Action at Last

Cynical Romans could scarcely believe their eyes or their ears. Rome's traffic came to a full stop as the city's motorists abandoned their cars in midstreet to buy each edition of each new paper. Screaming headlines proclaimed the facts: after months of inaction and seeming indifference, Italy's government had at last come to grips with the strange and threatening case of Wilma Montesi.

Piero Piccioni, the son of Premier Mario Scelba's ex-Foreign Minister, was locked up in Rome's Queen of Heaven jail on charges of manslaughter. Ugo Montagna, the rich and influential bogus marquis, was clapped into a nearby cell. Rome's ex-Police Chief Saverio Polito was also arrested but allowed to stay at home, pending trial, because of his age (73).

Corroding Confidence. For the first time, something that bore an official imprint was substituted for the deluge of black headlines and wild rumors that had sprung up because of the 18-month-old death of Wilma Montesi, the obscure daughter of a Roman carpenter. The charge laid against Piccioni was that, believing Wilma Montesi dead (presumably as a result of a drug orgy), he had left her body on a beach 13 miles outside Rome. There she had drowned in the tide. Montagna, a man of large but questioned means, and Polito were charged with aiding and abetting the manslaughter.

Italy's Communists had been diligent in fanning the Scelba regime's months of inactivity into a national scandal that was rapidly corroding confidence in the entire Italian governing class. Now the Reds were quick to seize on the government's action as an opportunity to bring down their hated enemy, tough Mario Scelba. Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti, with the support of Fellow-Traveling Socialist Pietro Nenni, threw one of his best firebrands against the government in Parliament. Before a packed Senate gallery, Red Senator Umberto Terracini recounted how Polito had served under National Police Chief Tommaso Pavone, who had resigned under the pressure of the Montesi case. And who had been Pavone's boss at the time of the Montesi girl's death? None other than Premier Scelba, who was then Minister of the Interior.

"There is no doubt that there was an attempt to stifle justice," cried Terracini. "It is impossible to believe that the honorable Premier, at that time Minister of the Interior, was kept completely in the dark about what his immediate subalterns were doing." The Communists and Red Socialists demanded that the Scelba government resign.

"Beria Was Shot." After three days debate, Premier Scelba gave his answer. "A young man has been arrested on the charge of manslaughter, a crime for which he will have to answer personally," said he coolly. "We are charged with not having acted in this matter. But we do not yet know the details of the charges nor the motives for this crime." As for the Communist insistence that a minister must answer for all the acts of subordinates, even their crimes, Scelba was scathing: the U.S. Secretary of State was not believed culpable because one of his subordinates, Alger Hiss, was found guilty of a crime. Britain's Foreign Secretary was not replaced when two of his subordinates vanished behind the Iron Curtain. "In Russia," added Scelba wryly, "the head of the police was executed because he had supposedly been serving capitalism, but I am not aware that his superiors were so much as touched.''

"But at least Beria himself was shot," yelled a Communist Senator.

But Premier Scelba had made his point and the Red balloon was pricked. The Christian Democrats and their allies held solidly together; the Red move to oust Scelba on a vote of confidence was defeated, 114 to 97.

The belated arrests, though they seemed to the Communists to offer excellent material for proving that the government had been trying to cover up, actually produced a great psychological break for the Scelba regime. Persons of wealth and high position just are not touched in Italy by the law--or so many Italians had come to believe. But this time, neither the wealth of Ugo Montagna nor the high connections of Jazz Pianist Piero Piccioni had prevented indictment and arrest.

Like a Gentleman. At the news of the arrests, Piccioni's father, who only a week before had resigned as Foreign Minister in order to stand by his son's side, promptly suffered a nervous collapse. Piero, however, submitted quietly enough. At the big grey prison where he was locked in a cell just vacated by a Sicilian accused of murder, he refused to send out for special meals, ate instead the plain prison fare of boiled beef and bread. "This is as good a time as any to follow the diet my doctor recommended," he said. And from a pretty quarter, he got a pretrial assist. Cinemactress Alida Valli, a onetime sojourner in Hollywood (The Third Man), announced what she considered to be an alibi for Piero. Two days before Wilma Montesi's body was found, she said, Piero had been with her, Alida, and then had gone home with a bad cold.

Like the dashing boulevardier he pretended to be, Ugo Montagna went to prison in style, reporting at the jail gate without benefit of police escort, but with a posse of lawyers at his side, after learning on a round of the nightclubs that a warrant had been issued for him. His first request was for a suit of prison clothes. "This gabardine I am wearing is newly cleaned and pressed," he explained, "and I don't want to get it dirty. I want to leave here like a gentleman.'' One of Montagna's first visitors was a handsome blonde driving a sleek Alfa Romeo, who was promptly turned away by the prison guards when she tried to leave him a bouquet of red carnations to decorate his cell.

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