The Monster of Florence Read Free Page A

truth and track down the real killer. This book is the story of that search and our eventual meeting with the man we believe may be the Monster of Florence.
    Along the way, Spezi and I fell into the story. I was accused of being an accessory to murder, planting false evidence, perjury and obstruction of justice, and threatened with arrest if I ever set foot on Italian soil again. Spezi fared worse: he was accused of being the Monster of Florence himself.
    This is the story that Spezi told.

CHAPTER 1
    T he morning of June 7, 1981, dawned brilliantly clear over Florence, Italy. It was a quiet Sunday with blue skies and a light breeze out of the hills, which carried into the city the fragrance of sun-warmed cypress trees. Mario Spezi was at his desk at
La Nazione
, where he had worked as a reporter for several years, smoking and reading the paper. He was approached by the reporter who usually handled the crime desk, a legend at the paper who had survived twenty years of covering the Mafia.
    The man sat on the edge of Spezi’s desk. “This morning I have a little appointment,” he said. “She’s not bad-looking, married . . .”
    “At your age?” Spezi said. “On a Sunday morning before church? Isn’t that a bit much?”
    “A bit much? Mario, I’m a Sicilian!” He struck his chest. “I come from the land that gave birth to the gods. Anyway, I was hoping you could cover the crime desk for me this morning, hang around police headquarters in case something comes up. I’ve already made the calls, nothing’s going on. And as we all know”—and then he spoke the phrase that Spezi would never forget—“nothing ever happens in Florence on a Sunday morning.”
    Spezi bowed and took the man’s hand. “If the Godfather orders it, I shall obey. I kiss your hand, Don Rosario.”
    Spezi hung around the paper doing nothing until noon approached. It was the laziest, deadest day in weeks. Perhaps because of this, a feeling of misgiving that afflicts all crime reporters began to take hold—that something might be happening and he’d be scooped. So Spezi dutifully climbed into his Citroën and drove the half mile to police headquarters, an ancient, crumbling building in the old part of Florence, once an ancient monastery, where police officials had their tiny offices in the monks’ former cells. He took the stairs two at a time up to the office of the chief of the mobile squad. The loud, querulous voice of the chief, Maurizio Cimmino, echoed down the hall from his open door, and Spezi was seized with dread.
    Something
had
happened.
    Spezi found the chief in shirtsleeves behind his desk, soaked with sweat, the telephone jammed between chin and shoulder. The police radio blared in the background and several policemen were there, talking and swearing in dialect.
    Cimmino spied Spezi in the door and turned to him fiercely. “Jesus Christ, Mario, you here already? Don’t go busting my balls, all I know is there’s two of them.”
    Spezi pretended to know all about whatever it was. “Right. I won’t bother you anymore. Just tell me where they are.”
    “Via dell’Arrigo, wherever the fuck that is . . . somewhere in Scandicci, I think.”
    Spezi piled down the stairs and called his editor from the pay phone on the first floor. He happened to know exactly where Via dell’Arrigo was: a friend of his owned the Villa dell’Arrigo, a spectacular estate at the top of the tiny, twisting country road of the same name.
    “Get out there quick,” his editor said. “We’ll send a photographer.”
    Spezi left the police headquarters and tore through the deserted medieval streets of the city and into the Florentine hills. At one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, the entire population was at home after church, getting ready to sit down to the most sacred meal of the week in a country where eating
in famiglia
is a hallowed activity. Via dell’Arrigo climbed up a steep hill through vineyards, cypresses, and groves of ancient