Enrico Mattei - Death

Death

On October 27, 1962 on a flight from Catania (Sicily) to the Milan Linate Airport, Mattei's jetplane, a Morane-Saulnier MS.760 Paris, crashed in the surroundings of the small village of Bascapè in Lombardy, in the course of a storm. All three men on board were killed: Mattei, his pilot Irnerio Bertuzzi, and the American Time–Life Journalist William McHale. The inquiries officially declared that it was an accident. The Italian Minister of Defense, Giulio Andreotti, was responsible for the accident investigation.

During his controversial tenure of ENI, Mattei had made many enemies. The US National Security Council described him as an irritation and an obstacle in a classified report from 1958. The French could not forgive him for doing business with the pro-independence movement in Algeria. Responsibility for his death has been attributed to the CIA, to the French extreme-nationalist group, the OAS, and to the Sicilian Mafia.

According to a 2001 TV documentary by Bernhard Pletschinger and Claus Bredenbrock, evidence was immediately destroyed at the crash site. Flight instruments were put into acid. On October 25, 1995, the Italian public service broadcaster RAI reported the exhumation of the human remains of Mattei and Bertuzzi. Metal debris deformed by an explosion was found in the bones. There is speculation that the fuse of an explosive device was triggered by the mechanism of the landing gear. In 1994 the investigations were reopened and in 1997 a metal indicator and a ring were further analyzed by Professor Firrao of Politecnico di Torino and explosion tracks were found. Based on this evidence the episode was reclassified by the judge as homicide, but with perpetrator(s) unknown.

Not trusting the Sifar (Italian secret service), even though it was full of his loyal supporters, Mattei constituted a sort of personal security guard made of former partisans, ENI staff by whom he felt protected.

Other facts on the crash:

• According to Phillipe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a former agent of the French secret service SDECE, SDECE agents were responsible for the 1962 plane crash which took the life of Mattei. Mattei was on the verge of engineering an Italian takeover of French oil interests in Algeria. A French agent code-named Laurent tinkered with Mattei's aircraft.

• When preparing the film The Mattei Affair in 1970, Francesco Rosi asked the journalist Mauro De Mauro to investigate on the last days of Mattei in Sicily. De Mauro soon obtained an audio-tape of his last speech and spent days studying it. De Mauro disappeared eight days after his retrieval of the tape, on September 16, 1970, without leaving a trace. His body was never found. All the Carabinieri and Police investigators who searched for De Mauro, and consequently investigated his presumed kidnapping, were later killed. Among them the general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

• Tommaso Buscetta, an important Mafia turncoat (pentito), declared that the Sicilian Mafia had been involved in the murder of Mattei. According to Buscetta, Mattei was killed at the request of the American Cosa Nostra because his policies had damaged important American interests in the Middle East. The journalist De Mauro was subsequently killed in 1970, because his investigation on Mattei's death was getting close to the truth. Gaetano Iannì, another pentito, declared that a special agreement had been achieved between the Cosa Nostra and "some foreigners" for the elimination of Mattei, which was organized by Giuseppe Di Cristina. These statements triggered new inquiries, including the exhumation of Mattei's corpse.

• Admiral Fulvio Martini, later chief of SISMI (military secret service), declared that Mattei's plane had been shot down. In 1986, former Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani described the accident as a shooting as well, perhaps the first act of terrorism in Italy.