“Adinolfi was an ‘inconvenient’ judge. He was killed and his body disappeared.” The journalist Alvaro Fiorucci, co-author together with the writer Raffaele Guadagno of the investigative book on the disappearance of judge Paolo Adinolfi (Adinolfi’s disappearancepublished by Castelvecchi). After 31 years of waiting, of investigations opened and then closed, a possible turning point in the investigations is looming with the start of excavations in the basement of the Casa del Jazz in Rome. The impulse came from Guglielmo Muntoni, former judge and current president of the Observatory on policies to combat economic crime. The hypothesis is that in those tunnels there could be the remains of the magistrate.
The disappearance
It was July 2, 1994 when judge Paolo Adinolfi, 53 years old, transferred about twenty days ago to the Court of Appeal of Rome after having worked for years in the II Bankruptcy Section of the Civil Court, vanished into thin air. That morning, around 9 am, he left the house to run some errands. “I’ll be back for lunch” he said to his wife, Nicoletta Grimaldi. According to what has been reconstructed, the judge’s morning took place more or less as per routine, except for some oddities which, in hindsight, cast many shadows on the cold case. “He said a money order to his wife of 500 thousand lire, for no apparent reason. – explains Fiorucci – That day he left the house and told his family that he would be back for lunch. So I don’t rule out that he was forced by someone to make that payment, probably to sidetrack the investigations and hypothesize a voluntary disappearance.” But that’s not the only anomaly. The keys to Adinolfi’s car were found the day after his disappearance in the mailbox of his elderly mother, who lived in via Scipio Slataper, in the Parioli area. “That morning the magistrate didn’t come by to say goodbye to the mother. So why were the keys in the mailbox? Had someone else put them there? Who and for what reason?”, continues the journalist. An acquaintance of the magistrate reported having seen him on bus 4, near Piazza Indipendenza, but the testimony was never confirmed.
A voluntary departure?
The first investigations followed the trail ofvoluntary removal. “The investigators followed the numerous and alleged reports that arrived in the days following his disappearance. – recalls Fiorucci – There were those who said they had seen him in a convent, hypothesizing a sort of mystical crisis, and those who raised the hypothesis of a suicide. The reports were verified and clearly had no confirmation”. The first request for dismissal for the investigation into Adinolfi’s disappearance was made on 16 September 1995, just over a year after his disappearance. The investigating judge’s dismissal decree arrived on 9 February 1996. Three months later, following the declarations of a justice collaborator, the prosecutor’s office requested the reopening of the investigation. The investigation was reopened, this time with the hypothesis of aggravated murder in a mafia context, on 7 June 1996. On 5 August of the same year, a complaint from Nicoletta Grimaldi, the judge’s wife, arrived at the Perugia prosecutor’s office, who reported a dinner at the Casalone restaurant in Rome, which was attended by around twenty diners. Between one door and another, someone would have hypothesized that the missing magistrate was in the cavities of a very important villa, namely Villa Osio.
Villa Osio
Villa Osio, which became The House of Jazz in 2005, was owned by Enrico Nicolettientrepreneur known in the news for being the cashier of the Magliana gang. The villa was purchased by Nicoletti for one billion and 400 million old lire, compared to the 37 billion that, according to the investigators, the structure was worth. “On 6 April 1997, following Nicoletta Grimaldi’s complaint, excavations began at Villa Osio. – says Fiorucci – The inspection was ordered by the deputy prosecutor of the Republic of Perugia Alessandro Carnevale. The operations were coordinated by the archaeological superintendent of Abruzzo Luigi Capasso who made use of the contribution of expert speleologists and geologists. The technicians explored a long stretch of these tunnels, then stopped because they found the road blocked: there were neither the technical means nor the economic resources to move forward”. Raffaele Guadagno, co-author of the investigation book on the disappearance of Adinolfi and assistant to the prosecutor at the time, adds other details: “The excavation lasted a while, then the activities were interrupted due to the risk of a landslide. A landslide caused by human activity, not random in short. I remember that in the SCO offices, during the investigation into Filippo Verde, we heard Nicoletti who made a joke: ‘You’re drilling holes in my house looking for what?’. It was a very unique release. As if he knew we were looking for something we wouldn’t find.” The expert operations ended with a negative outcome.
The cashier of the Magliana gang and the illicit business
The name of Enrico Nicoletti returns several times in the investigations into the disappearance of Paolo Adinolfi. And not just for the excavations at Villa Osio. “Nicoletti was the one who managed the money of a criminal organization and controlled a large part of the illicit business that took place in the capital. – explains Fiorucci – He was a man of enormous economic and financial power. So much so that his name appears in many bankruptcy proceedings handled by Paolo Adinolfi”. During his activity in the Bankruptcy Section, the judge had dealt with many burning investigations, such as the investigation into Fiscom Spa, a financial intermediation company, of which he declared bankruptcy (The provision was later revoked by a colleague while Adinolfi was on holiday).
In a note written by the then public prosecutor of Rome Pietro Catalani, Nicoletti’s involvement in the affair was attested: “…Once investigations were launched into the case, it was ascertained that the F. bankruptcy hid a complex interweaving of interests between Tuttolomondo, the entrepreneur Nicoletti, the notary Di Ciommo and the director of the Rome area of the Cassa di Risparmio di Rieti, Di Pietro Giuseppe. In fact, the four subjects indicated used the FF to achieve objectives that were completely incompatible with the functions of the company“. In the 1990s the cashier of the Magliana band was convicted of usury, extortion and criminal association. In 2001 the State confiscated the villa he owned and assigned it to the municipality of Rome which made it a multifunctional center for Jazz music.
Amber Insurance
As Fiorucci and Guadagno explain in their investigative book, Adinolfi seemed to have “important information” for the investigations relating to an insurance company, Ambra Spa, which at the time was being investigated by the prosecutor’s office of the Lombardy capital. When heard by the investigators, Nicoletta Grimaldi said that her husband would have wanted to contact his colleague from Milan, in charge of the investigation, to make himself available to him. There was a telephone contact between the two judges, in which Adinolfi informed the other magistrate that he would visit him in person. Three days after that conversation the judge disappeared. intercepted? Maybe that meeting shouldn’t have happened?
The mysterious phone call
There is also another phone call, the content of which is unknown, which according to Raffaele Guadagno “may be useful in arriving at a historical truth about the judge’s disappearance”. “At 1.30 pm on 9 May 1994, a call came to Adinolfi’s mother’s house, where he had a small studio. – explains the writer – It came from a SIM card registered to a high-ranking Eni official and lasted 94 seconds. When interviewed by the investigators, the manager declared that he had never met Adinolfi nor had he ever contacted him for professional or personal reasons. Furthermore, Eni, in response to a request from the prosecutor’s office, Perugia, who asked to know the actual usurer of the SIM, explained that the user had ceased on 2 June 1994 following cloning. So who called? Was the choice of the number to clone accidental or intentional? I think it would be interesting to find an answer to these questions, because the phone call represents a trace that should not be underestimated.”
An “inconvenient” magistrate
The last investigation was closed in 2003. But the hypothesis that the intervention of third parties was behind the mysterious disappearance, then as now, seems like a concrete possibility. “Studying all the trial documents, I came to the belief that Adinolfi was killed and his body disappeared, because he was a magistrate who was annoying, an ‘inconvenient’. – states Fiorucci – With his decisions he had made more difficult the functioning of a vast tangle of economic and financial interests on which a large part of the illicit affairs of the capital in which organized crime was entangled were based”.
But what is the way to get to the truth? “We need to start again from the failures that he oversaw and from the people involved in those events. – concludes the journalist – Adinolfi has struck several times at a system of corruption and illicit business. That’s where we need to look for the truth, among those files”.