By Ed Vulliamy,

August 23rd, 2014

Who really killed Pier Paolo Pasolini?

"Want to go for a spin?" the poet and maestro of Italian cinema asked therent boy, according to the latter's confession to the police. "Come ridewith me, and I'll give you a present."

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The film of Pier Paolo Pasolini's last day is tipped to win the GoldenLion at the Venice biennale festival Photograph: Allstar PictureLibrary

So began the events leading to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini(http://www.theguardian.com/�lm/pier-paolo-pasolini), brilliantintellectual, director and homosexual whose political vision – based on asingular entwinement of Eros, Catholicism and Marxism – foresaw Italianhistory after his death, and the burgeoning of global consumerism. It wasa murder that, four decades later, remains shrouded in the kind ofmystery and opacity Italy (http://www.theguardian.com/world/italy)specialises in – un giallo, a black thriller.

e encounter occurred in the miasma of hustling around Roma Terminirailway station at 10.30pm on 1 November 1975. And it marks the pointof departure for a �lm tipped to win the Golden Lion at the Venicebiennale (http://www.labiennale.org/en/Home.html) festival this week –Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe and directed by Abel Ferrara(http://www.theguardian.com/�lm/abel-ferrara), Bronx-born of Italiandescent. e �lm deals with the last day of an extraordinary life. Ferrarasays: "I know who killed Pasolini," but will not give a name. But in aninterview with Il Fatto Quotidiano, he adds: "Pasolini is my font ofinspiration."

At 1.30am, three hours after the station rendezvous, a Carabinieri squadcar stopped a speeding Alfa Romeo near the scrappy coastal promenade ofIdroscalo at Ostia, near Rome. e driver, Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, 17,sought to run, and was arrested for theft of the car, identi�ed asbelonging to Pasolini. Two hours later, the director's body was discovered– beaten, bloodied and run over by the car, beside a football pitch.Splinters of bloodied wood lay around.

Pelosi confessed: he and Pasolini had set off, and he had eaten a meal at arestaurant the director knew, the Biondo Tevere near St Paul's basilica,where he was known. Pino ate spaghetti with oil and garlic, Pasolini dranka beer. At 11.30pm they drove towards Ostia, where Pasolini "askedsomething I did not want" – to sodomise the boy with a wooden stick.Pelosi refused, Pasolini struck; Pelosi ran, picked up two pieces of a table,seized the stick and battered Pasolini to death. As he escaped in the car,he ran over what he thought was a bump in the road. "I killed Pasolini," hetold his cellmate, and the police.

Pelosi was convicted in 1976, with "unknown others". Forensicexamination by Dr Faustino Durante concluded that "Pasolini was thevictim of an attack carried out by more than one person".

On appeal, however, the "others" were written out of the verdict. Pelosihad acted alone and the master was dead in a squalid tryst gone wrongand best forgotten, perhaps even deserved. But fascination with Pasoliniand his �lms (in Italy, his writing too) increased – as did that withmysteries that still hang over his last hours.

e renown of his work is manifestly on merit: New York's Momamounted a retrospective(http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/�lms/1338) in 2012, the BFI in2013 (http://londonist.com/2013/02/preview-pier-paolo-pasolini-season-at-b�-southbank.php). In April this year the Vatican, which had oncepursued Pasolini and helped secure a criminal conviction for blasphemy,declared his masterpiece, e Gospel According to St Matthew, "the best �lm

ever made about Jesus Christ". is expression of Pasolini's radical faithportrays Jesus as a revolutionary "red Messiah", according to theFranciscan doctrine of holy poverty, which in part in�uences the current

pontiff, Francis.

But the compulsion of his death is less explicable: in 2010 the formermayor of Rome and leader of the centre-left Democratic party, WalterVeltroni, demanded that the case be reopened on the basis of aconvergence of strange, and politically charged, circumstances.

Pasolini was killed the day after his return from Stockholm, where he hadmet Ingmar Bergman and others in the Swedish cinematic avant-garde,and given an explosive interview to L'Espresso magazine. In it, headdressed his favourite theme: "I consider consumerism to be a worseform of fascism than the classic variety."

Pasolini's view of a new totalitarianism whereby hyper-materialism wasdestroying the culture of Italy can be seen now as brilliant foresight intowhat has happened to the world generally in an internet age. But hiscritique had been, for months before the murder, more speci�c. He hadsingled out television as an especially pernicious in�uence, predicting therise and power of a type such as media-mogul-turned-prime ministerSilvio Berlusconi long before time. More speci�c still, he had written aseries of columns for Corriere della Sera denouncing the leadership of theruling Christian Democratic party as riddled with Ma�a in�uence,predicting the so-called Tangentopoli – "kickback city" – scandals 15 yearslater, whereby an entire political class was put under arrest during the

early 1990s. In his columns, Pasolini declared that the ChristianDemocratic leadership should stand trial, not only for corruption butassociation with neo-fascist terrorism, such as the bombing of trains and

a demonstration in Milan.

Again, a spine-chilling vindication: these were the so-called "years of lead"in Italy, culminating in the bombing of Bologna station �ve years afterPasolini's death by neo-fascists working with the secret services, killing 82people.

I was a student in turbulent Florence in 1973, returning every yearthereafter and affiliated to a radical organisation called Lotta Continua(Struggle Continues); and I well remember Lotta Continua's newspapertaking contributions from Pasolini, though his relationship to the radicalmovements spawned by 1968 was ambiguous. He had identi�ed withpolice officers against student rioters because, he said, they were "sons ofthe poor" attacked by bourgeois "daddy's boys".

So it was that, in the wake of the murder in 1975, those close to Pasolinisaw the hand of power behind his killing. It would not have been a �rst:prominent leftists were often attacked or killed; feminist Franca Rame,who would marry the anarchist playwright Dario Fo, was gang-raped byneo-fascists, urged by the Carabinieri.

Members of Pasolini's family and circle of friends, and the writers OrianaFallaci and Enzo Siciliano raised possible political motives for the killingand produced evidence that contradicted Pelosi's confession, such as a

green sweater found in the car that belonged neither to Pasolini norPelosi, and Pasolini's bloody handprint on its roof (there were barely any

bloodstains on Pelosi). Motorcycle riders and another car had been seenfollowing the Alfa Romeo.

In January 2001 an article appeared in La Stampa that turned conspiracytheory into a hard lead. It concerned the death in 1962, in a plane crash,of Enrico Mattei, head of the ENI energy giant, made into a famous �lmby Francesco Rosi, with whom Pasolini had worked.

e article's author, Filippo Ceccarelli – one of Italy's expert politicaljournalists – cited inquiries by a judge, Vincenzo Calia, into politicalintrigue within ENI, which found the plane had been shot down. JudgeCalia implicated the man who succeeded Mattei, Eugenio Ce�s, in cahootswith political leaders. e report cited a journalist who had worked on eMattei Affair �lm with Rosi, Mauro di Mauro, who was kidnapped anddisappeared without trace.

Long before Calia's investigation, published in 2003, Pasolini had workedon the posthumously released book Petrolio, featuring barely disguisedversions of Mattei and Ce�s, and revealing knowledge of how the ENIscandal and murder went to the heart of power and the P2 Masonic lodge,of which Ce�s was a founder member. "With 25 years' foresight," wrote

Ceccarelli, "Pasolini the writer had been aware of the outcome of a longinvestigation."

en, in 2005, the �oodgates opened. Pelosi, interviewed on television,retracted his confession, saying that two brothers and another man hadkilled Pasolini, calling him a "queer" and "dirty communist" as they beathim to death. ey frequented, he said, the Tiburtina branch of the MSIneo-fascist party. ree years later, Pelosi gave further names in an essaycalled "Deep Black", released by the radical publisher Chiarelettere,revealing connections to even more extreme fascist cells tied to the statesecret services, saying he had not previously dared to speak, after threatsto his family.

One of Pasolini's closest friends, assistant director Sergio Citti, then cameto the fore to say that his own investigations had produced evidenceentirely overlooked: bloodied pieces of the stick dumped close to thefootball pitch, and a witness ignored by the official investigation who hadseen �ve men drag Pasolini from the car.

Citti introduced a new theme: the theft of spools from Pasolini's last �lm,Salò, the return of which he had tried to negotiate. e gang of thievesfrequented, it emerged, the same billiard bar as Pelosi, and had calledPasolini on the last day of his life to organise a meeting. Another

investigation by the writer Fulvio Abbate tied the killers to the famousMagliana criminal gang on the coastal outskirts of Rome.

Yet the case remains closed, and there are those within Pasolini's circle aswell as in the political class who prefer it so. Author Edoardo Sanguineticalls the death "delegated suicide" by a sado-masochist bent on his owndestruction. Pasolini's cousin Nico Naldini – also a homosexual poet –

wrote in the ambiguously entitled Brief Life of Pasolini about the director's"fetishistic rituals" and "attraction for boys who made him lose his sense

of danger".

Pasolini had died, so history insists, as though in a scene from one of his�lms. "It is only at the point of death," Pasolini had said in 1967, "that ourlife, to that point ambiguous, undecipherable, suspended – acquires ameaning."

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