case. Our correspondence has been via email as he tells me his English isn't great, but his long comments have been very illuminating. He firmly points the finger at the Italian Military secret services (SISMI, now AISE) being the ones behind Alpi's death...this would track with the testimony from Francesco Fonti, the penitent Mafiosi, claiming his dealings with toxic waste trafficking were kickstarted by a contact from SISMI.

Here, for example, is Fonti in L'Espresso:

As I have already written, in the early 1980s Giuseppe Nirta called a meeting of the leaders after being contacted by the Ministry of Defense, and at that very moment he had also been contacted by two collaborators of the SISMI, Giorgio Giovannini and Giovanni Di Stefano, who asked the family of San Luca if they were willing to provide manpower to transport toxic and radioactive waste to Somalia on behalf of Italian companies that no longer knew where to put it. The secretary of the PSI Bettino Craxi was aware of the matter", writes the former boss of the 'ndrangheta, "but he did not follow this type of business but left it to the secret services to deal with."

(Giuseppe Nirta was the boss of 'Ndranghetta. Bettino Craxi was the famously crooked Socialist politician, who served as Prime Minister in the mid-1980s.)

Some things from the first two episodes were cleared up for me, such as the real names behind the Jupiter and Condor aliases in the SISMI messages linked to Alpi's trip to Bosaso to interview the sheikh. One of those agents was himself obliterated in what the journalist suspects was a SISMI effort to tie up loose ends to "dark plots". And of course, the Somali man, who was arrested, imprisoned, and then after 23 years declared innocent and set free, was killed in a car bomb in Mogadishu.

I never understood that particular part about getting involved in big conspiracies...like if you're dealing with one of those big plots where half the guys doing the crime get smoked in a kind of loose-end style situation, it feels like the risk-reward ratio is so skewed you might as well just go and get a job, sell ice cream or something, it can't possibly pay so well to be on the low end of the criminal food chain...but I guess that's just the way things go...

Giancarlo's lawyer, Stefano Menicacci, is another figure that entrances me. We could likely do a whole episode on him, maybe we will, but you only get so many a year so probably not. Plus can try to work in as much on him as we can elsewhere... Menicacci was not a top-tier player, rather he was one of many creatures burped out from Italy's sewers that flourished during the events of the famous Years of Lead, the period of extrajudicial murder and state terror that did a real number on Italy in the 60s and 70s.

He served most of this period as a member of parliament for the MSI---the Italian Social Movement, formed by some clever survivors of Fascist Italy's rump successor, the Italian Social Republic (if you've seen the infamous Salo---it was those guys). He also served as the lawyer for Steffano Delle Chiaie.

There's an excellent book on Delle Chiaie called STEFANO DELLE CHIAIE: PORTRAIT OF A BLACK TERRORIST (PDF on libcom at that link) by Stuart Christie. Christie was an interesting, dynamic fellow. An anarchist from Scotland, famous for his 1964 arrest in Spain for his plan to dynamite Francisco Franco. He served a few years in a Spanish prison before being released back to the UK, where he became a writer. At the time of the bomb plot, Christie was just 18. Anyways the book is great, tying in the CIA, the Vatican, the international 4th Reich, Mafia, etc together in a well-researched and thoughtful manner. Delle Chiaie was involved in numerous plots to overthrow the Italian government, famously the Borghese coup of 1970, and was connected to multiple massacres and bombings throughout the country. The groups Delle Chiaie was a part of---the National Vanguard etc---were the extra-parliamentary footsoldiers working in concert with members of MSI and sometimes the Christian Democrats (and of course sections of the secret services) to destabilize the country.

I'm so curious: When and how did Giancarlo and Menicacci meet? Or, a more specific question---who introduced them? Why?

An interesting fact, which likely can't find a home in any of the episodes (reading it would take too much time in already very lengthy episodes, it doesn't necessarily prove anything, etc) is that Menicacci says he that when he was in Mogadishu checking on Giancarlo, he actually saw the very Land Rover that Alpi's killers were said to have used---and saw it when he was heading to the site of the murder in his capacity as Giancarlo's lawyer.

From his parliamentary testimony:

STEFANO MENICACCI: I hired an armed team of about eighteen people, which cost me 150 dollars (that was the custom); in the morning or afternoon - I don't remember - I went to the site of the Ilaria Alpi accident, in the afternoon I went to see old Mogadishu, because I am naturally curious and I also take risks. I took many photographs of old Mogadishu and on the way back, in the evening, to Marocchino's house, one of the escort who was with me---look at the coincidence of life---pointed out to me a Land Rover that was driving along Corso Risorgimento. I was coming from the old port, so we crossed paths with it. Since that day I was talking about Ilaria Alpi, this person signaled to me that it was the attackers' Land Rover. However, I only saw it in passing. It was rather dark in color. Naturally, in those circumstances I couldn't chase it - in fact I was very careful not to - or look for it.

What are the odds...

We must not forget that the MSI was also the political home of my favorite bimbo, ALESSANDRA MUSSOLINI. The granddaughter of the one and only DUCE, the niece of Sophia Loren, famous mostly for her pretty alright album AMORE (which if I recall right was actually big in Japan) and for seemingly getting access to lip filler technology decades before it hit the mainstream. She also served in parliament as a member of MSI during the waning days of the party. When it finally tried to moderate halfway through the decade, she did the same, and following the course of many Italian fascists ended up in Berlusconi's party by the 2010s. But...this is what I mean by digression...it has nothing much to do with Il Polpo except I find it interesting...in fact she's very interesting (and her cop husband was a pedophile)...perhaps we should do an episode on her...

Alessandra Mussolini starred in the film Ha-Derech L'Ein Harod, an Israeli-Italian action movie based on a dystopian novel by the Israeli satirist Amos Kenan (speaking of dark plots: A member of the Stern gang, though he turned into something of a general Israeli dissenter). This is the IMDB description:

In a dystopian future, the Israeli army keeps the population in check because of water scarcity but Saul Jordan, an activist journalist, finds out that it is an invention and tries with the help of a Palestinian tramp to spread the news from a small radio station improvised in the desert, inciting fellow countrymen to the resistance and the struggle for freedom. Wanted throughout the nation, the two during an escape take hostage to an army colonel and the group of his collaborators, including the sexy Liora (Alessandra Mussolini).

As you can see, the movie (apparently called "PHANTOM FIGHTERS" in the English release) also stars Gregory Pecks son, Tony.

Anyways, I haven't seen it yet but the more I think about it, we really should do an episode on this strange woman...

You see how easy it is to digress? And then you run the risk of getting bogged down in the past, sometimes you must talk of DOGE (don't hear much about them anymore...), the Economy, World War Three, things like that. I like to do that too but the past is a foreign country...sometimes one must stay at home (what the fuck does that mean? Nevertheless it's probably correct)

My favorite bit of the parliamentary inquiry into Alpi, at the end of a long interview with Scaglione, is this:

We return to the present with our next episode...we will return to Somalia soon...

BRACE

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