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a one-page interview in
Corriere della Sera
on December 18, 2006, with Senator Gerardo D’Ambrosio, one of the magistrates who investigated Piazza Fontana and the death of Pinelli. The lengthy inquest was not completed until after the death of my father, and it established that Pinelli had not been killed, nor had he committed suicide. He had quite simply fallen out of the window after suddenly taking ill. Although it did not appear in time to save my father’s life, D’Ambrosio’s investigation nevertheless uncovered all the mysteries of thatawful night and established that my father had not been in the room when Pinelli fell from the window.
    As I read his words, I am filled with emotion: someone has finally found the courage, the will, and the patience to dismantle the theories that had been recycled for decades. The interview was conducted by Dino Martirano, a courageous journalist who lives not far away from me in Rome. I decide to give him a call, and he immediately invites me over for lunch. At his house, he offers me a tape of the full interview. “I hear that you’re writing a book. This should definitely come in handy.”
    I then phone Senator D’Ambrosio and ask if he can give me a minute of his time. We meet outside the Senate, have an espresso at Sant’Eustachio, and then walk toward the Pantheon. I ask his permission to use Martirano’s tape. “It wouldn’t look right if I, the son of Luigi Calabresi, asked you to give an interview exonerating my father. You might feel obliged to say nice things to me. But with Martirano you felt free to say what you think and if you don’t mind, I’d like to use your conversation with him as a document.”
    He stops for a minute, shrugs his shoulders inside his navy blue loden coat, and says that he doesn’t mind. He does have a few things he wants to get off his chest first, however. As he starts walking again, he says in a dry precise voice: “Pinelli wasn’t murdered and your father wasn’t in the room. Those were times of complete madness.”
    Staring down at the cobblestones as he goes, he adds, “I still get letters asking me why I acquitted the police. I did it because I was absolutely convinced that no murder had been committed. Lotta Continua did a lot of damage to Italy: first and foremost, it managed to implant in the minds of the left the idea that Pinelli had been murdered and that the trials were a sham. They weren’t interested in the truth. All they cared about was theverdict in their heads: guilty as charged. And they blame me that this didn’t happen. I still get letters today telling me, ‘You went on to become a senator but you never said why you acquitted Pinelli’s murderers.’ It’s unbearable.”
    I go home and turn on the tape recorder.
    I remember that a file was delivered to me with the label “first-degree murder.” I refused to do anything until they changed it to the lesser charge of manslaughter. We had to proceed with transparency. We also had to fight the stonewalling and the ridiculous old-school ways that used to prevail at the courthouse and police headquarters. You can’t believe the dirty looks I used to get when I appeared at police headquarters. I would show up with reporters in tow, to assure transparency and truthfulness. The police didn’t realize that I was putting together proof and forensics. We investigated high and low, leaving no stone unturned. And as we proceeded, all the “proof” concocted to show that Pinelli had been murdered—the ambulance, the truth serum, the karate chop, the fall—was found to be without foundation. Let me go through them one by one:
    The ambulance
. An elaborate conspiracy theory has been woven around the call to the ambulance. So without notifying anyone, I took the court reporter with me to visit the center where emergency calls used to come in for ambulance