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Icardi took command of the Chrysler mission, radioed back that Holohan had been lost in an enemy attack. Between then and the end of the war, 50 airdrops floated down on the Orta district. During that period, LoDolce had a nervous breakdown and was smuggled out to Switzerland.
After the war, the OSS and the Army began a routine investigation of Major Holohan's disappearance, officially listed him as killed in action.
The First Confessions. One man did not accept the story of William Holohan's death. His brother, Joseph R. Holahan,* 51, a Wall Street stockbroker, kept looking for more details. He met Icardi after the war, and heard a plausible story of the Nazi attack in which the major was supposedly lost. Icardi showed him a picture of the Chrysler mission team, offered to go back to Italy with him sometime to find the body. Still Joe Holahan was not satisfied. He wanted to find his brother's body. He wrote letters to the OSS, the Army, to Italian partisans and Italian police.
In January 1949, a young Italian carabinière named Lieut. Elio Albieri, commanding the Arona station near Lake Orta, became interested in the case. He questioned the Chrysler mission's two helpers. In March 1950, Tozzini, caught in contradictions, confessed first. Manini confirmed him in almost every detail.
In June, Albieri grappled for Major Holohan's body. At the exact spot pointed out by the two partisans, his net hauled up a heavy bundle. Inside, preserved by cold lake water, was the body of Major Holohan, two bullets from a 9-mm. Beretta in his skull, traces of cyanide in his intestines. Tozzini confessed the name of the man to whom he had sold the pistol. It was found. The bullets that killed Holohan had been fired from it.
In Rochester, N.Y., the Army's Criminal Investigation Division and local police picked up Carl LoDolce, who now has a pretty wife, two children, and a job as an engineer. He denied everything. After a lie-detector test showed him nervous, he confessed. His story jibed with the one told by Manini and Tozzini.
Hints & Repudiations. At that point, amazingly, U.S. investigation seems to have stopped. In Washington, the Judge Advocate General's office told Army investigators that the two Americans, LoDolce and Icardi, could not be tried by a military court because they had been discharged from the Army. Since the crime was committed outside the U.S., no civil court could try them. (This mile-wide loophole has since been plugged, but the law is not retroactive.)