A glove disappeared forty-five years ago, an item never recovered, and a truth still obscured. The Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate has placed Filippo Piritore, a former officer of the Palermo Flying Squad and former prefect, under investigation for obstructing investigations into the murder of Piersanti Mattarella, President of the Sicilian Region, assassinated on January 6, 1980, under house arrest.
According to the Palermo Prosecutor's Office, Piritore allegedly made false and uncorroborated statements, thus contributing to the misdirection of the investigation into a crucial piece of evidence: a leather glove found inside the Fiat 127 used by the commando who killed Mattarella. That glove, never seized or collected, was removed from the evidence and its traces were lost.
The former official, questioned as a witness in September 2024, said he entrusted the glove to Forensic Officer Di Natale, who, according to his version, was tasked with delivering it to Deputy Prosecutor Pietro Grasso, then in charge of the investigation. Grasso, again according to Piritore's account, then ordered it returned to the Forensic Officer, where it was handed over to an officer named Lauricella. But that reconstruction, prosecutors say, "is illogical and contradicted by every evidence," especially since no one named Lauricella was working in the Palermo Forensic Officer at the time.
The DDA investigations collected testimonies from Grasso and Di Natale himself, both of whom denied Piritore's version.
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For the Palermo magistrates, the glove's disappearance marked a point of no return: "The investigation into Piersanti Mattarella's murder was seriously tainted and compromised by members of the institutions who, with the clear aim of preventing the identification of those responsible, removed a very important piece of evidence from the body of evidence."
The name of Bruno Contrada, then the number two at the SISDE, also appears in the investigators' file. He was definitively convicted of external complicity with mafia association. His figure emerges in the passages concerning the handling of the find and the institutional contacts of the time.
According to the prosecution, Piritore—who had been in possession of the glove since its discovery—induced the forensic team to hand it over to him, thus removing it from the regular collection. "The system adopted created a stalemate in the investigation, resulting in the glove being permanently forgotten," the prosecutors wrote.
A crucial piece of one of the darkest chapters in Italian history, which today returns to the center of judicial scrutiny at the hands of those who, according to the prosecution, should have guaranteed its transparency.
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