The Mussolini Diary Forgeries

JULIUS GRAKT 107 Fenchurch Street, London, E.C.3, Bxglaltrl

I have chosen this particular case from my experience not so much because it presents any novel, sophisticated or complex scientific method of forensic interest, but because i t shows strikingly how a relatively minor and unimportant personal experience can lead to the rapid solution of a major problem. About 2 years ago a partnership was formed between a subsidiary of the Thomson Organisation and another Company, whose main business was to handle a number of diaries and notebooks said to have been written by Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator. On the face of i t these were extremely important docu- ments, because it was known that Mussolini did keep a diary throughout the years of his rise and fall, and there are some crucial points in Italian history on which the diaries could shed a badly-needed light.

The price asked for the diaries was £245,000, and a tirst instalment, a banker's draft for £30,000 payable on sight, was handed over in May, 1967, to a Mr. Ettore Fumagalli, in whose possession the diaries were a t that time. The relevant Agreement stipulated that the documents were to be stringently checked before payment, but this apparently, had not been done.

In February, 1968, the diaries and notebooks were brought to me. They consisted of 11 bound books, each diary representing one year, and each page headed with the day and the date in printed characters. I was asked to state whether the paper used for the diaries corresponded with the dates of the years appearing on them; and I was told to ignore the handwriting, as this was being dealt with elsewhere. I learned subsequently that the diaries had been sent to a graphologist, who reported initially (after seeing photocopies) that they could not be forgeries, although she reversed her views later when she had seen the originals; to Mr. F. W. Deakin, Master of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, author of the standard work on Mussolini, who said there was nothing factual in the documents that could be faulted but on the other hand, there was nothing in them that could not be found in published sources; to the paleographer, Prof. Brown, who was equivocal; to a handwriting expert, who regretfully concluded that he could not be definite; and to Vittorio Mussolini, who authen- ticated the diaries as those of his father, and assigned the rights to the Company -for which he received £3,427 in the form of a Jaguar car.

My procedure in the first instance was to examine the fibre compositions of the pulps used to make up the papers of the individual years. In the cases of all the items except the January to December, 1925, diary, I found nothing which was inconsistent with the paper used having been made during the year or prior to the year to which the diary referred. However, the January to December. 1925, notebook contained approximately 40°/0 of straw pulp and also a con- siderable amount of starch.

I t so happened that in 1937, the British company of papermakers, for whom I was Chief Chemist, were very interested in the utilisation of straw for paper- making, and they sent me to Italy to study a new process for carrying this out. I spent some time in Italy on this project, and I therefore happened to know quite well that straw pulp was not made in Italy prior to 1937. I also learned to recognise straw pulp made by this process from the fibrous characteristics of the straw pulp and, in particular, the preponderance and structure of paren- chyma cells. The process is used to-day in Italy and elsewhere in the world, and the straw pulp of the diaries was characteristic of it.

If straw was first being produced by this process in 1937, then the 1925 diaries must obviously have been false. Of course, the possibility that the straw

may have come from somewhere other than Italy in 1925 was not ruled out; however, again because of my Company's interest in straw, I was aware that in 1937 only 2 mills in the world were producing bleached pulp for sale on the open market, one in Holland and one in Germany. I t was not difficult to elim- inate these on grounds of dating or because of the different characteristics of their straw pulps, as seen under the microscope.

The sequel of the story is ironical. The diaries had actually been forged in Italy, by two women, Amalia Panvini and her 84-year old mother, Rosa, and they have been described as some of the cleverest, most painstaking, most convincing forgeries ever achieved. In 1960 the Panvinis had been tried for the forgery, and the police were able to produce the printer and the binder who testified that they had supplied the blank diaries in 1956. Fumagalli had dis- covered that the Panvinis still possessed some of the diaries that they had forged 10 years before. He bought these for £3,000, after signing a paper acknowledging that the diaries were not authentic and stating that he was buying them for their value as curiosities. All this came to light after the various expert opinions on the diaries had been passed; and of course, after the deposit of £30,000 had changed hands !