The mysterious Orlandi case becomes more and more complicated
Another piece of the mysterious story disappears forever Emanuela Orlandi. A few days ago, one of the most important witnesses in the case of the Vatican town that disappeared from the center of Rome on 22 June 1983 and was never found again passed away. It’s about Maurizio Giorgetti who first linked his disappearance to the Magliana gang. His first appeal dates back to 2010, when the tomb of Enrico “Renatino” de Pedis, head of the Testaccina faction of the criminal group, had not yet been found in the basement of the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare. Giorgetti made statements to the television program “Chi l’ha visto” regarding the “girl with the band” and was later summoned by the Prosecutor’s Office. He revealed to the Roman magistrates that he had heard about the girl’s kidnapping from two members of the gang but his statements were not considered reliable by the magistrates. There was a lack of material and testimonial evidence. The man also ended up accused of perjury but he did not give up and tried in every way to carry forward his hypothesis. Giorgetti even went so far as to escape house arrest to go to the Carabinieri to report what he thought he knew about Emanuela Orlandi. He filed complaints on the case even in the last years of his life. The head of the second investigation into the Orlandi case, magistrate Giancarlo Capaldo, indicated him as “completely unreliable”.
Who was Giorgetti?
Maurizio Giorgetti was close to the far right circles of Paolo Signorelli and Adriano Tilgher (Movimento Sociale, Ordine Nuovo). He gravitated around that gray area common to Roman crime and political extremism, in which bandits and militants coexisted. It was Capaldo himself who declared at the time of the investigations: “We are convinced that the Magliana gang knows what happened to Emanuela Orlandi” (from “Repubblica” of 8 October 2010). Giorgetti told the investigators that he had listened to the conversations about Emanuela Orlandi at the “Il Porto” restaurant in Lungotevere a Ripa and at the “Antica Pesa”, on two separate occasions. He named the interlocutors involved: Giuseppe “Sergione” de Tomasi, who emerged from the investigations as the person behind the telephone operator “Mario” and Angelo Cassani called “er Ciletto”. The latter, Cassani, was also brought up by de Pedis’ lover, Sabrina Minardi who indicated him as one of the alleged perpetrators of the kidnapping of the prosecutor Capaldo. Giorgetti reported that he had heard that de Pedis had previously told them that he had participated in the kidnapping of a girl to recover money belonged to Manlio Vitale, known as “Er ngappa”. He also said that he had been in 1983, at dinner with de Pedis and Franco Giuseppucci, another prominent member of the gang, a few days before Emanuela’s kidnapping. During that evening 41 years ago, she heard – she later declared to the investigators during the second investigation – i two bandits discuss an apartment near the Vatican where they can segregate the girl in the first days of his imprisonment.
The death
Giorgetti died at his home in Soriano nel Cimino at the age of 70. With his passing, the relative possibility of shedding light on one of the countless mysteries that characterize this absurd story disappears. “With his death, silence definitively falls on some truth about Emanuela’s kidnapping”, comments Pietro Nicotera, the lawyer who followed him in his last difficult times. His disappearance closes a chapter but leaves many, too many questions open.
