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© 2005 Doug Ireland. Click
here to read the article, but
with photographs.
The investigation into the 1975 murder of the great gay
Italian poet-film director-novelist-playwright-essayist-literary critic Pier
Paolo Pasolini – which had been re-opened in May after the hustler
originally convicted of the murder recanted on television his confession of
three decades earlier – has been definitively shelved, it was
reported in Rome yesterday.
This means that the many questions about the murder of
Pasolini – a political radical as well as a genius polymath – will remain
unanswered.
Ever since Pino “the Frog” Pelosi, who was a teenage
hustler and petty criminal at the time he confessed to having killed
Pasolini, said in a lengthy interview with RAI 3 television that his earlier
confession was a fabrication, I have closely followed and written about the
Pasolini murder case.
I laid out many of the serious flaws in Pelosi’s original
confession and the reasons why many of Pasolini’s closest friends have
always believed the murder was political
in a lengthy article I wrote for the
August 5 L.A. Weekly, "Restoring Pasolini."
Frankly, I’m not surprised that this latest investigation
of Pasolini’s murder has gone nowhere – for several reasons.
In the first place, it is 31 years since Pasolini was
brutally assassinated, many of the principals who were or could have been
have died, memories have faded, documents have disappeared. Moreover, the
Italian police (like all police departments) are notorious for protecting
their image. And the original investigation was a complete botch.
For example, as I reported earlier, the original judge in
the Pasolini murder case recently said that
the theory that the murder was political was “never investigated at the time
by the authorities.” And at the time of the first investigation, the
police was riddled both with elements of the neo-fascist extreme right who
detested Pasolini both for his politics and for his open homosexuality, and
by corrupt police in cahoots with the Mafia. Rome police were thus charged
with investigating themselves in the freshly re-opened inquest into the
murder.
Then, too, not only did the Mafia have extensive ties to
the neo-fascist ultras in Italian politics and shared their homophobia, but
it had threatened Pasolini who, at the time of his murder, was working on an
investigation of the Maria’s role in the extensive and lucrative Italian
prostitution industry.
Moreover, one of Pasolini’s closet friends and proteges –
the talented Italian film director and scenarist Sergio Citti, who was
considered the only legitimate inheritor of Pasolini's cinematic heritage –
had always asserted he knew that Pino “the Frog” had been part of a plot to
lure Pasolini to the deserted vacant lot where he was brutally murdered by
people claiming to have possession of precious stolen footage from Pasolins
anti-fascist film “Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom”, which Pasolini was
completing at the time.
In a tragic coincidence, the
72-year-old Citti died this past Tuesday,
on the same day it was announced the re-opened investigation into the murder
of his dear friend and mentor Pasolini, for which Citdti had long
campaigned, had been shelved.
It was widely assumed in Pasolinian circles that Pino
“the Frog” was the “fall guy” in the murder who had been pressured or
compensated into confessing to it because, since he was a minor at the time,
he would receive a very light sentence (in fact, the hustler was sentenced
to only 9 years in jail, and did not serve his full sentence).
So, even it the trail had gone cold after three decades
and the re-opened investigation says it found nothing to confirm that
Pasolinis murder was political, neither has it found anything that says that
it was not. And so the many, many questions about Pasolini's mysterious
death will remain officially unresolved.
For a comprehensive account of Pasolini's life and
murder, see my L.A. Weekly article, "Restoring
Pasolini."
© 2005 Doug Ireland. Republished with permission
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