Part I of Two-Part Series
“Killed to keep the world turning
– Coil, “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)”
Throw his bones over
The white cliffs of Dover
And into the sea, the sea of Rome
And the bloodstained coast of Ostia.”
In light of the on-going revelations and public obsession surrounding the sordid saga of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is highly topical.
The film’s themes overlap with the on-going scandal, as many believe the Epstein files implicate virtually the entire U.S. political class in sexual blackmail and sex trafficking.
Directed by the acclaimed Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film is set in 1940s fascist Italy in the short-lived Republic of Salò and the plot centers on four ruling class Italian libertines who kidnap and subject 18 teenagers to increasingly extreme forms of psychological, sexual and physical torture for their amusement.
Pasolini’s polemical tour de force is loosely based on the Marquis de Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom and updates the 18th-century text to critique the depravity and totalizing power of fascism, capitalism and, ultimately, the bourgeoisie through graphic sexual metaphors. The Epstein disclosures have led many to draw comparisons to both the Pasolini film and its source material, citing both as representations of the perversity of the elites.
Salò was so provocative when it was first released that it was withdrawn from Italian cinemas three weeks into its theatrical run and has consistently faced censorship ever since.
However much the film has been denounced for its explicit nature, the violent acts depicted were likely drawn from what Pasolini, who personally experienced Italian fascism in his youth, had witnessed in the final years of Mussolini’s regime. In the death throes of El Duce’s grip on power, civilians suspected of supporting the partisans could face brutal punishments, including eye-gouging, torture by fire, and anal rape—all graphically depicted in the film.
For all its shock value, Salò’s pseudo-pornographic sadistic visuals were part of its broader message. Ultimately, it was a political film denouncing precisely what the contemporary so-called Epstein class represents. Even the most controversial scenes in the episodic film were intensely political and metaphorical, particularly the segment entitled Circle of Shit where the wealthy and corrupt characters force their victims to consume human feces. Pasolini had intended the film’s coprophagic sequences to be a critique of the processed food industry, whereby the proletariat is forced to consume symbolic excrement.
In fact, the entire film was intended to be a critique of the objectification and subjugation of the working class under fascism and, subsequently, capitalism. The famed Italian director commented on what proved to be his swan song’s allegorical meaning, noting, “In addition to being anarchic, what best characterizes power – any power – is its natural capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-fascist repression excelled in this.”
However much Salò sparked moral outrage and bowdlerization, Pasolini’s preceding pictures had also caused an uproar. Furthermore, the Bologna-born auteur was just as scandalous in his personal life as his artistic output. Pasolini was known for his homosexuality and outspoken radical politics, represented by his close relationship with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and he considered himself a Marxist from his young adulthood until his death. His political commitments profoundly informed both his artistic work and his public engagement.
What makes Salò singular in Pasolini’s oeuvre is that, three weeks before the film premiered, the director’s mangled body was found on a desolate beach near Rome. The brutal murder of the beloved filmmaker, prolific poet, novelist, and polemicist remains shrouded in mystery to this day. The official story of Pasolini’s death is as follows: Three weeks after he had finished editing his unforgettable picture, Pasolini dined with Italian actor Ninetto Davoli and his wife. Davoli, who Pasolini discovered on the streets and brought on as an actor in many of his films, was the muse and long-time love interest of the openly gay director. Emotionally wounded by Davoli’s marriage and committed to his deviancy, Pasolini, supposedly after telling Davoli he was going straight home, instead went out cruising for sex.
Late in the evening of November 1, 1975, Pasolini picked up a 17-year-old hustler named Giuseppe “Pino” Pelosi outside of Rome’s central railway station. Purportedly, he offered Pelosi 20,000 lire and then drove the teenage prostitute to an isolated field near the sea at Ostia, the only district of Rome bordering the Tyrrhenian Sea. After Pasolini performed fellatio on Pelosi, the two exited the car.
According to Pelosi’s initial claims, Pasolini had tried to rough him up and attempted to sodomize him with a wooden stick. Pelosi allegedly retaliated in self-defense by kicking Pasolini’s genitals so violently that the Italian poet suffered an internal hemorrhage. Then the 53-year-old director was clubbed over the head with the wooden plank until his skull burst open, after which he was run over with his own car, dying from the visceral trauma.
His heart exploded under the pressure of the vehicle’s weight and his skull was completely crushed. To reiterate, Pelosi contended this excessive level of violence was in self-defense. Pelosi then drove off in Pasolini’s car and was subsequently detained by the police the next morning for speeding. After being arrested for the traffic violation and possession of a stolen vehicle, later that day Pelosi confessed to having killed the famous director.
At dawn on November 2, 1975, Pasolini’s mangled corpse was discovered on the beach in Ostia. Truly a macabre scene, his head and chest were flattened almost to the ground and a foot-wide pool of coagulated blood ringed his head like a halo. Ninetto Davoli identified his body, and that same evening the confession of Pelosi, who was already in custody on the auto-related charges, was aired on Italian public television. It should be noted that this was against the existing laws requiring press silence during the preliminary phase of an investigation. Moreover, the police never conducted a thorough investigation of Pasolini’s murder and much of the forensic evidence mysteriously disappeared from the scene of the crime.
Upon closer scrutiny, the official narrative begins to collapse. The publicized account claimed that Pelosi acted alone, murdering the director in self-defense. However, the sheer brutality inflicted on Pasolini, coupled with the strength discrepancy between the two—one a scrawny teenager, and the other, although 53, in excellent condition from his long-standing passion for amateur soccer, make it implausible that Pelosi was Pasolini’s sole assailant.
Furthermore, although Pelosi claimed Pasolini had initiated the violence, the young petty criminal reportedly suffered no injuries himself, unlikely even in the event of a violent struggle between them. He also lacked an obvious motive for murdering the filmmaker, who was a generous customer of male street prostitutes and would often help impoverished young men get on their feet by offering them non-professional acting roles in his films.
Additionally, why would Pelosi brag to his jail mates about having committed murder when he had only been arrested for car theft? Oddly enough, when Pelosi was picked up for speeding the morning after he supposedly bludgeoned Pasolini, he did not have a trace of the filmmaker’s blood on his clothing. This is a particularly baffling detail given the excessive violence he claimed to have inflicted.
Two days after Pasolini’s death, the testimony of a local fisherman appeared in the Italian newspaper La Stampa. The fisherman reported that he had seen several people mortally strike Pasolini, but a few days later he mysteriously retracted his statement. Additionally, the newspaper Paese Sera published a letter from a different witness saying that a car carrying four passengers followed Pasolini to Ostia, but the testimony was never presented at Pelosi’s trial. The testimony of other surrounding residents who claimed to have heard screams for help were also excluded from the courtroom.
Pelosi’s trial itself was a murky affair. After confessing to Pasolini’s murder, the minor was convicted and sentenced to nine years, the maximum punishment for an under-age offender. The original verdict, however, reportedly found that Pelosi had not acted alone, sentencing him for the crime in collaboration with “unknown others.” That finding was later mysteriously removed from the verdict in 1979, naming Pelosi as the sole perpetrator.
The conventional account of Pasolini’s slaying obscured these important inconsistencies while, at the time, the press largely portrayed the filmmaker’s death as the inevitable consequence of his hedonistic pursuits. As an open homosexual, media depictions suggested he had paid the price for his “degenerate lifestyle,” or worse, he had sexually assaulted a minor who had killed him in self-defense.
However, 30 years later, a major blow was dealt to the sanctioned tale of Pasolini’s demise. On May 7, 2005, Pelosi retracted his admission of guilt on Italian television, a claim he would later reiterate in his autobiography. Pelosi stated that his confession three decades prior had been made under the threat of violence to his family by mysterious men with what he described as Southern Italian accents, an apparent reference to the Mafia’s strong presence in that part of the country, particularly Sicily.
According to Pelosi, he had waited until after his parents’ deaths to come forward out of fear of retaliation against them. In his stunning admission, Pelosi claimed that three people, not including himself, had committed the murder, beating Pasolini to death as they shouted homophobic slurs and “dirty communist.” Later in the year, in an issue of the French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Pelosi revised his story again, saying that it was as many as five men who had killed the filmmaker, and reiterated that he had never laid a finger on Pasolini.
Just three years later, Pelosi disclosed further details in an interview published in journalistic duo Giuseppe Lo Bianco and Sandra Rizza’s 2008 book Profondo Nero (Deep Black), where he admitted to being used as bait in a planned ambush in which the director was lured to the scene of the crime to retrieve stolen property. More explosively, he associated Pasolini’s murderers with extreme fascist cells connected to the Italian state secret services. Pelosi specifically named the brothers Franco and Giuseppe Borsellino, both members of the neo-fascist party MSI (Italian Social Movement), as accomplices in the director’s murder. In fact, the Borsellino brothers had told an undercover policeman in 1976 that they had participated in killing Pasolini, but law enforcement did not follow up on this crucial lead.
These revelations affirmed what many of the poet’s friends had suspected all along: that Pelosi had not acted alone. Italian notables such as Academy Award-winning film director Bernardo Bertolucci and actress Laura Betti believed that their colleague had been offed by members of the MSI, which had a history of assaulting Pasolini.
Bertolucci pointed to the absence of blood on Pelosi’s clothes and the marks on Pasolini’s body to demonstrate the unlikelihood that the former was the sole perpetrator. Betti, who had appeared in many of Pasolini’s films, went so far as to organize a campaign calling for an inquiry into her close friend’s death, arguing that it had deeper political significance. Other friends of Pasolini, such as his frequent collaborator, screenwriter, and director Sergio Citti, believed that he had been killed by agents of the Italian government, at that time under the control of the corrupt Christian Democratic Party, in collusion with neo-fascists.
In fact, Pelosi’s 2005 revelations emboldened an aging Sergio Citti to publicly reiterate his account of his collaborator’s brutal murder. Two days after the tragedy, Citti had shared what he knew in an interview with the Italian daily Il Messaggero. Yet he was never called to testify at Pelosi’s trial, even though he had spoken with Pasolini on the day of his death and likely possessed relevant evidence about the case. Years later, sticking to his story, Citti stated in an interview with the Roman newspaper La Repubblica how he believed that Pasolini was killed as part of a political conspiracy.
He claimed that he had an eyewitness source who saw five men dumping Pasolini’s lifeless body on the beach in Ostia, suggesting that his friend was killed elsewhere and transported by the perpetrators to the seashore where they arranged his corpse in a staged scene. Citti stated the five men were Pasolini’s actual murderers and that Pelosi was only a patsy.
Citti’s reconstruction of his friend’s last night alive radically differs from the conventional account. According to the screenwriter, on the day that he died, Pasolini had confided that he was meeting with a group of men who possessed stolen reels from his film Salò. Allegedly, he had planned on meeting the extortionists to retrieve his artistic property. Some facts appear to back up Citti’s account, as in August of that year 15 reels of Salò were stolen, which constituted about one-third of the original film. (The missing reels were remade from copies of the original.)
Additionally, two million lire were found under the carpet of Pasolini’s car after his death, presumably the money he had brought to pay the racketeers. Pressure from Citti, combined with Pelosi’s revelations in the spring, led the Roman police to reluctantly reopen the investigation of Pasolini’s murder in 2005. In an eerie coincidence, however, the inquiry was closed the same day that Citti died of a heart attack in Ostia that October. The Rome prosecutor’s office supposedly found “no corroborating evidence” for either Citti’s story or Pelosi’s retraction.
Citti was not alone in his belief that his friend had been killed by neo-fascists in service of the Italian state. It has long been speculated that Pasolini’s murder was connected to the clandestine right-wing group Propaganda Due (P2), the most influential Masonic lodge of the 20th century. P2 evolved into a secret anti-communist organization composed of Italy’s top intelligence officers, military leaders, prominent industrialists, and politicians. The covert association of Masons was heavily implicated in criminal and terroristic activity, fueling suspicions that it may have been involved in some of Italy’s most notorious political crimes—including Pasolini’s murder.
As Swiss journalist Daniele Ganser documented in his 2005 book NATO’s Secret Armies, P2 was an instrumental part of Operation Gladio, a top-secret campaign under way at the time of Pasolini’s murder. Gladio, code-named after the Italian word for “sword,” consisted of a series of secret “stay-behind” armies throughout Europe, composed of neo-fascist paramilitaries, which were purportedly prepared to defend democracy in the event of a Soviet invasion.
After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the Italian government was the first to publicize the existence of stay-behind networks in their country, although the clandestine armies had existed in all 16 NATO countries during the Cold War. In August 1990, after juridical investigations into mysterious terrorist attacks, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to confirm the existence of a shadow army set up by the CIA and MI6 in Italy.
A year later, the BBC subsequently broadcast a three-part investigative docu-series on Gladio for its Timewatch program, directed by American filmmaker Allan Francovich. Another important report appeared in The Washington Post, but mainstream media coverage of the shocking revelations was noticeably minimal.
The origins of Gladio can be traced back to the West’s surreptitious reabsorption of fascists after World War II to combat the rise of the Soviet Union. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Italian military intelligence service (Serviziodi Informazioni delle Forze Armate “SIFAR”), which was established with support from the CIA, signed an accord with the latter about the organization of a “post-occupation clandestine network.”
The cooperation between SIFAR and the CIA was coordinated through NATO and both the U.S. and British intelligence services provided weapons to the pre-positioned covert armies. Spread across Europe, they ostensibly existed as sleeper cells ready to activate in the event of a hypothetical Soviet invasion. However, the Soviets never intended to invade Western Europe, something even American foreign policy experts like Cold War architect George Kennan acknowledged. Instead, the Gladio soldiers fought domestic leftist organizations through sabotage and terrorist attacks which were then wrongfully pinned on the radical left.
In Italy, particularly during its “Years of Lead” (1968-1982), political violence reached extraordinary levels, although other European countries suffered similarly. Fascist stay-behinds bombed train stations and market squares, while the Italian security services incriminated the militant left, subsequently using the attacks to justify the suppression of communists and the expansion of state power.
For example, after three Carabinieri (Italian paramilitary police) were killed in a terrorist attack on May 31, 1972, the violence was blamed on the ultra-left group Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). The police then used these incidents to crack down on the Italian left and round up dissidents. More than a decade after the event, the case was reopened by Judge Felice Casson who had discovered that the report which connected the car bomb to the Red Brigades was a forgery.
Upon further investigation, it was revealed that right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra had planted the explosive and that the neo-fascist stay-behind Ordine Nuovo was to blame. When Vinciguerra was brought to court in 1984 for the attack, he gave a startling confession as to how the Italian state had collaborated with the far right, which sparked a series of inquiries that led to the exposure of Operation Gladio.
As his testimony revealed, it turned out that the ultra-nationalist paramilitary group had worked in coordination with SIFAR to engineer the attack and pin it on the left.
In the 1970s, rumors circulated among the Italian left that the mysterious massacres and terrorist attacks plaguing the country, such as the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing of the National Agricultural Bank headquarters in Milan and the Piazza della Liggia bombing of an anti-fascist rally in Brescia five years later, were part of a secret war being waged by the U.S. against the Italian communist movement.
In fact, Pasolini himself was a prominent figure on the Italian left who shared this “conspiratorial” view. Shortly after the Piazza Fontana attack, Pasolini expressed incredulity toward the mainstream media’s version of the attack being perpetrated by anarchists and left-wing militants. Instead, he believed the bomb had been planted at the behest of the security services in a plot orchestrated by the Italian state in collaboration with the CIA.
In 1971, Pasolini became the director of the left-wing magazine Lotta Continua and a year later he helped the organization shoot an investigative documentary about the bombing in Milan.
Furthermore, when Pasolini’s colleague and frequent interviewer Gideon Bachmann brought a few of his American students to the set of Salò, the former asked the youths, “Why are you not opposing your government more forcefully? Don’t you know that the fascist bombs in Italy are placed by the CIA?” In fact, Bachmann, a cinematic archivist who was on the set of Pasolini’s final film and carefully documented the experience in his diary, corroborated how negatives of Salò had been stolen.
In addition to his film career, Pasolini was a prolific political writer who often publicly commented on current events. His polemics became more widely read after he took out a regular column in the historic Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera in 1973.
In his prominent op-ed, he accused the Italian government and police of being responsible for the bombings in Milan and Brescia. He also speculated that the state could have prevented the attacks, but deliberately chose not to as part of a broader “strategy of tension.” The poet was referring to the Machiavellian political strategy whereby the state covertly encourages extremist violence with the aim of using popular fear to justify an expansion of the government’s security apparatus.
In fact, Pasolini even wrote a piece for Corriere della Sera titled “I Know” where he claimed to possess the names of those responsible for the terrorist attacks plaguing Italy at the time.
Published a year before his death, the iconic filmmaker averred, “I know the names of the ‘leadership’ that manipulated both the old fascists who devised the ‘coups,’ and the neo-fascists who materially executed the early massacres, as well as the ‘unknown’ perpetrators of the most recent massacres. I know the names of the people who managed two different, in fact opposite stages of the tension; the first, anti-communist stage (Milan 1968) and the second, anti-fascist stage (Brescia and Bologna 1974). I know the names of the powerful figures who, with the help of the CIA (and in a secondary role the Greek colonels and of the Mafia) first created an anti-communist crusade which failed miserably in order to plug the damn of ’68, and subsequently took on a new anti-fascist identity in order to remedy the disaster of the ‘referendum.’”
Seemingly, Pasolini really was privy to dirty state secrets; in the months before his death, he had even met with several politicians to inform them that he had intimate knowledge of who was really behind the “Years of Lead.”
The historical record lends support to Pasolini’s assessment of the terrorist attacks. For example, with the revelations around NATO’s stay-behind armies, the Italian Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the bombing in Milan in 1969 was carried out by the neo-fascist group Ordine Nuovo. Even before Operation Gladio was fully exposed, reactionary extremist Vincenzo Vinciguerra, on trial in 1984 after confessing to the 1972 Peteano car bombing which killed three Carabinieri officers, testified that “this ‘super-organization’ [meaning the network of secret armies] which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task on NATO’s behalf of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.”
Vinciguerra’s testimony was given further weight by General Giandelio Maletti, a former head of Italian military counter-intelligence. During the 2001 trial of right-wing extremists accused of perpetrating the 1969 Piazza Fontana attack, Maletti suggested: “The CIA, following the directions of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left, and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism.”
In this light, Pasolini’s conviction that the terrorist attacks were backed by the Italian state and the CIA seem highly perceptive. With the revelation of Gladio many years after his death, it has since been speculated that the filmmaker’s slaying might also have been connected to the then-unknown, but long-suspected, operation.
This was further reinforced with the posthumous release of Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio [“Oil”] in 1992. The book is made up of a non-linear series of numbered notes, as Pasolini wanted the novel to be structured “in a swarm” and not “on a spit,” or not unfolding in a strictly chronological fashion. The convoluted plot centers on an oil executive and engineer named Carlo who splits into two distinct personalities, one driven by a lust for power and the other by perverse sexual lust, and the text incorporates elements from classical myth as well as heavy social criticism of emergent consumer capitalism. The fascinating experimental novel linked powerful entrepreneur and P2 member Eugenio Cefis, who served as the president of the Italian National Oil Company (ENI) from 1967 to 1971, to violent crimes, particularly the murder of his predecessor at ENI, Enrico Mattei.
When Mattei was the head of the Italian state-owned energy conglomerate, he pioneered equal-footing agreements in energy diplomacy with developing countries and drew the ire of Washington by negotiating the first major oil-import agreement between Italy and the Soviet Union. His policies alarmed the United States and threatened the interests of the dominant Anglo-American oil companies, collectively known as the “Seven Sisters.” Mattei openly challenged their monopoly on the international petroleum market, pursuing equal-footing trade agreements with oil-producing nations and greater energy policy independence for Italy. (The Seven Sisters consisted of Exxon, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Mobil, Chevron, Gulf Oil, and Texaco.)
Mattei also covertly supported the Algerian independence movement, further antagonizing imperialist interests. This led some journalists and investigators to speculate that his untimely death was connected to the French far-right paramilitary organization OAS which fiercely opposed Algerian independence.
In October 1962, Mattei died in what the mainstream press described as a tragic plane crash. A cloud of mystery surrounded the event, with some evidence suggesting there had been an explosion aboard the aircraft, leading many on the left to speculate that Mattei had been assassinated.
Such was the view of investigative reporter Mauro De Mauro who began looking into Mattei’s death, who himself mysteriously vanished in 1970 before he was able to publicize his discoveries. It has since been widely suspected that de Mauro was also likely murdered, his disappearance being connected to his investigations into Mattei’s demise and his reporting on organized crime and neo-fascist activities in Italy. His work also explored a failed right-wing coup attempt known as “Golpe Borghese” which has itself been linked to the “strategy of tension.”
Pasolini himself took an interest in the suspicious death of Mattei, which features in the half-completed Petrolio. In the novel, Eugenio Cefis (renamed as the fictional character “Aldo Troya”), Mattei’s successor as chief executive at ENI, is blamed for orchestrating his predecessor’s death. Cefis has been described as one of the most powerful figures in post-war Italy who possessed great influence over the Italian intelligence services and a reputation for corrupt and shady business dealings. According to some sources, Cefis was a driving force behind the anti-communist Masonic lodge P2 and was connected to Operation Gladio.
Pasolini became interested in Cefis after reading a February 1972 speech given by the shadowy entrepreneur at the Military Academy of Modena. Entitled “My Homeland Is Called Multinational,” Cefis positively described the birth of multinational finance and the decline of national economies, anticipating and seemingly endorsing what would become known as neo-liberal globalization.
He also called for constitutional reforms which would have permanently barred the PCI from participating in government. Pasolini planned to include the speech in its entirety half-way through Petrolio after first reading a reproduction of it in the Italian feminist psychoanalytic magazine L’erba Voglio which had been given to him by L’erba Voglio contributor, activist and psychiatrist Elvio Fachinelli.
Fachinelli had also bequeathed Pasolini a copy of Questo è Cefis L’attafaccia dell’oriorato presidente (This is Cefis: The Other Side of the Honored President), a hard-to-find and highly controversial investigative book on Cefis. Published in 1972 under the name “Giorgio Steimetz,” a pseudonym of the journalist Corrado Ragozzino, the text was immediately and inexplicably removed from the market shortly after its release.
The book was financed in part by Mattei loyalist Graziano Verzotto, who had provided significant information to Mauro De Mauro prior to his mysterious disappearance. In the biographical volume, Cefis is described as a shadowy puppeteer who neutralized Mattei’s genuinely nationalist policies in order to bring Italy back into favor with the Anglo-American oil giants. Ragozzino also advanced the widely speculated theory that Cefis was instrumental in Mattei’s timely death by plane “crash.” Not only was the book pulled from the market; it is still unavailable in the National Library of Rome and Florence, the equivalent of not being available in the U.S. Library of Congress.
Although evidence was immediately destroyed by the authorities at the crash site, such as flight instruments being dissolved in acid, in a 1995 exhumation and examination of the remains of Mattei and his pilot, metal debris misshapen by an explosion were found in their bones. Two years later, the remnants of the plane were examined using the latest technology, leading the scientist who conducted the examination, Donato Firrao of the Polytechnic University of Turin, to conclude that “the Mattei affair had been solved: a small charge bomb had been planted behind the dashboard from the exterior of the plane.”
In fact, the rare “ghost book” on Cefis and his speech were what inspired Pasolini to write Petrolio. In the novel, he meticulously details the convoluted web of companies composing what he dubbed Cefis’s private empire. The murky businessman wielded extensive influence in Italy and he even used public money from the ENI to become president of the country’s chemical giant Montedison, shifting state-backed productive power into Italy’s largest private chemical firm. Pasolini criticized the latter enterprise for its negative environmental impact, encapsulated in his famous phrase “I would give all of Montedison for a single firefly.”
Also in Petrolio, Pasolini reiterated how he believed the Italian government to be behind the spate of bombings terrorizing Italy at the time, placing blame on the CIA, an organization he also implicated in the death of Mattei. In fact, his theory that Mattei was assassinated has been supported by evidence from subsequent investigations.
The first major Mafia personality to expose the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra, Tommaso Buscetta, collaborating with an Italian judge in the 1980s, claimed that Mattei’s murder was ordered by the American branch of the organization at the behest of major U.S. oil companies. Buscetta specifically named notable mafioso Giuseppe Di Cristina as responsible for the hit, also accusing him of involvement in the disappearance of journalist Mauro de Mauro. Certainly, the U.S. intelligence officials and American oil corporations saw Mattei as a geopolitical threat over his support of decolonial struggles and his trade agreements with the Soviets.
The most probable explanation is that the plane crash in which Mattei died was actually the result of the detonation of a bomb which had been planted on his private jet, exploding mid-flight and sending the aircraft plummeting.
To add to the intrigue surrounding Pasolini’s unfinished novel, much of Petrolio’s manuscript conveniently disappeared after his death. This led Roman criminal lawyer Stefano Maccioni, who began investigating Pasolini’s murder in 1998, to believe that the missing chapter Note 21, entitled Flashes of Light on ENI, would have made Cefis seem to be responsible for Mattei’s death. Maccioni postulated that Italian secret service agents stole the manuscript copy of Note 21 from Pasolini’s study during a reported break-in a few days after the famed director’s slaughter. Additionally, Maccioni managed to get Pasolini’s murder case reopened in 2010, yet it was again reshelved by a Roman judge in 2015.
Maccioni’s perspective that Pasolini was killed because of his investigation into Mattei’s death was shared by the Italian film director and journalist David Grieco, who was mentored by Pasolini and collaborated with Sergio Citti as a screenwriter on several of the latter’s films. In 2016, Grieco aired his views in the film La Macchinazione [The Ploy], his dramatization of Pasolini’s execution. La Macchinazione depicts the murder as a political assassination orchestrated by the ruling elite in Italy.
The biographical crime thriller portrays Pasolini as in the process of uncovering a wider conspiracy involving Italy’s Christian Democratic government, neo-fascists, and Eugenio Cefis. The film implies that Pasolini was targeted for the work he was doing on Petrolio and that he was lured to his death in an attempt to get back the stolen Salò reels from the extortionists, following the version of events Sergio Citti averred all along.
Grieco’s hypothesis represents a departure from previous cinematic depictions of Pasolini’s death. Directed by the Italian-American filmmaker Abel Ferrara, the 2014 eponymously titled Pasolini biopic does depict the controversial Italian poet as in the process of writing Petrolio. Additionally, Ninetto Davoli, upon his own request, appears in the film, something meaningful for the actor given how close he was to Pasolini.
However, the film avoids challenging the conventional narrative around Pasolini’s murder. While it does humanize him as a sympathetic figure and does not suggest his allegedly hedonistic lifestyle brought about his tragic demise, ultimately it leaves larger political questions surrounding his puzzling fate unexamined. Davoli himself believed Pasolini’s murder was the result of an unfortunate private encounter, although at the time he was young and politically naive, self-admittedly detached from his romantic and artistic partner’s Marxist polemics.
All told, Ferrara’s Pasolini reads like an identity-politics account of the famed director’s demise. The film frames his murder primarily through the homophobia he consistently faced, presenting it as if he was killed for his unrepentant homosexuality in an abhorrent anti-gay hate-crime. While entrenched homophobia was certainly something Pasolini had to contend with during his career, it is a grave disservice to Pasolini’s legacy to dismiss the possibility that his death was more than a hook-up turned ugly.
A proper examination of his death could implicate a broader network of political actors, embroiling much more important figures than a scruffy underage prostitute who took the fall. In fact, the latter’s lawyer, Alessandro Olivieri, reflected on his former client after his death in 2017, stating that he was “totally convinced of his [Pelosi’s] innocence.” Olivieri alluded that Pelosi knew undisclosed information about Pasolini’s death, possessing secrets he carried to his grave.
In order to better understand the significance of Pasolini’s murder, as well as to why so many believe it was, in all probability, a political assassination, we must scrutinize Pasolini’s relationship with the Italian authorities and press, as well as center his commitment to radical politics. Consistently downplayed and misrepresented, Pasolini’s politics were at the core of his artistic output and it is unacceptable to allow the brilliant writer and filmmaker to become a deradicalized caricature of himself.
While Pasolini’s identity as a gay man certainly informed much of his work, he understood how capitalist society was becoming more permissive in a counter-revolutionary way. Reducing his legacy to identity politics is a disservice to a man who wrote, “Tolerance is the most atrocious aspect of false democracy. I will tell you that it is even much more humiliating to be ‘tolerated’ than to be ‘forbidden’ and that permissiveness is the worst form of repression.”
This is the first of a two-part series on Pasolini and his murder, the second part of which will dive into his political commitments and persecution by the Italian state.
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About the Author
Shaenah Batterson is a polemicist and poet located in Baltimore, Maryland.
She writes a Substack called The Red Letter and cohosts the podcast Captive Minds.
Shaenah can be reached at shaenahbatterson@icloud.com.
