Cynical Romans could scarcely believe their eyes or their ears. Rome's traffic came to a full stop as the city's motorists abandoned their cars in midstreet to buy each edition of each new paper. Screaming headlines proclaimed the facts: after months of inaction and seeming indifference, Italy's government had at last come to grips with the strange and threatening case of Wilma Montesi.
Piero Piccioni, the son of Premier Mario Scelba's ex-Foreign Minister, was locked up in Rome's Queen of Heaven jail on charges of manslaughter. Ugo Montagna, the rich and influential bogus marquis, was clapped into a nearby cell. Rome's ex-Police Chief Saverio Polito was also arrested but allowed to stay at home, pending trial, because of his age (73).
Corroding Confidence. For the first time, something that bore an official imprint was substituted for the deluge of black headlines and wild rumors that had sprung up because of the 18-month-old death of Wilma Montesi, the obscure daughter of a Roman carpenter. The charge laid against Piccioni was that, believing Wilma Montesi dead (presumably as a result of a drug orgy), he had left her body on a beach 13 miles outside Rome. There she had drowned in the tide. Montagna, a man of large but questioned means, and Polito were charged with aiding and abetting the manslaughter.
Italy's Communists had been diligent in fanning the Scelba regime's months of inactivity into a national scandal that was rapidly corroding confidence in the entire Italian governing class. Now the Reds were quick to seize on the government's action as an opportunity to bring down their hated enemy, tough Mario Scelba. Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti, with the support of Fellow-Traveling Socialist Pietro Nenni, threw one of his best firebrands against the government in Parliament. Before a packed Senate gallery, Red Senator Umberto Terracini recounted how Polito had served under National Police Chief Tommaso Pavone, who had resigned under the pressure of the Montesi case. And who had been Pavone's boss at the time of the Montesi girl's death? None other than Premier Scelba, who was then Minister of the Interior.
"There is no doubt that there was an attempt to stifle justice," cried Terracini. "It is impossible to believe that the honorable Premier, at that time Minister of the Interior, was kept completely in the dark about what his immediate subalterns were doing." The Communists and Red Socialists demanded that the Scelba government resign.