Aldo Semerari

Aldo Semerari

Aldo Semerari (Italian pronunciation: [ˈaldo semeˈraːri]; 8 May 1923 − March or 1 April 1982) was an Italian criminologist, anthropologist and psychiatrist. He was also a noted neo-fascist, who was suspected of complicity in the terror attack that killed 85 people at Bologna railway station in 1980.

Background and career[]

Semerari was born on 8 May 1923, in Martina Franca, Apulia. He studied medicine at the University of Padua, specialising in psychiatry.^[1] During the 1970s he was Professor of Criminal Anthropology at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and a director of the university's Institute of Forensic Psychopathology.^[2] His academic interests primarily involved the study of sadomasochism and sexual crimes.

In 1962, Semerari came to public attention when he was asked to provide a psychiatric analysis of the writer and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was then on trial for attempting to steal two thousand lire from a petrol station. In his report, Semerari pronounced Pasolini to be a "sexual deviant" and "instinctive psychopath", whose voyeurism and criminal tendencies were stimulated by his communist affiliations. He also considered Pasolini's refusal to acknowledge his deviancy as further evidence of mental instability, declaring that Pasolini was "so deeply abnormal that he accepts his abnormality in full consciousness, to the point of being unable to judge it as such."^[3] Having neglected to interview Pasolini in person, Semerari did not succeed in getting his evidence accepted by the court, but his report's findings were published before the trial ended and then repeated uncritically by sections of the popular press.^[4] The controversial nature of Semerari's evaluation of Pasolini did not dent his status as a leading consultant to the criminal courts in Rome, and throughout the following two decades his psychiatric evaluations continued to influence judicial rulings.

In the 1970s, Semerari was also involved in making films himself, developing a partnership with the director and screenwriter Brunello Rondi. He and Rondi wrote the screenplay for the film Valeria Inside and Outside (Valeria dentro e fuori, 1972), an explicit account of a young woman's neurotic Freudian fantasies and sexual frustrations, and he received a further screenwriting credit for Rondi's sexploitation film Sex Life in a Women's Prison (Prigione di donne, 1974).^[5]

Neo-fascist activity[]

In his youth Semerari was a communist ideologue, who belonged to the Stalinist faction of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI). Corrado De Rosa recounts in his book La mente nera how Semerari cultivated a partisan image while still in Martina Franca, frequently wearing a fur hat, leather jacket, red star and pistol holster, and was a member of a gang that placed a bomb in the house of the local Christian Democrat member of the Constituent Assembly, for which he received a short spell in gaol in 1946 before benefitting from a general amnesty.^[6] He later spent time in Prague as a cadre, having specifically requested that he be sent there for training.^[7] In 1954, however, he suddenly pivoted to the extreme right, becoming a convert to national socialism.^[8] Several news outlets later reported that his home contained a substantial collection of Nazi and Fascist memorabilia, including military uniforms and photographs of Hitler and Mussolini, which friends and associates dismissed in public as merely a hobby.^[9][10][11] Although never a prominent figure within the neo-fascist movement, Semerari became a leader of a small group of fellow intellectuals and agitators called "Let's Build the Action" (Costruiamo l'azione), and was also a member of the Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge, reputedly maintaining links with SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency.

As John Dickie explains, Semerari's main significance lay in his position at the intersection of subversive political activity and organised crime.^[12] He was convinced that establishing partnerships with criminal gangs would accelerate the strategia della tensione (literally, the "strategy of tension"), the process by which "revolutionary" activity would exacerbate public discontent and bring about the fall of the democratic state, and to this end he had by the late 1970s cultivated close ties with the recently-established Roman criminal syndicate, the Banda della Magliana, whose meetings were often organised by him at his summer villa in Rieti.^[13] Alongside the former parliamentarian Fabio De Felice and history professor Paolo Signorelli, Semerari also hosted a number of seminars with various far-right militants at around this time, which Jeffrey Bale suggests were convened to discuss a "new decentralized and self-financing terrorist strategy", modelled on the activities of the Red Brigades, that could "consolidate the remnants of various extremist groups" in the face of official state crackdowns and the flight of several neo-fascist leaders to "safer havens abroad".^[14] Bale notes that the seminars' participants frequently disagreed about which was the best route to achieve their goals, with Semerari and De Felice emerging as the leaders of a "traditionalist" faction that eschewed direct revolutionary action in favour of constructing a logistical base that would bring together like-minded militant groups and individuals.^[15]

In exchange for financial support for his organisation, Semerari helped the members of various criminal organisations evade imprisonment when they were arrested, devising strategies for coping with police interrogation and writing reports that sought to establish either innocence or lack of culpability, which were usually supported by a fraudulent diagnosis of mental infirmity.^[16] In addition to the Banda della Magliana, Semerari made similar deals with both Raffaele Cutolo's New Organised Camorra (Nuova Camorra Organizzata; NCO) and one of Cutulo's main rivals, the New Family (Nuova Famiglia; NF) headed by Carmine Alfieri.^[17] His efforts at keeping criminals away from severe punishment often bore fruit: Franco Ferraresi concluded that he was "critical in obtaining lenient terms for many of them."^[18]

In August 1980 Semerari was one of a trio of university professors − the other two being Signorelli and Claudio Mutti − who were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station earlier that month, which claimed the lives of 85 people and wounded over 200 more. Semerari was, according to The Observer, held by the police at his home in Rieti and taken to a top security prison for further interrogation.^[10] Pino Rauti, a leading figure in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano; MSI) and a friend of Signorelli, announced in a press statement that the accusations regarding the culpability of Semerari and the other detainees were "fabricated by members of the Italian secret services to discredit the political right."^[19] Semerari remained in prison for a further seven months on charges of subversive association and forming armed bands, until he was freed in April 1981 due to a lack of evidence.^[20] During captivity he suffered (in the words of Ferraresi) a "psychological breakdown", which ensured that he remained a patient at the San Camillo hospital in Rome even after being formally released from court supervision.^[20][21]

Murder[]

On 23 March 1982 Semerari travelled to Naples, ostensibly to meet a local Camorra leader, Umberto Ammaturo, who was on the run from the police and had requested a psychiatric certificate. Ammaturo was already a client of Semerari, having previously escaped a custodial sentence by heeding the latter's advice to feign insanity during police interviews.^[17] Semerari was last seen, according to the Irish Times, leaving the Royal Hotel in Naples on 26 March in the company of three "Camorra men".^[8] Three days later a letter was delivered to the offices of the communist newspaper l'Unità, purportedly written by Semerari himself, which claimed that he was responsible for writing and circulating a fake "official document" alleging that Vincenzo Scotti, a government minister, had visited Raffaele Cutolo in Ascoli Piceno gaol to enlist his help in rescuing from captivity a Christian Democrat politician, Ciro Cirillo, who had been held by the Red Brigades for several months.^[22][23] Semerari's decapitated body was subsequently discovered on 1 April 1982 in a stolen Fiat 128 parked near the town hall in Ottaviano, Campania, close to the headquarters of the NCO.^[24][25][26] According to the journalist Alejssandro Silj, his body had been there "for some days".^[8]

Shortly after the murder, a criminal named Lugaresi Capemuorto claimed that Semerari had been assassinated by SISMI in order to prevent him from revealing what he knew about the 1980 Bologna massacre. He claimed that on 25 March he had received a telephone call from Semerari, who told Capemuorto that he was in fear for his life and begged for help. Capemuorto stated that "I immediately called General Santovito [the former director of SISMI and a member of P2] warning him of the situation. Santovito, who certainly knew Semerari, was totally unsurprised and said: 'Keep the news to yourself', in the sense that I should not tell others." The magistrate, Rosario Priore, believed Capomuorto's allegations and developed a complex reconstruction of the murder on the basis of these alleged facts, but in the end the theory was proven to be completely unfounded.^[27]

In fact, Semerari was murdered on the orders of Ammaturo, an associate of Alfieri's NF, who desired revenge after discovering that his enemy, Raffaele Cutolo, was also availing himself of Semerari's services whilst in prison. Both Ammaturo and his lover, Pupetta Maresca, were subsequently arrested and charged with Semerari's murder, although the former managed to escape justice by fleeing to Africa and then to South America. Maresca, having remained in Italy to face the charges, would serve four years in prison before she and Ammaturo were acquitted on appeal in 1989 due to a lack of evidence. Although Maresca continues to deny any role in the murder, Ammaturo subsequently confessed to his involvement when he decided to become a pentito (state witness or "supergrass") in June 1993.^[17][28] In May 2010, after being released and provided with a new identity in exchange for his testimony, he admitted to personally beheading Semerari in an interview with La Repubblica newspaper. "I cut off [Semerari's] head", Ammaturo stated, "... because he had committed himself to us in the New Family, to follow "le cose nostre", and he was well paid by me personally, but Cutolo had someone killed in the security chambers of the courthouse and Semerari gave him a false report to have him acquitted... He was a traitor, whoever makes a deal and doesn't keep it is a traitor".^[29]

Personal life[]

In addition to his collection of Fascist memorabilia, Semerari was also renowned for his love of fine wine and classical music.^[30] He bred Dobermann dogs, reputedly communicating to them only in German.^[31]

Semerari's assistant and partner was Fiorella Carrara, who was found dead from gunshot wounds in her apartment in Rome the day after Semerari's body was discovered.^[8] Although police investigators declared her death a suicide there have since been rumours of foul play, as her house was burgled and searched by persons unknown shortly afterwards.^[32]

His son is the psychiatrist Antonio Semerari.

References[]

Sources: books, articles and theses[]

• Allum, Felia Skyle, 'The Neapolitan Camorra: Crime and politics in post-war Naples (1950–92)', Ph.D. thesis, Brunel University (2000).
• Arlacchi, Pino, Mafia Business: the Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1986). ISBN 9780860911357
• Bale, Jeffrey, 'The "Black" Terrorist International: Neo-Fascist Paramilitary Networks and the "Strategy of Tension" in Italy, 1968-1974', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley (1994).
• Behan, Tom, The Camorra (London: Routledge, 1996). ISBN 0-415-09987-0
• Curti, Roberto, 'Rediscovering Brunello Rondi', Offscreen, Volume 15, Issue 12 (December 2011).
• (in Italian) De Rosa, Corrado, La mente nera (Rome: Sperling & Kupfer, 2014). ISBN 9788820056001
• Dickie, John, Mafia Brotherhoods: Camorra, Mafia, 'ndrangheta: The Rise of the Honoured Societies (London: Sceptre, 2012). ISBN 9780340963944
• Ferraresi, Franco, Threats to Democracy: the Radical Right in Italy after the War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). ISBN 9780691044996
• Hodgson, Francis, Who's Who in Science in Europe: a Reference Guide to European Scientists (Guernsey: Hodgson, 1978).
• (in French) Klein, Jean-Claude, 'Le lynchage d'un pédé', Le Berdache, Issue 6 (December 1979−January 1980).
• (in Italian) Lucarelli, Carlo, Storie di bande criminali, di mafie e di persone oneste: dai Misteri d'Italia di Blu notte (Turin: Einaudi, 2008). ISBN 9788806195021
• Schwartz, Barth David, Pasolini Requiem (New York, N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1995). ISBN 9780679733492