On the evening of April 16, 1952, the engineer was killed with a single shot Erio Codecà near his villa in via Villa della Regina, not far from the Church of the Gran Madre di Dio in Borgo Po, a residential neighborhood in the Turin foothills.
Codecà, 53 years old, was at the time one of the prominent managers of Fiat; Graduated in Grenoble in 1926, he was hired by Fiat in the automotive sector and subsequently sent to manage the Bucharest branch in Romania, where he married a Romanian teacher of Polish origin.
In 1935 he was nominated director of Deutsche Fiat in Berlin, remaining there until 1943 when he returned to Italy as head of the Lingotto Laboratories. After the liberation, the wind of political and social passions also overwhelmed the engineer Codecà in Fiat, who was charged with his stay in Nazi Germany.
After a few years in the "second row", in 1950 he was entrusted with the management of the historic SPA establishment (the former Società Piemontese Automobili) in Corso Ferrucci in Turin, reconverted to the production of industrial vehicles and agricultural tractors by Fiat.
The engineer Codecà gains visibility in the media of the time, newspapers, magazines, newsreels, in the autumn of 1951 when at the Turin Motor Show he was commissioned by Valletta, thanks to his relational skills, to present the new car models to the President of the Republic Luigi Einaudi; a "media" visibility that will perhaps be fatal for him, as happened years later in other cases.
That evening, after having had dinner and telephoned his wife and twelve-year-old daughter in Rapallo for the Easter holidays, around 21 pm he tells the maid to leave the house for a walk with the dog.
The crime takes place just left home, a few steps from the gate of the villa: Erio Codecà is shot down while, after letting the dog in behind him, he opens the front door of his Fiat 1100, parked on the street. No eyewitnesses, except for two or three elderly ladies from the nearby pension who report hearing a great bang, but who didn't immediately understand it was a gunshot.
The investigators ruled out, right from the first investigations, an attempted robbery gone wrong and also a crime of passion, and opted for the execution of political matrix.
The autopsy will reveal that the only bullet fired came not from a pistol, as believed at the time, but from one Stone, the English machine gun used by partisan formations in the war of liberation.
The fact that a single shot did not fire from the weapon proved that the crime had been committed with premeditation and by a person skilled in its use.
The first to pay homage to the body were Victor Valletta e Gianni Agnelli, and the funerals were attended by all the managers of the factories in Turin and, as they said at the time, those outside Turin, i.e. those of Milan, Brescia, Modena and Florence.
The post-war years were "hot" years in the Fiat factories. Certain barricade claims of those who had fought Nazi-fascism and hoped for a new order had not completely subsided: and some, in addition to union struggles and the weapon of the strike, were willing to use violence.
Several episodes.
If the processes of “purge” of the most prominent executives, including Valletta, had already finished in 1946, Mirafiori was occupied for a few days following the assassination attempt on Palmiro Togliatti.
In August 1950, a Mirafiori bomb killing three workers and in the autumn of 1951 a considerable quantity of already primed explosives was found at Fiat Aviazione.
Up until the mid-XNUMXs, numerous finds of war weapons and munitions were made in the Fiat factories, not only in Turin.
It is in this climate that the Questura directs the investigations into the Codecà murder towards the area of the political opposition, detaining and interrogating numerous communist activists.
The thesis of the political crime is supported by the inscriptions that appeared on the boundary wall of the Fiat Grandi Motori in Corso Vercelli "1st of the series" and that of the Lancia in Borgo San Paolo "Is one!! Beware of the TWO!!".
Same Fiat and the Industrial Union of Turin put a size of twenty-eight million lire (approx 500.000 € today) for the identification of the killer(s).
An informant mentions the name of a certain Giuseppe Faletto, a drifter who had already been condemned by the partisan brigades for his violence and dishonesty; summoned for the first time to the police station, the investigators will not initially be able to find elements to incriminate him.
Not a few days go by that the Beacon he is stopped a second time because in the Turin taverns, behind a flask of wine, he goes about telling that it was he who assassinated the Codecà. He denies everything, saying it was just a boast, but he falls into several contradictions and his alibi falters, despite having been deemed valid the first time, and he is arrested. Tried in 1958, he confessed to nine murders during the partisan war (now amnestied) but flatly denied that Codecà and was acquitted due to insufficient evidence.
Il responsible for the murder he was not found, just as those responsible for the fires and the discovery of the weapons were never found.
If the crime, although burdened by the suspicion that it could be connected to work conflicts in the company, in which trade union and political pressures interacted, it was considered a terrorist act by a fanatic, the identification of the victim was on the other hand considered inexplicable by the newspapers and by the ' public opinion.
The Codecà was, as Dr. Palmucci described it to me more than twenty years later, director of the mirafiori and in 1952 Codecà's deputy at the SPA plant, a meek man who had never entered into conflicts with the workers, indeed the previous February he had given them all a prize out of envelopes of 12.000 lire, an important sum for that period.
Unfortunately in the factory, as the Red Brigades years later, the main objective of terrorism, both individual and group, will be precisely against those company and union managers, who sought dialogue and collaboration, rather than the clear company-union opposition.
The Codecà murder was never claimed and still today, almost seventy years later, it remains a mysterious crime.
I point out my book published by Arabafenice.
Robert Gremo