As is known, history is not a matter of facts, but of those who tell them. And distortions tend to live a long time especially when they are made (certainly in good faith) by respected people. Thus I happened to attend the day before yesterday 8 June, in the Milanese church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a pleasant and passionate speech in which Gherardo Colombo recalled Giorgio Ambrosoli. Colombo, before resigning in 2007, was one of our best magistrates. He did not know Ambrosoli directly, but together with Giuliano Turone shed light on his killing of him. Killing carried out in July 1979 by a certain Joseph William Aricò, a killer of the American mafia paid by Michele Sindona. In quoting all the figures of the establishment who had bowed to Sindona's wishes (with Giulio Andreotti at their head, Prime Minister and great protector at the time) Colombo inserted Enrico Cuccia at a certain point. To him to say about him, despite having learned from Sindona himself of his intention to eliminate Ambrosoli, he had kept silent. If he had spoken, this is the sense, things “could have gone differently”.
Not even Cuccia knew Ambrosoli and therefore had no confidence in him; but it is not true that he kept silent. He was being blackmailed by Sindona who threatened to kidnap her children through his American Mafia friends. Those who sent him Aricò himself to threaten him and finally perhaps to eliminate him if that killer managed to find the new house in which Cuccia had moved and then Aricò had not died in his turn trying to escape from a Manhattan prison in which he was finished. Sindona threatened Cuccia's children whose addresses and habits she had discovered. For this reason he agreed to meet him in New York in April 1979 and on that occasion Sindona told him that he wanted to assume the moral responsibility (sic!) of making Ambrosoli disappear. Upon his return, Cuccia did not keep silent as the vulgate would have it, but sent his lawyer, Prof. Alberto Crespi, to the magistrates Ovilio Urbisci and Guido Viola to warn them of the danger that Ambrosoli ran. As long as he was alive Cuccia did not want to reveal this fact. After his death on June 23, 2000, it was Crespi himself who revealed it in an interview with Corriere della Sera.
I therefore quote from the Corriere della Sera of the year 2000, days 30 June, 1 and 2 July. Crespi: "Enrico Cuccia instructed me to report to the investigating judge Ovilio Urbisci the threats that Michele Sindona made to the liquidator during an interview in New York in April 79"; Crespi went to the judge the morning after Cuccia's return from New York: "I explained the situation to him, I brought back Cuccia's vivid impressions"; “Urbisci explained to me that he was perfectly aware of the threats. The phones were bugged." Interviewer's question: "Why did Cuccia in the Court of Assizes in 85 declare in the courtroom that he had not told anyone about the threats to Ambrosoli for fear of a lawsuit for slander?". Crespi: “Cuccia was perfectly aware that the magistrates had been promptly warned by me... and therefore he was aware that he had thus fulfilled his duties as a citizen. At this point it would have been absurd to endanger the lives of one's children by publicly declaring in the hearing that he had instructed me to report everything to the Milanese judges". Sindona died by suicide in March 1986. The magistrates replied to Crespi confirming: “… prof. Crespi had, in the spring of 1979, to express strong concerns of his own and of Dr. Kennel for the safety of the lawyer. Ambrosoli and the investigating magistrates themselves”. To understand the tenor of the threatening phone calls received by Giorgio Ambrosoli, recorded by the police, it is worth rereading the book published by his son Umberto in 2009 "Whatever happens", Sironi Editore; for example, on January 12, 1979: “you are worthy only to die killed like a c.! She is a c. and b.!” (p. 238).
I have had the privilege of working with Enrico Cuccia for many years and I can only confirm his moral rectitude and exemplary conduct in his actions. Accusing of cowardice (this is the meaning of the vulgate) a man who in the midst of mafia threats exposed himself personally, refused supplies, continued to walk around Milan coming to work in the same place and at the same hours is not only infamous , it is a vile nonsense.
