Word: montesi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Saverio Polito, 79, overzealous Rome police chief (1946-53) accused (and later cleared) of hushing up investigation of the notorious Wilma Montesi death, jailed by the Fascists in 1943 on a charge of trying to seduce Mussolini's wife while she was in his custody; of a circulatory ailment; in Rome...
...Little Saint." Wilma Montesi's grief-stricken parents, at first the object of great sympathy, proved to be shifty witnesses. Stubbornly they insisted that Wilma could not possibly have been involved with any man except the young police sergeant she-was engaged to marry. She was a "santarellina" (little saint), sobbed Mamma Montesi. Only under relentless hammering from the judge...
...play the tragedienne. Don't lie" -did Mamma finally admit what the whole Montesi clan had been trying to conceal-the fact that Wilma had often been invited out for rides by her Uncle Giuseppe, a 32-year-old government functionary who fancies himself a Don Juan...
Until Mamma Montesi cracked, Uncle Giuseppe had stubbornly clung to his original alibi: on the fatal day he had been out with his fiancee. Now under sharp questioning he changed his story, said that instead he was with his fiancee's sister (who, trying to help him out, admitted on the stand that Giuseppe was in fact the father of her illegitimate child). Almost at once, this alibi, too, began to fall apart. What remained was the damning testimony of one of his fellow employees that on the day of Wilma's death Uncle Giuseppe had left...
...more convincing because it was reluctant-lifted the shadow of corruption from Italy's Demo-Christian government. Wrote Rome's Messaggero: "Of all the terrible suspicions which tormented public opinion nothing is left: no orgies, no white slavery, no boatloads of prostitutes, nothing." But before the Montesi affair could finally be left to history a new inquiry was in order: How satisfactory was a system of justice which forced Piero Piccioni to suffer three years of public humiliation and judicial jeopardy on the basis of gossip alone...