Black on Black — The Three Lives of Ulderico Sciarretta

Ulderico Sciarretta

1.

There are many different shades of black. One is particularly hateful to Italian people and will never fade in the collective memory. During the Fascist regime, black was the color worn by the Italian Fascist militia, the “blackshirts”: a tint evoking violence, repression and abuse, a vision soliciting fear, but also a badge which granted power and rewards for those wearing or supporting it, either by belief or personal advantage. Born on August 26, 1906, Ulderico Sciarretta enlisted in the Fascist party at 16, in 1922, soon after the March on Rome. One might say he was quick in catching the spirit of the time. Then, as he later claimed, he had a “vocational crisis”[1] and enrolled in the navy; he did not make much of a career, though: on the contrary, he ended up on trial for violence and outrage. 

In 1937 Sciarretta moved to Turin, posing as an accountant, a professional title the police advised him not to use. He set up a tax advice office which in fact was a front for other types of business, not exactly legal. Then came the September 1943 armistice: following the birth of Mussolini’s short-lived Republic of Salò in Northern Italy, Sciarretta acted as a double agent and took part in Fascist raids against the partisans, as a spy of the infamous Fascist brigade “Ather Cappelli” (one of the members was Mario Volonté, Gian Maria’s father). After the end of the war, he was arrested and taken before the Court of Assizes in Turin, together with other war criminals: he was accused of taking part in the murder of the 25-year-old Agostino Priuli, killed in December 1944 during a raid in a workshop where arms for the partisans were assembled and repaired with the steel provided clandestinely by the Lancia car plant. The newspaper La Nuova Stampa described Sciarretta as follows: “Pale, puny, skinny, he even looks sinister.”[2] A woman testified having seen him railing against dead partisans’ bodies, shouting: “Come, mothers, come and see your bandits!” During the trial, the crowd⎯largely composed of relatives of people arrested, deported, tortured or killed by the defendants⎯yelled out loud, “Give them to us!”

On August 8, 1945, the Court sentenced Ulderico Sciarretta to death by shooting in the back. The audience cheered out loud.[3] 

2.

Cut to: Rome, the early 1960s. The fragmentation of the Italian film industry was an effective remedy against the invasion of American cinema; many small and ambitious companies surfaced, producing genre films which could be sold abroad at competitive prices, relying as they were on labor costs slightly above those of third world countries. Films were produced based on the “minimo garantito” (minimum estimate), the advance given by distributors which resulted in the products being shaped according to their own needs, namely the type of story, the choice of the director and leads, the dosage of nudity and violence, and so on. This resulted in countless variations on a common theme, in the attempt at catching a chunk of public as large as possible. Many production ventures attempted to cut their small share by any means necessary, without any agenda if not to ride the filone (thread) in vogue at that moment. Between 1965 and 1970 no fewer than 400 production companies surfaced on the market, more than half produced only one film, and only 22 managed to make more than five titles per year. These hit-and-run products were usually distributed regionally and barely surfaced in the big cities; their commercial exploit happened mostly in the second and third-run venues in the suburbs and provinces.

It is in such a context that Ulderico Sciarretta’s name pops up again, about two decades after his trial. He had returned a free man in December 1946, after his death sentence was annulled, and wisely moved to the Capital, to start a new life. As his previous deeds had proven, he certainly had enough shrewdness to follow the wave and take advantage of the current situation, whatever it might be. Like many other small producers, he did not really have to have much money to start with: he just needed an office and a legally established company. His own firm bore the puzzling name “I Film della Mangusta” (Mongoose Films), a small company with a capital of just 400,000 lire administered by Fernando Cerqua but run de facto by Sciarretta and Spartaco Antonucci.

Giuseppe “Nello” Vegezzi

This is where Sciarretta’s path crosses that of a young aspiring director by the name of Giuseppe “Nello” Vegezzi. The scion of a wealthy family from Piacenza and a habitué of the literary youth circles, young Nello had been bitten by the film bug and cultivated the dream of becoming a filmmaker. He left university and moved to Paris. There, from 1954 to 1958, he attended the prestigious “Institut des hautes études cinématographiques” (Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies), headed by Marcel l’Herbier. Back in Italy, he settled in Rome, and devoted himself to various projects, all of which invariably failed. But his will was firm and sound, as he once told his sister: “You know what this means to me: again collapse, again rubble, again humiliation and discouragement. And once again I succumb to crisis and stay alive. And once again the “others” destroy my house. And once again I get up, shake the dust off my shoulders, and build it up again. I believe in “my house.” I want to make a movie.”[4] 

The movie Giuseppe Vegezzi wanted to make was based on a script initially titled La bella e il diavolo (The Beauty and the Devil), the story of a group of young punks who descend upon a gloomy manor for an orgy and meet an old man who has sold his soul to the devil. There, the juvenile delinquents face a series of supernatural experiences that will bring them, the next morning, to a renewed existential self-consciousness. The Gothic palimpsest of the tale and the nods to the Faustian pact were a pretext for a bulky symbolic discourse, as Vegezzi laid out in his notes to the script: 

The action takes place in the modern era, and in an unspecified location. The six young men represent the outer life. They are the embodiment of life as the exasperation of the “present.” Outside good and evil. A symbol of “recklessness” and “pure instinct.” The old lord of the castle is meant to portray the exasperated inner life, brought to the level of Faustian fanaticism. Life as non-acceptance of “becoming” and exasperation of the “past.” Beyond good, beyond evil. The symbol of “exasperated conscience” and ascetic fanaticism. The castle is meant to be the allegoric-symbolic visualization of the “collective unconscious.” It is here that, from the meeting of two opposite misconceptions of life, the “awareness” takes place which brings the characters to a “sublimation” or katarsis.[5] 

In a bizarre twist of fate, Vegezzi (a fervent Communist) teamed up with the ex-Fascist Sciarretta, as I Film della Mangusta agreed to finance his feature film debut, which acquired the definitive title Katarsis. The low-budget production could count on at least one bankable star: Christopher Lee, then a familiar presence in and around Cinecittà, where he acted in a bunch of flicks ranging from Mario Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra (aka Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961) and La frusta e il corpo (aka The Whip and the Body, 1963) to Warren Kiefer’s Il castello dei morti vivi (aka Castle of the Living Dead, 1964). Katarsis was filmed in Spring 1963, with a tiny budget of just 46 million lire. Vegezzi’s idea was to shoot it mostly in long takes, with very little dialogue and ample use of music and sound effects to heighten his concept. 

Unfortunately, if the film is about a pact with the devil, the contract Vegezzi signed with Sciarretta was no less diabolical. Trouble for the debuting director began almost immediately. Vegezzi never received the 900,000 lire that were granted to him by the contract, and when Sciarretta threatened to halt the shooting, the young director asked his father and brother for money to salvage his project. He obtained a providential funding of nearly four million lire. In addition to that, affairs of the heart nearly turned the filming into tragedy: “A young director jumps from a window but ends on a shed and saves his life,” a newspaper article reported in July 1963[6]. Nello had fallen for one of the actresses, Vittoria Centroni (credited in the film as Lilly Parker), and had been shattered by the woman’s rejection.

But the worst was yet to come. Although not finished and assembled in a rough cut, Katarsis was submitted to the rating board and screened in a small Southern town. The audience response was so bad that the distributor rejected the film, calling it “boring crap, with non-existent direction and awful actors.” Soon afterwards, in late February 1964, I Film della Mangusta went bankrupt. Eventually Katarsis was purchased by the company Eco Film, owned by none other than Ulderico Sciarretta, who, to paraphrase Lubitsch, proceeded to do to the film what Hitler did to Poland. In June 1965, Vegezzi received an ominous letter by Eco Film which announced: 

You are aware of the film’s drawbacks, which made it impossible to release theatrically … to the point that it was rejected by the distributors. 

We have prepared a specific script for the indispensable reshoots, based on a story by our Executive Producer [Author’s note: Ulderico Sciarretta], which will make it acceptable to the public and marketable. 

We therefore invite you to tell us, within five days from this letter, whether you wish to have your respected name appear as the author of the story, the script and the artistic direction of the film, which will undergo a title change.[7] 

Vegezzi immediately resorted to the law, to have the original negative seized in order to avoid tampering, but in vain. Sciarretta, along with actor Piero Vida (the only returning member from the original cast), proceeded to re-edit the movie arbitrarily. He distorted its structure and style, fragmented Vegezzi’s long takes, replaced the original soundtrack and added a pernicious, moralistic voice-over that haunts the viewer throughout the film. In addition to that, Sciarretta shot a new slapdash framing story which, for lack of better terms, can be roughly described as “apostolical film noir.” Vegezzi was so disheartened that he left Rome for good and returned to his hometown, where his psychic conditions worsened. He never made another film. 

The heavily re-edited version of Katarsis (now available in Blu-ray through Severin films), bearing the title Sfida al diavolo (aka Challenge the Devil), was released in 1965. It opens with a wounded man taking refuge in a convent to hide from a gangster from Beirut. There, he meets a monk named Father Remigio (Vida) who agrees to help him. Father Remigio goes to a shady nightclub to retrieve incriminating documents: there, in order to persuade a dancer (Alma Del Rio) into giving him the papers, he tells her his own tragic story. “Have you ever asked yourself why I became a monk?” “What do I know? You’ve always been such a weird guy!” she replies. Father Remigio then tells her the Faust-like parable which was Katarsis’ original core. In fact, he was one of the punks who spent the night in the haunted castle and had been so affected by the experience that he took the vows. 

What is left of Vegezzi’s original footage⎯shortened, reshaped, and paired with Peo’s commentary (“We were like animals: we liked the taste of blood and uncontrolled violence,” he recalls during a ludicrous orgy scene which in Vegezzi’s concept should have been devoid of any dialogue)⎯forms the core of the tale in one long flashback. It amounts to approximately 55 minutes. In the final scene, the dancer is so deeply moved by Father Remigio’s story (“You have managed to ruin my evening!”) that she gives him the papers. Father Remigio returns to his convent, alone in the night, accompanied by church organ music. The End.

Adding insult to injury, Sfida al diavolo features one of the most embarrassing product placements in Italian film history, long before J&B became the irreplaceable accessory in every Italian lounge room captured on screen. After welcoming the wounded and hunted gangster in the convent, the considerate guardian monk hands him a drink from a bottle with no visible label, saying, “Don’t pay attention to the bottle: this is real Stock ’84 brandy. I’ve been told to buy a cheaper one, but since I drink it myself, I don’t care about the price.” The diminutive, balding and brandy-loving guardian monk is played by none other than Ulderico Sciarretta. 

Around the same period, Sciarretta was involved in a couple more productions, both low budget gialli with a touch of, er, noir. Delitto allo specchio (Sexy Party), in which he is credited as production manager, is another bizarre item in Italian 1960s cinema, if only for the presence behind the camera of French playwright and philosopher Jean Josipovici⎯a disciple of Henri Bergson, Maurice Blondel and Paul Valéry as well as the husband of French diva Viviane Romance⎯and a cast featuring John Drew Barrymore (“whose thick head of hair would be enough for two wigs” a critic commented[8]) and Michel Lemoine, whose uncanny eyes were another rather common occurrence in Italian movies of the period. Shot by the end of 1963, the film was conceived as an Italian-French coproduction (with Ambrogio Molteni listed as co-director for bureaucratic reasons in the Italian print, whereas Josipovici is the only director credited in the U.S. version, Death on the Fourposter), but transalpine financers eventually backed out. 

With its dozen or so annoying upper-class youths equally divided between horny or nerdy boys and frivolous girls (including the sultry Luisa Rivelli, José Greci, and Maria Pia Conte) who gather at a castle on the Roman hills for a wild weekend of music, alcohol, and frolic, Delitto allo specchio relies on a basic premise akin to Katarsis, which introduced a similar selection of obnoxious types converging on a manor for an orgy. Delitto allo specchio features an elaborate if shaky build-up, with the ravishing Antonella Lualdi performing a sexy dance routine to the sound of a groovy record appropriately titled “Wild Party,” followed by one of those racy party games which no Italian film about the bourgeoisie seemed able to do without after La dolce vita. John Drew Barrymore then turns up as a suave musician-cum-psychic who conducts a séance and predicts upcoming terrible events before leaving the place (and the film) for good.

The mystery plot kicks in only in the second half, after Lualdi’s character is murdered and the guests find themselves trapped in the castle, Agatha Christie-style. But at this point the script has run out of ideas and is simply content to play with the Gothic elements (including the inevitable secret passage) and shift suspicions from one character to the next, the main red herring being the lord of the castle, played with wide-eyed abandon by Lemoine. Delitto allo specchio’s most interesting element is its penchant for the esoteric and the occult (an element destined to become prominent in the following decade), possibly coming from Josipovici’s interest in Oriental mysticism. One wonders about the extent of the French thinker’s contribution to the project: after his work in the film business (with four films directed and about a dozen scripts) Josipovici found a niche as an eclectic and radical philosopher in the 1970s, penning several essays often focused on esoteric themes and the revolt against modernity and “obscurantist science” as per the title of his best-known book, La scienza oscurantista.

Produced by Eco Film, La casa sulla fungaia was also to be directed by Josipovici. Based on a stage play by Elisa Pezzani (an ex-Futurist poetess who became an author of Grand Guignol dramas) it was eventually helmed by Romano Ferrara. The muddled plot opens with the shady Paolo (John Drew Barrymore), running away from gangsters and taking refuge in the house inhabited by Anna (Rivelli) and her rich and faint of heart husband Davide (Jean Claudio). The latter dies after Paolo administers him a fatal heart medicine. Paolo chases away his pregnant lover (Ombretta Colli) and takes over as the trustee of Davide’s wealth, only to be stuck in the premises with Anna, a nurse who knows too much named Elisabeth (Lisa Gastoni), and the deceased’s crippled, dumb, blind, and horribly disfigured brother, who seemingly has the power to sense impending tragedies. After Elisabeth is killed, Paolo and Anna are the main suspects, but it turns out things are not quite as they seem. 

With its trite Italian setting, nondescript characters and scathing references to pulp literature (one of the suspects admits reading “anything except gialli—they’re too violent and improbable”), Crimine a due looks like a relic from thirty years earlier, despite a rugged film noir-style opening which even includes a brief musical number (recalling the additional scenes Sciarretta shot for Sfida al diavolo). The twist ending involves the use of a latex mask, evoking John Huston’s 1963 film, The List of Adrian Messenger, whereas the moralistic epilogue, with the villain trapped in a mushroom farm and frantically burning banknotes to chase away flesh-hungry rats, falls flat, devoid as it is of any salvaging irony. The film had scarce diffusion and was met with the usual bias by reviewers. Some even mistakenly thought the director hiding under the pseudonym “Roy Freemount” to be Roberto Bianchi Montero. 

Crimine a due was to be Ulderico Sciarretta’s last venture into production. Nothing else was heard about Eco Film except for the announcement of a forthcoming movie called 12 bambole bionde (12 Blonde Dolls), advertised in the specialized press of the period. “Retailers!” the ad begins, and one almost visualizes Sciarretta standing on the balcony of Piazza Venezia, haranguing a crowd of venue owners like a miniature Mussolini. The ad goes on as follows: After the great success of Crimine a due… Who killed Gino? Who killed Romolo? Who killed Linda? Who killed Raymondo? Who killed Paolo? Who killed Emerson? These are the questions to which Inspector Klem will provide an answer.” Announced as “not just a Super Giallo, but a Colossal Giallo”, 12 bambole bionde was to be “a movie rich with suspense, events, thrills, exciting episodes … which ULDERICO SCIARRETTA [in all caps in the original] will produce for Eco Film and which will be directed by MARIO BAVA.”[9]

The project is telling of the erratic course of Bava’s career from the mid-1960s onward, and the involvement of Sciarretta’s company confirms Lamberto Bava’s claim that his father “liked producers who were a little dodgy.”[10] All things considered, in retrospect it is probably just as well that 12 bambole bionde never got made. As for Sciarretta, the only other trace of his presence in the film business is a note published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana and dated August 3, 1972, which alerts the shareholders of the joint stock company Iadas Film about an extraordinary meeting on September 7 with the aim of turning it into a limited liability company. The sole administrator of Iadas Film, signing the note, is Ulderico Sciarretta. Incidentally, as far as we know, Iadas Film (funded with a capital of one million lire) never produced any movie during its obscure existence. 

3.

After his ambitions as a producer failed, the third life of Ulderico Sciarretta was characterized by a flair for the paranormal, a trait perhaps he already had in himself judging by the stories of the films he’d produced (not to mention his miraculous salvation from capital punishment…). As he himself told the press, “I do it for vocation, not for money.”[11] And so Sciarretta tagged along with the period’s growing fascination for parapsychology and built himself a reputation as a psychic. Whether that reputation was deserved, however, came into question. 

In August 1973, an article appeared in the Corriere della Sera, titled “The fraud of two Rome-based “magicians” has been exposed.”[12] The alleged psychics had announced that they would solve the mysterious murder of a young woman named Antonietta Longo, whose naked and decapitated body had been found in Lake Albano, near Rome, two decades earlier, in 1955, causing a great resonance in the press. The article reported:

After a brief survey in the area where the body had been found, the two magicians, psychic Ulderico Sciarretta and Professor Illevon (two luminaries in the field), decided to proceed with the exceptional experiment. That’s what it was about: the psychic would evoke the spirit of Antonietta Longo, while a photographer would pass a photographic plate over the professor’s forehead. Eventually, the killer’s photograph as well as the precise location of the victim’s head would appear on it.[13] 

A curious experiment, indeed. However, the journalist gathered for the occasion were understandably diffident, and, as the article revealed, had marked the photographic plates that were to be placed over the magician’s head. Guess what? “The plate on which something appeared (a name and a date) was the only one the journalists hadn’t marked. Hence, the fraud was revealed, and the two magicians were showed up.”[14]

Soon after, though, Professor Illevon⎯real name Renato Pietro Novelli, a self-proclaimed Doctor in Parapsychology at the Sorbonne who claimed he had learned meditation in Tibet⎯struck again: he formed a “parapsychoelectric group,” among whose adepts were actors Enzo Cerusico (Dario Argento’s Le cinque giornate, aka The Five Days of Milan) and Nino Castelnuovo (Nude per l’assassino, aka Strip Nude for the Killer), and launched the idea of a machine which would capture criminals’ thoughts[15]. An idea, one shall add, which to many cinephiles will evoke the bizarre device featured in Elia Palumbo’s La polizia brancola nel buio (aka The Police Are Blundering in the Dark, 1975)⎯incidentally, a giallo so cheap and haphazard that it looks like an Ulderico Sciarretta production. In December 1976, however, Novelli’s brilliant career ended for good: he was arrested for having swindled dozens of wealthy middle-aged ladies whom he’d met through lonely hearts ads[16]. Three months later he hanged himself in his cell[17].

Sciarretta did not give up, though. In 1984 his name made the headlines again, as the psychic attempted to interview the recently deceased Russian premier Yuri Andropov. Sciarretta’s intermediary in the afterlife would be his guiding spirit, a monk by the name of Father Antonio, perhaps a lover of Stock ’84 as well, whom Sciarretta contacted every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon starting at 4 p.m., for the benefit of those who gathered at the headquarters of the “Centro Studi Lucrezia Borgia–Parapsicologia applicata” which he funded and chaired. An article described it as “a small room whose walls are covered with newspaper clippings and diplomas, hundreds of recorded tapes with names such as Hammurabi or Paracelsus on the labels, a three-legged table, a dozen rickety chairs, a disconnected phone, the window closed and sealed with adhesive tape, and pitch black all around.”[18] Not unlike a movie set from an Eco Film production. 

However, the planned interview with Andropov never happened, but Father Antonio told the participants to the séance that nothing would ever change in Russia, anyway. Which sounds a fitting epilogue to the earthy parable of Ulderico Sciarretta, who left this vale of tears on January 27, 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and during the last days of the USSR. 

Ulderico Sciarretta left two sons, Alfredo (born in 1936) and Roberto (born in 1939), who both had their share of trouble with the law. In 1967 Alfredo Sciarretta was arrested for cashing fake postal orders; among his accomplices was a 27-year-old struggling actor by the name of Maurizio Merli[19]. 

Starting in the mid-1960s, Roberto Sciarretta was involved in several thefts and robberies, leading to a 9-year sentence in 1966 (later overturned for insufficient evidence), followed by more such episodes, with break-ins of jewelries and fur companies. In 1979 Roberto Sciarretta was arrested with the accusation of being the head of a criminal gang⎯nicknamed “The Golden Men” after a popular Marco Vicario film, Sette uomini d’oro (aka Seven Golden Men, 1965)⎯that had committed many hits in several parts of Italy. “He is being persecuted,” his father claimed, writing to newspapers and giving interviews where he explained that his son’s many judiciary vicissitudes were the result of negative bias and brutal interrogation methods on the part of the armed forces. “I can prove everything,” Sciarretta concluded. “All is written and documented.”[20] Four years later, in June 1983, the mobile squad caught Roberto Sciarretta in the act, in the vault of a Roman bank: it was Roberto’s twentieth arrest, and the Roman mobile squad had four huge folders with his name on it. “Sciarretta is the genius of the gang,” the article explained. “He looks like singer-actor Domenico Modugno. Same smile, same captivating ways. ‘Look, opening a vault is like conquering a beautiful woman. A big, exciting, indispensable pleasure. When I’m in front of the security door I tremble with pleasure. If I manage to open it… it’s like making love.’”[21]

In 1997 the 58-year-old Roberto Sciarretta returned to jail for the umpteenth time. An article nicknamed him “il mago degli scassinatori” (the wizard of safecrackers) for his elegant ways[22]. His last score at a central Turin bank in April 1992 had been a masterpiece of planning and execution, worthy of a Jean-Pierre Melville, and much better executed than any of his father’s celluloid productions⎯not to mention far more commercially successful. The robbers had emptied the safe and opened no less than 475 deposit boxes. It had gained him an amazing loot of almost 90 billion lire.

The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

Was it worth it to go through the three lives of Ulderico Sciarretta⎯war criminal, two-bit film producer, fraud psychic⎯or simply have his name engulfed and forgotten in the limbo of history, together with his celluloid atrocities and real-life crimes? The answer, perhaps, can be found, mutatis mutandis, in a similar trajectory, that of Nazi war criminal Albert Kesselring, the commander of German troops in occupied Italy who in 1947 was tried for the horrible crimes he was responsible for, such as the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in Rome. Kesselring was released in 1952 for his “very serious” health conditions. Once in Germany he was saluted as a hero by the Bavarian neo-Nazi circles, and he declared to the press that he had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of⎯indeed, Italians ought to build him a monument for his good work. Soon a plaque appeared in the city of Cuneo, with a sarcastic poem penned by anti-Fascist politician and jurist Piero Calamandrei, Lapide ad ignominia (A monument to ignominy), which started as follows:

You will get it

kamerad Kesselring

the monument you demand of us Italians

but it’s our turn to decide

the stone it will be built with.

Here’s your monument, kamerad Sciarretta.

by Roberto Curti

Notes:

[1] “La condanna a morte del criminale Sciarretta,” La Nuova Stampa, 10 August 1945.

[2] “La spia Sciaretta [sic] alle Assise del Popolo,” La Nuova Stampa, 8 August 1945.

[3]  “La condanna a morte del criminale Sciarretta,” La Nuova Stampa, 10 August 1945.

[4]  Nello Vegezzi, letter to Janna Vegezzi, December 1961. From Nello Vegezzi’s private archive, courtesy of Camillo Vegezzi, who kindly provided this document and the other material related to Katarsis mentioned in the text. 

[5]  Nello Vegezzi, “Explicative note” to Katarsis.

[6]  “Un giovane regista si getta nel vuoto ma finisce su una tettoia e si salva,” Il Tempo, 20 July 1963. 

[7]  Eco Film, letter to Giuseppe Vegezzi, June 9, 1965. 

[8] Vice, “Delitto allo specchio,” Corriere della Sera, 14 July 1964.

[9] See Tim Lucas, “Bava’s Lost Super Giallo Opportunity,” Video Watchblog, 4 February 2009 (https://videowatchdogblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/bavas-unmade-super-giallo.html).

[10] Lamberto Bava, quoted in Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, “Il talento di Mr. Bava,” in Genealogia del delitto. Il cinema di Mario e Lamberto Bava. Nocturno Dossier #24, July 2004, 14.

[11]  “Sostiene che il figlio è un “perseguitato”,” Corriere della Sera, 6 August 1979.

[12]  “Smascherato il trucco di due “maghi” romani,” “Corriere della Sera, 14 August 1973.

[13]  Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15]  Gherardo Ghinelli and Pasquale Di Todaro, “Fotografo senza obiettivo,” Corriere d’Informazione, 30 July 1974.

[16]  Alfredo Falletta, “Ha raggirato più di trenta fidanzate il Casanova delle signore di mezza età,” Corriere della Sera, 30 December 1976.

[17]  O.r., “Si impicca l’uomo dalle 30 fidanzate,” La Stampa, 30 April 1977.

[18]  Mario Pandolfo, “Mancata intervista dall’aldilà con il defunto Yuri Andropov,” Corriere della Sera, 16 February 1984.

[19]  “Sgominata la banda dei vaglia postali falsi,” Corriere della Sera, 11 September 1967.

[20]  “Sostiene che il figlio è un “perseguitato”,” Corriere della Sera, 6 August 1979.

[21]  Paolo Graldi, “Chi sono i capi degli “uomini d’oro” presi nel caveau della banca a Roma,” Corriere della Sera, 8 June 1983.

[22]  “Ritorna in carcere il mago degli scassinatori,” Corriere della Sera, 9 February 1997.