Author: Gerry Gable | Date: July 1998

Roberto Fiore: from terrorist to entrepreneur … and back again

One of Britain’s longest running security scandals, involving far-right terrorists, is about to cause enormous embarrassment to the government. Its two key players are living in London as successful businessmen, while being allowed to continue their extremist activities.

The story began in Italy in the 1970s, when young followers of the Italian fascist quasi philosopher Julius Evola banded together in an illegal group called the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR). Whether the NAR was actually a creation of Italy’s then corrupt and often fascist-led secret service is still not known.

In August 1980 fascist bombs were exploding across Europe. On 2 August Bologna railway station in northern Italy was devastated by a sophisticated bomb packed in a suitcase. Among the 85 dead and 200 injured were a recently engaged British couple who had just graduated.

In 1988, 13 terrorists, including two Italian secret service agents, were convicted and sentenced for the bombing. As a result of government string pulling, nine of the sentences were quashed on Appeal in 1990 and the sentences on the two agents were reduced to two years. Pressure from the association of the families of the victims, which produced evidence of corruption in Italian politics and the justice system, led to the Supreme Court annulling the Appeal Court decision and a new trial, which in 1994 restored the original verdicts.

Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello have escaped justice throughout these years. Although not wanted for the Bologna bombing, they have convictions for organising the NAR terror group and robbing a sports store to obtain weapons.

Investigating magistrates in Bologna told Searchlight that they wanted to interview the two men about the links between the bombers and the Italian secret service. So far the Bologna court has not been able to lay hands on them.

The pair arrived in London from Lebanon in the early 1980s and another 35 to 40 Italians joined them in exile. They included the double police killer Luciano Petrone, who brought with him the bulk of the proceeds from a £9 million bank vault robbery in Spain. He was later returned to Italy to serve a 40-year sentence for the murders.

Another exile was Alessandro Allibrandi, the son of a magistrate, who had killed an investigating magistrate. He fled back to Italy after Searchlight found him attending a meeting of the fascist League of St George. Within weeks he was cut down in a hail of bullets in a police ambush. Some people suggested he was deliberately silenced.

Despite Margaret Thatcher’s frequent pronouncements about the need to fight international terrorism and promises to act by her and Douglas Hurd, extradition requests by the Italian government were ignored. Eventually a mishandled application to the British courts was refused. They could easily have been expelled from Britain at any time on the grounds that their presence was not conducive to the public good. In fact in March 1986, four years after the initial request, an Anglo-Italian extradition treaty was signed.

Several of the exiles were found homes and jobs through the League of St George, but Fiore and Morsello lived a humble existence. At one time they lived in an anarchist squat in south London and drove minicabs.

That did not last long. They soon formed a firm association with a group of well educated and politically ambitious men in the National Front, a marriage that gave birth to the “Political Soldiers”.

Secret training sessions were held in the New Forest, a magazine called Rising was produced and the Political Soldiers adopted Evola’s slogan “Long Live Death”. Martin Webster, then the NF’s organiser, planted a very young Patrick Harrington into the new group as a spy. Its members included Nick Griffin, now the leader of the British National Party, the fanatical extremist Catholic Derek Holland and Michael Walker, a former NF organiser and editor of the quasi-intellectual journal Scorpion.

Harrington, sensing which way the wind was blowing, promptly defected to the Political Soldiers. In two coups in 1983 and 1986 the Political Soldiers took control of most of the NF and created more sinister groups such as the International Third Position, to which Fiore is still linked. The ITP has recently become more active again, largely as a result of Fiore’s backing.

At one stage Fiore, Griffin and Walker were all living in Walker’s mother’s flat in Warwick Square, London. Their downstairs neighbour was the right-wing Tory Minister Nicholas Ridley. The flat appeared to be a meeting place for all sorts of fascists, nazis, terrorists and racists as well as members of the Young Conservatives.

Griffin, Walker and Fiore ran a tourist agency called Heritage Tours, which provided guides for overseas visitors. Unfortunately for them, one of their first customers was an Italian Searchlight journalist, who photographed Fiore standing outside Downing Street.

While gradually many of the Italian exiles were deported, or left of their own accord, Fiore and Morsello stayed. Within a few years they had set up a string of international businesses, ranging from language schools to travel, housing and employment agencies. Employees claimed the businesses were not entirely run along conventional lines. At the same time Fiore’s love life flourished, with the birth of a baby girl from an association between him and the nanny who looked after the children of Petrone’s British lover. After the birth she was packed off to Brighton to live in a property owned by the notorious nazi publisher Anthony Hancock.

In 1988 Searchlight co-produced a Dispatches programme for Channel 4 which included pleas for justice from the families of the victims of the Bologna bombing, and from the mayor of Bologna and magistrates. The programme revealed Fiore’s political and business connections in public for the first time.

The following year Searchlight uncovered the startling truth about the pair’s safe haven in Britain. During their period in Lebanon they had been recruited as agents for MI6. It was a time of civil war, mercenary armies and cross border incursions, and the British were desperate for intelligence about the terrorist groups many of which included European political extremists of various hues. A deal had been made with Fiore and his followers that if they worked for MI6 they would be allowed to come to Britain afterwards.

Searchlight approached the Labour MP David Winnick, a former member of the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee, to raise the matter in the House of Commons, because it was now clear that the exiles were being given free rein to help set up fascist organisations that advocated violence and had close links with Libya, Iran and later Iraq. He and Greville Janner, a leading Jewish MP, tried to put down a question, only to be told that it would not be “in the public interest”.

The tax authorities failed to act on information about their business practices. A string of complaints was made to the German and French embassies in London about the menacing treatment of German and French citizens living in properties managed by Fiore and Morsello. Some of the properties were owned by major landlords who promised to distance themselves from the pair. Still nothing happened to halt their progress.

Morsello moved into music promotion, not only of right-wing music but also jazz and mainstream music. In March 1996 he arranged a concert in a London hotel for the jazz musician son of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Anti Nazi League protesters were professionally beaten up by a squad of young Italians in Armani suits.

With the arrival of Tony Blair in Downing Street and Robin Cook and Jack Straw at the Foreign and Home Offices respectively, the Italian Socialist government renewed its request for the two terrorists’ extradition. Again, it appears, promises were made seven months ago, but as in the 1980s nothing happened.

Fiore controls the violent nazi Hammerskins movement and uses Italian, Polish and other European skinheads and nazis to enforce his “trading standards”. The Hammerskins have carried out a string of violent acts across Italy, putting five police officers in hospital, and including the attempted murder of anti-fascists, attacks on Jewish property and the desecration of memorials to victims of the SS.

Over the past 12 months the Italian anti-terrorist police squad, DIGOS, has been gathering evidence on the Hammerskins in an operation code-named Thor. On 25 May officers swooped with warrants to arrest nine men because, according to Domenico Vulpiani, the head of DIGOS, the Hammerskins were on the verge of starting an international campaign of violence. In raids on dozens of premises, DIGOS officers seized thousands of documents and held several people for questioning. More than 100 others have been notified that they are to be questioned. DIGOS says the group has a network covering London, Milan, Madrid and Amsterdam. Searchlight can add Poland, France, Croatia, Portugal and several other countries.

The head of DIGOS told the press that the operation had put eight men in custody but the ninth was living a life of ease in London. This was Roberto Fiore and he was wanted because Hammerskins were being financed and run from his business premises in London.

The Italian fascist leader Gianfranco Fini promptly stood up in parliament to defend Fiore, whom he described as an entrepreneur and philosopher. He was howled down by the majority of MPs.

Fiore himself has not been shy to defend himself. In a statement to the Italian press he described the Hammerskins as a cultural group that brought young Italians to Britain to learn English on working holidays and for cultural events. This might account for the nazi gig that the Hammerskins held in London in early June and their continued presence at gigs run by Blood and Honour and the British terror group Combat 18.

Fiore ended by disclosing that the British Home Office had only recently returned his passport. This poses the intriguing questions: why did the Home Office have his passport in the first place and who decided, in the light of events in Italy, to give it back to him.

Searchlight wonders what the British government intends to do about this, or does parliamentary democracy go out of the window when MI6 puts its foot down.

As Searchlight goes to press, no British publication or television news programme has covered this story, although it was headline news in Italy. Is this yet another result of the actions of some institutional spin doctors?

In the meantime, the survivors and families of those who died in the Bologna bombing are asking when can they expect justice from the British authorities.

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