Mauro De Mauro

Mauro De Mauro (6 September 1921 – disappeared 16 September 1970) was an Italian investigative journalist.

Originally a supporter of Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime, De Mauro eventually became a journalist with the left-leaning newspaper L'Ora in Palermo.

Mauro De Mauro was born in 1921 in Foggia, Apulia.

His father Oscar De Mauro belonged to a reputable family of doctors and pharmacists that had been living in Foggia for several generations.

His mother Clementina Rispoli came from Naples and was a math teacher.

His younger brother Tullio De Mauro (31 March 1932 – 5 January 2017) was a linguist and politician who became minister of education in 2000-2001.

De Mauro was a supporter of the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

After the armistice with the Allied Forces in September 1943, he choose to follow the hard-line fascist regime of the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI) in German-held northern Italy.

During the German military occupation of Rome in 1943-1944, he was vice-commander of police under the Commander Caruso, informant of Captain Erich Priebke and Colonel Herbert Kappler of the SS.

De Mauro was also a member of the Koch Band, a special unit of the Home Security in the RSI.

Using a variety of aliases, De Mauro managed to infiltrate several resistance organizations in Rome and Milan in order to hunt the partisans.

De Mauro and his wife Elda volunteered to join the Decima MAS, a brutal anti-partisan force under the command of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, also known as the "Black Prince".

He worked for the journal La Cambusa (The Galley) of the propaganda unit of the military formation.

Accused of having participated in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in March 1944 in which 335 people were executed, he was absolved by the court in 1948.

De Mauro was arrested during the liberation in Milan in April 1945.

He escaped from the prison camp Coltano (Tuscany) in December 1945 and took refuge in Naples with his young wife, along with his two daughters, Junia and Franca Valeria (the names referred to Junio Valerio Borghese).

In 1948, De Mauro moved to Palermo, Sicily, under an assumed name, and worked for local newspapers such as Il Tempo di Sicilia and Il Mattino di Sicilia.

From the mid-1950s to the 1970s, the left-leaning newspaper often hit the national spotlight for its investigations and denunciations of ties between corrupt politicians and the Sicilian Mafia.

De Mauro also wrote pieces on drug trafficking and on the Sack of Palermo, the construction boom in the 1950s and 1960s that led to the destruction of the city's green belt and ancient villas.

In 1959 he started working for L'Ora, a communist-oriented paper.

Other journalists were puzzled about De Mauro's presence at the newspaper, as he had been a supporter of Mussolini until the bitter end and fought in the brutal war against the anti-Fascist partisans.

Rumour had it that his nose had been broken by partisans.

At L'Ora, De Mauro joined a group of crack investigative reporters that included Felice Chilanti and Mario Farinella.

During his controversial tenure of ENI, Mattei had tried to break the oligopoly of the "Seven Sisters" (a term Mattei coined to refer to the dominant oil companies of the mid-20th century ), and in 1959, in the middle of the Cold War, brokered an oil import deal with the Soviet Union over intense protests from the United States and NATO, while supporting independence movements against colonial powers such as Algeria.

In 1960 De Mauro was among the winners of the Premiolino, one of the most important Italian journalism awards, for his crime investigations.

In 1962, De Mauro was the first to publish a detailed map of the Mafia, which was confirmed 22 years later by the Mafia pentito (turncoat) Tommaso Buscetta in his testimony to Judge Giovanni Falcone.

In January 1962 he published a series of articles in L'Ora disclosing the testimony of Melchiorre Allegra, a medical doctor and a member of the Mafia from 1916 until his arrest in 1937.

Upon being arrested, Allegra disclosed his membership and testified about Mafia activities.

It was one of the first testimonies about the Mafia from within, but the document had been neglected until De Mauro republished it.

After these and other revelations, De Mauro became a target for the Mafia.

"De Mauro was a walking corpse," said Buscetta.

"Cosa Nostra had been forced to 'forgive' the journalist because his death would arouse too much suspicion, but at the first opportunity he would have to pay for the scoop. The death sentence had only been temporarily suspended."

In 1962, De Mauro investigated the mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, the powerful president of Italy's state-owned oil and gas conglomerate ENI, who died in suspicious circumstances in a plane crash on 27 October.

He disappeared in September 1970 and his body has never been found.

The disappearance and probable death of the "inconvenient journalist" (giornalista scomodo) – as he became known as a result of his investigative reporting – remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in modern Italian history.

Several explanations for De Mauro's disappearance are current.

One is related to the death of Enrico Mattei, the president of Italy's state-owned oil and gas conglomerate ENI.

Another is that De Mauro had discovered a drug trafficking network between Sicily and the United States.

A third explanation links his disappearance with the Golpe Borghese, a 1970 foiled right-wing coup d'état.

De Mauro was apparently convinced that he had got hold of a story of a lifetime and had told colleagues at L'Ora, "I have a scoop that is going to shake Italy."