Reportage
40 years after the Rapido 904 massacre, some questions still linger
‘Another investigation by the Florence prosecutor's office is ongoing to identify possible links between the Mafia, secret services and the neo-fascist right.’
“It was only when I grew up, when I was going to university, that I became aware that the event that was being talked about at home was a piece of the country's history, not an accident or a natural disaster,” Rosaria Manzo tells us. She turned 40 in May, the same number of years that now separates us from the Rapido 904 massacre: the bombing of a train that left Naples for Milan just before Christmas, with more than 600 passengers on board.
She is the daughter of Giovanni Manzo, the engineer who was driving the train through the San Benedetto Val di Sambro tunnel, between Emilia and Tuscany, on Dec. 23, 1984, when a bomb exploded in second-class car 9 – halfway through the train – killing 16 people and injuring 267. It was a mafia-ordered massacre that recalled the bombing of the Italicus train in August 1974. In December 1984, Rosaria was just seven months old; now she is the president of the association of victims' families.
“Many relatives of those who died and the survivors who were on the train speak of a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’” she says. “For me, that isn’t the case, because I was born together with the massacre, it has always been part of my life, even though my father was not injured. The son of a railroader, he had just been hired in 1984, when he was 29 and had two daughters: myself and Caterina, two years older. He had moved to Emilia Romagna because he usually worked on the route between Florence and Milan. We were going to join him shortly. Mom had already bought the fur coat.”
Rosaria has no memories from that Sunday, December 23; she was too young: “My sister told me about a memory of her own: so many shoes. Those of all the relatives and neighbors who rushed to our house in Cercola, near Mt. Vesuvius, after the evening news show reported the news. Dad was only able to call by dawn. He said he was fine and that the only thing he wanted was to come back home.”
Did he ever get on a train again? “Five or six months later, he went back to his job as a train engineer, but it didn’t last long. He ended up working in the ticket office until he retired. As for Mom, that terror and uncertainty made her no longer able to breastfeed me.”
Nowadays, Giovanni Manzo has just as little desire to go back in his memory to that 1984 evening, one day before Christmas Eve: “He never wanted to talk about it in the family. From a newspaper clipping of the only interview he gave, I know that he ran in the dark to set off the distress signal, convinced people to get back on the train and drove it out of the tunnel. My knowledge of the massacre comes more from the families of the victims than from him. They have imprinted in their memory the sickening smell of burnt iron and blood in the train car. There are those who remember an enormous bang and then silence, and those who say they didn’t hear anything and found themselves in the midst of a mad confusion.”
One of the stories is that of Federica Taglialatela: “I worked in Ischia for a time,” Rosaria Manzo recounts. “It was there that I met Rosaria Gallinaro, Federica’s mother. She ran a boarding house by the sea and died a year ago. On December 23, 1984, she was on the Rapido 904 with her husband Gioacchino, with Federica, who was 14, and with Gianluca, their other child. They were going on a skiing vacation. She told me that a few minutes before the blast, which occurred at 7:08 p.m., she had gone out into the corridor to smoke. When she came back, she saw that her daughter had taken her seat. Federica had offered to give it back to her, but Rosaria told her not to worry about it. The daughter ended up dying instead of her mother, who suffered injuries to her face and one eye. Her husband, who would pass away in 1986, recounted in the hospital that immediately after the blast, motionless and in pain in the dark and freezing cold, he held Federica's hand. He felt minute by minute that her grip was getting weaker.”
Little siblings Anna and Giovanni De Simone also died on that train together with their parents. “Their father worked at Enel, their mother was a teacher,” Manzo recalls. “They had left Naples to visit relatives who lived in Milan.”
The investigation would end up coining the phrase “Mafia terrorism” for the first time. Forty years later, the president of the association of victims’ families tells us that unanswered questions still remain about those who were ultimately responsible: “All the sentencing documents talk about ‘connections,’ and the unanswered question is who did these connections involve. Pippo Calò was not only the treasurer of the Mafia, but the liaison man between Rome and Sicily. It’s hard to believe that he was the ultimate decider, together with his right-hand man in the capital – Guido Cercola, who would later commit suicide in prison in 2005 – and no one else.”
In a final judgment, Calò, Cercola, Franco Di Agostino, another member of the Calò clan identified by the magistrates as the one who planted the bomb, and the German Friedrich Schaudinn, deemed to have been the bomb maker, were convicted of the massacre on the Rapido 904 train. According to the judges, the bombing was the Mafia’s retaliation for Operation San Michele, which in September 1984 had led to 366 arrest warrants against mafiosi, following the revelations disclosed to prosecutor Giovanni Falcone by mafioso-turned-informant Tommaso Buscetta.
“However, some pieces are missing in this reconstruction,” Rosaria Manzo tells us. Other individuals may also have taken part in plotting the massacre, in agreement with the Mafia but for different purposes. Other leads have been explored in the course of the six trials held in eight years, without results. Former MSI member of Parliament Massimo Abbatangelo was acquitted of the charge of taking part in the massacre and convicted solely for the possession of explosives. Three defendants linked to the Camorra with professed neo-fascist views – Alfonso Galeota, Giulio Pirozzi, and Giuseppe Misso – were also convicted for possession of explosives, but not for the massacre itself. More recently, Salvatore Riina was acquitted in the first instance and the appeal never proceeded due to the defendant's death.”
Some matters have never been clarified: “Take, for instance, the fact that Schaudinn recounted in an interview that he had escaped from Italy thanks to a passport provided to him by the German embassy.” Rosaria Manzo will not stop in the search for truth: “Another investigation by the Florence prosecutor's office is ongoing to identify possible links between the Mafia, secret services and the neo-fascist right. I don't know the details, but the effort to look for more pieces of the truth is a positive development.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/rapido-904-la-strage-di-natale-in-cerca-dei-mandati-oltre-la-pista-mafiosa on 2024-12-22