The darkness is apparently that of any night. The awakening will be that of a massacre, sculpted with fire in that sea full of oil, with eyes streaked with blood, burned by that thick smoke that leans like a tombstone on the horizon of Vegliaia, the entrance dam of the port of Livorno. There, swaying like a cradle of death in the middle of the sea, is what remains of that shore ferry that was to reach the promised land. In Sardinia, on the other hand, the Moby Prince will never get there. The quay of the port of Olbia will never again see the ropes of that ship hooking up to the bollards of the White Island. When I fly over that curtain of smoke in front of Livorno harbor at dawn, the bells of heaven ring sadly. Everyone ran away down there. Not even five hundred meters above sea level, close to that pile of sheet metal burnt by real fire, the overflight crystallizes a perennial shot: down there no one is left, everyone has disappeared. Helpless, consumed by the flames, they are the only ones left, those 140 poor Christs snatched from life for a state mystery that for 32 years has been twisting the deepest bowels of those family members who have remained eternal orphans. Since that nefarious night, it was April 10, 1991, 11,680 days have passed. All without an answer. Without a hint of truth and justice. Trials and investigations follow one another with the rhythm of a metronome always leaning towards the slow pace, as if after three decades and two years there was still no hurry.
The state's encephalogram is feeble, almost flat when it comes to that tragedy. Consultants and experts who cyclically linger in affirming diametrically opposite positions on the same context, always insinuating new doubts and new leads, as if to mislead rather than resolve fogs and omissions.
Let's start from the few certainties, to try not to forget that huge tragedy. That night, the Moby Prince, the Navarma ferry, which had just set sail from Calata Carrara, was about to leave the harbor of the Port of Livorno to sail the route towards Sardinia. Impossible to believe the tale of the fog, surreal to think of a distraction from the bridge. Certainly, at 10.25 pm on that April 10, 1991, when deep darkness enveloped the bay of Livorno, the Moby Prince ferry, abruptly reversing its course, crashed into the tanker Agip Abruzzo, of the Eni group, loaded with Iranian light crude oil, Iranian oil. The crew of the tanker was quickly rescued, the Moby Prince, on the other hand, was transformed into a fire coffin not so much by the progress of that burning oil poured onto the decks of the ferry, as by the foolishness of rescuers who did not arrive never. The radio traces even mistake it for a barge, leaving it at the mercy of flames and death.
One hundred and forty people between passengers and crew, 26 Sardinian victims, are the toll of the most serious tragedy ever of the Italian navy.
Thirty-two years later, with the risk of transforming the commemorations into a tired and rhetorical request for truth, four great mysteries resist on that theater in Livorno, like that deserted dawn the next day.
The mysteries
The first: what other ships and what trades were taking place in the harbor of Livorno on that accursed night? The second: why did the state relief never leave to save the passengers of the Moby Prince? The third: why was Moby Prince insured for twenty billion lire, triple its real value, and why did Navarma and ENI never enter into an insurance dispute over that disaster? The fourth: how was it possible to ignore the traces of explosive found by forensics in the engine room of the Moby Prince, ignoring the classified confessions of a 'Ndrangheta repentant about a mafia massacre?
Four mysteries and a judicial massacre that in more than thirty years has left that massacre unpunished until today. In chronological order, to retrace omissions, state secrets and illegal trafficking, the anti-mafia prosecutors of Florence and Livorno are trying.
One fact is certain that night there were too many elements out of place. Starting with the ships at anchor, which disappeared like lightning as soon as they saw the bad turn of the disaster. First of all, there were the American ships, military ships, loaded with weapons and all kinds of explosives, which had just returned from Iraq. Positioned a stone's throw from the American base of Camp Darby, a secret casket in the hands of the "US Force", a stone's throw from Livorno. And then there are the unknown vessels, complete with acronyms coded and encrypted by the radar of the port. It can be perceived by listening to the radio frequencies of the Moby Prince, those of channel 16. More than a control tower, it looks like a crazy telephone switchboard. It overlaps everything and more. Everyone, as if by agreement, talks about a barge on fire. In reality, the one wrapped in live fire is the Moby Prince.
In this eternal state omission, however, there are "pizzini" and confessions, some spontaneous, others hidden. The magistrates, with many difficulties, are trying to rewind the tapes, repositioning the omitted and hidden pieces.
The context is disturbing, between the mafia, arms and oil trafficking, high-level coverage and war risk insurance in the Pacific Tyrrhenian Sea.
Parallel and sneaky truths, faked and ignored. Certainly there is a chapter that remains the darkest, crystallized by the Italian 007 who put black and white a "concept map" dedicated to the "trafficking of recovered war material, nuclear waste and weapons". When the Viminale experts entered the ship, they ruled: "Traces of explosives for civilian use have been found, found in a room in the bow of the ship, where a deflagration probably occurred a few moments before the collision".