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Author: Gerry Gable | Date: February 2001
A bomb that destroyed the offices of an Italian left-wing daily paper last December was planted by a member of Roberto Fiore’s fascist third positionist group, Forza Nuova. The Italian police anti-terrorist section, DIGOS, is now calling for the FN to be banned and its bank accounts in Rome and London to be seized.
Since the bomb that shattered Bologna railway station in August 1980, taking the lives of 85 people including two young Britons and injuring over 200 more, Searchlight has dedicated itself to tracking down the organisations and individuals who have tried to destabilise Italy in the postwar years. With the protection of MI6, Fiore and a core group of activists of his Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR) arrived in London in the early 1980s and were allowed to build up a multimillion pound business empire as a cover and financial source for their ongoing political work.
Their agenda in Britain included the collapse of the once powerful National Front, the dispatch of key NF activists to Libya, the formation of the International Third Position and possibly the murder of one of the ITP’s financial benefactors a year ago in order to get their hand on the rest of the assets. Despite constant exposures in Searchlight, the national media and a television documentary, and numerous attempts by MPs to demand and end to their protection by MI6, they remain free to carry on their terrorist activities.
Despite Andreas Insabato’s long history of terrorist activities, the only person he managed to injure with his bomb at the offices of Il Manifesto was himself. Insabato, 42, has been an active and violent terrorist since the mid 1970s, when a number of young middle-class men and women were moving from the major postwar fascist party in Italy, the MSI, into groups which had their ideological roots in Latin America. The son of a liberal magistrate, he shared the same social background as many of his contemporaries on the 1970s Italian fascist scene.
Insabato became a footsoldier in the war against democracy in postwar Italy, being conducted by senior members of the Christian Democrats, which for many years ruled Italy, along with elements of the Secret Service, Mafia bosses, reactionaries in the Vatican, the CIA and Nato, all of which came together in the secret P2 lodge of Freemasons. Insabato was guided towards terrorism first against the left and trade unions and later the public at large.
The Communist Party headquarters in Rome was one of his targets in the mid-1970s, when Insabato and his comrades drove past the building firing shots. At that time one of his closest comrades was Francesco Storace, then a thug, now the Member of Parliament for the Lazio Region around Rome. His days as an MP for Gianfranco Fini’s fascist Alleanza Nazionale have been no less violent, with assaults on the floor of Parliament.
Storace and other AN MPs have leapt to Fiore’s defence and were instrumental in obtaining permission for Fiore’s political and business partner, Massimo Morsello, to return home from Britain on the grounds that he was terminally ill, although his conviction for terrorism was not spent. Morsello’s illness has not prevented him being active on the streets.
Morsello is one of the organisers of the thuggish Hammerskins, which is financed by Fiore’s London businesses. Morsello also runs the FN music scene, which comprises bands and two record companies, Rupa Tarpea and Londinium SPQR. Both are registered in Rome but Londinium’s manager, Francesco Pallitino, lives in London.
By 1977 Insabato was facing trial charged with an attempt to reconstitute the Italian Fascist movement, which was constitutionally banned after 1943. Three years later he was back in court on charges of possessing a weapon. By this time he was firmly in contact with Fiore and others who had created the Third Position in Italy with the NAR as its activist wing.
In the period immediately after the Bologna bombing he fled, only to be caught and held for three years in preventive detention. He was acquitted in 1985 in one of several trials that took place over a number of years following the Bologna bombing. In 1990 he paid two visits to London apparently plugged into the Fiore/Morsello business empire. He returned to Rome to set up an English language video store, which went bankrupt after a year.
In 1992 Insabato received an 18-month suspended prison sentence for his anti-Jewish actions on football terraces. Lazio FC, whose Ultras fan club is presided over by Storace, must have made him feel at home.
Insabato returned to London for six months in 1996, working for Fiore as a “doorman”. He was almost certainly here when Fiore and Morsello staged a jazz concert at a West End hotel, starring Mussolini’s son, at which their thugs beat up anti-fascist protesters. According to bank documents seized by the police Insabato was paid £250 a week.
Returning to Italy he was running back and forth to the Balkans. When war broke out he concealed himself inside the peace movement opposing the war.
Documentary evidence shows that Fiore paid Insabato a retainer of £100 a month, but as most of Fiore’s workers were paid cash in hand this is not a reliable indicator of his true earnings. Interviewed after the Il Manifesto bomb, Fiore denied all knowledge of Insabato. However it is clear from the cheque payments that they are close and the Italian police now say that Insabato is a fully registered member of the FN.
The present rise of far-right terrorism started when Fiore returned to Italy from London in 1999. Late that year an academic, who was advising the centre-left government, was assassinated in a style reminiscent of the NAR killings of the 1970s and 1980s. Around the same time, a number of bombings were followed by calls purporting to come from anarchists or the left, but which the police laid firmly at the door of the FN.
Last year a bomb went off in Rome at the Museum dedicated to the Resistance to Mussolini fascism. A second bomb was placed at a cinema showing a documentary on Eichmann, at which the Israeli ambassador was the guest of honour. The bomb was discovered by the police and disarmed. After investigation the police arrested Giuliano Castellino, a man closely linked to the FN. As a result the police extended their existing investigation into the Hammerskins and its wide international links and started looking at the newly formed FN.
DIGOS received good cooperation not only from Searchlight but from Special Branch in London. At that time Special Branch was trying to boot out a number of fascist criminals sheltering here, who had been convicted abroad of crimes ranging from bank robberies to the killing of police officers. Some of these fascist criminals were linked with Fiore and the other long-term fascist exiles. Some were deported to Italy; others walked away scot free because their convictions were too long ago.
On 16 December last year a bomb placed on the roof of Milan Cathedral failed to explode. DIGOS stepped up its efforts, discounting the phoned claim that the bomb had been planted by anarchists.
Concern was also being raised over the FN’s association with Horst Mahler, a former Baader-Meinhof terrorist, and Udo Voigt, of the German National Democratic Party, which faces a possible ban because of its own close associations with bombers. Both Germans have attended meetings alongside Fiore and other FN leaders in Italy and Germany.
Two weeks before the Il Manifesto bombing, Ricardo Baggio, the FN chief in Padova, was held with three other FN members after police raided a bomb factory. They found guns and ammunition, pipe bombs and enough explosive to destroy the block had it gone off.
Insabato was already on the DIGOS watch list after he appeared late in 1999 on a platform with Fiore at an anti-abortion rally and again at a similar rally last spring.
During the visit of Jörg Haider, the Austrian fascist leader, to the Vatican last December, Insabato was photographed carrying two flags. On the same day he had been recorded on television giving out FN leaflets. The FN was expressing noisy public support for Haider and attacking the government and the Jewish community.
In the early morning of 22 December, a police telephone tap picked up a call between Fiore and Insabato. It is also believed that Insabato was captured on video near the Il Manifesto offices in the company of a leading Rome FN official. Security cameras record him arriving on a scooter, later recovered near the bombed building, with a pillion rider. After the explosion, which left Insabato with his legs shattered, there was speculation that as many as three people were seen running away.
Insabato’s life was probably saved by the first aid given to him by those he had come to kill. Despite Fiore’s denial of all knowledge of Insabato, within hours, Stephano Fiore, Roberto’s lawyer brother, had taken Insabato’s case free of charge.
Calling for an immediate ban on the FN, UCIGOS, a section of DIGOS, showed the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism evidence gathered in Italy, London and elsewhere on Fiore’s political, financial and criminal operations. Calls for the seizure of Fiore’s bank accounts will come as an embarrassment to the Charity Commissioners in England, who recently unfroze the accounts of Fiore’s British charities, despite recognising that there was a political link between them and the ITP.
UCIGOS officers revealed that several terrorists have benefited from Fiore’s largesse. Possibly the most notorious is Franco Freda, who bombed the Piazza Fontana in the late 1960s. He has appeared in court several times in connection with the bombing, the latest occasion being in 1995. At that time he received £3,000 towards his costs by means of a cheque drawn on Meeting Point, one of Fiore’s and Morsello’s London businesses.
Meeting Point also made payments to Fabrizio Croce and Duilio Canu, two fascist criminals running the Hammerskins. Canu is now the FN’s Milan organiser. Others put in funds included Davide Sante Petrini, Rosario Lasdica and Francesco Bianchi. Bianchi severely beat up a reporter from La Stampa who dared to try and ask Fiore a question after the Il Manifesto bombing.
The Italian police have warned that Fiore and his chums may try to destabilise the investigation into them by giving journalists false trails to follow.
One story circulating is that they were paid by MI6. While Searchlight has always maintained that they were protected as a reward for services rendered, no money was handed over because Fiore had enough from illicit sources and from his growing business empire. Another story doing the rounds is that Fiore stole the funds of the Third Position in Italy, when he fled around the time of the Bologna bombing.
UCIGOS has countered these rumours by alleging it has evidence that Fiore has received help from the Molinari drinks empire, producers of Sambuca, and from sources close to known Mafia figures or operations.
UCIGOS also believes preparations were under way for a private army of fascists to go onto the streets to attack prostitutes, abortionists and refugees. It describes the FN as existing on two level: one which it cynically describes as the “unarmed parliamentary wing”; the other a full-blown terrorist outfit.
Fiore is now likely to return to London. He probably thinks that any extradition proceedings would be long and drawn out. But the fact that he has signed cheques in favour of a series of terrorists, drawn on bank accounts held in Britain, would provide grounds to send him packing, in the view of some lawyers.
In the meantime one must hope the Italian authorities can keep Insabato alive, as in the past the shadowy people behind Italian terrorism have been known to shut the mouths of vital witnesses.
© Searchlight Magazine 2001