Part Two: All the People Who Tried to Kill Mussolini
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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, people try to confront those bad things in various ways. Lots of various ways. One of the way... No, just a person. One of the people who's also on this podcast with me is Robert Evans, my guest. Hi. That's right. I'm Robert Evans, and I'm Robert Evans. That's me. Well, I brought you on because you're an expert about Italy.

Yeah, I mean, I know several things about Italians, Margaret. Number one, butte di beppo. Number two, spese mita balla. Here's where we remind the listeners that Robert Evans is Italian. Whatever the hat is that the chefs wear and those kind of racist caricatures. Look, it's fine. We all decided that it's okay with Italians now.

Yeah, despite the huge trial that we talked about last time about anti-Italian prejudice in the United States. Look, if they'd been, I have the opposite position of that guy. I'm fine with the murder. If they'd been on trial for being Italian, I would have said fucking, you know? Yeah, exactly. Hang a my. Yeah, maybe upside down. Maybe. That's a dead Mussolini joke, which is unfortunately not going to happen in today's episode.

A lot of people are going to try. Give it the old college try. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie. It's me. I'm Sophie. Hi. I realized when I got my podcast you listened to the most in 2024 that four of them were Sophie podcasts. The loyalty is unmatched. Unmatched. That's right. I'm a little bit surprised that...

That not all five were, but I think the problem was that the Pathfinder podcast I listened to has really long episodes. You need one break. So I listened to like five. Yeah, you need one break from me. We should do a Pathfinder podcast, Margaret. I would love to do a live play podcast. Maybe I'll reach out to the guy who created Pathfinder and listens to our podcasts and talk to him about that. I would love that guy who created Pathfinder. Y'all are great and your system rules and I play it anyway.

So, but yeah, no, Cool Zone Media needs a live play podcast. That's all I'm saying. And if you, listener, agree, bug these people on the internet about it. And then, because I needed more podcasts to be on. Whatever. I don't care. There's a shortage of podcasts. I don't know if you're aware of this. Yeah. But the CDC has said that it's probably the largest threat to our national collective health.

Well, it's the only thing that they're trying to put a tariff on that everyone's in favor of is that they're trying to make it harder for people to make podcasts. That's right. That's right. All podcast mics. Oh my God. That actually is good. Most of the podcast mics are probably not made in the U S whatever. I got mine. I have no idea. I have no idea where they make our microphones, Margaret. No, no, I do not. Yeah.

Anyway, this is part two on a two-part episode about people trying to kill Mussolini. Later, we'll probably talk about the people who succeeded. It took a whole war. But some people tried to cut to the chase and circumvent the need for the war. And we've already mentioned several of them. But we're going to talk a lot more of them today.

First, we're going to talk about Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. And that our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And that Gino Lucetti was born working class in the year 1900 in Carrara, Tuscany. You ever heard of Carrara?

I've heard of Tuscany, because the Tuscan coast is pretty famous. I've never heard of Tarara. Other than that, it makes me think of that song that goes, Tarara, boom, dee, which I don't know what that's a reference to. Is that a slur? I have no idea. I should probably look into that song, see if there was anything fucked up. It's like celebrating a genocide. That's often the case with old songs. What a lovely tune. Oh, no! Yeah. Well...

Carrara is famous for two things. It is famous for its marble quarries. It produces some of the finest marble from which the most iconic buildings and statues in the world are made. There's a whole list of them, and I forgot to write them down. But, like, think of an old Italian statue from Rome, old Rome, and the marble might have come from Carrara. It has, like, blue veins. I spent way too long reading about this marble.

It's good-ass marble. Yeah. The other thing that Carrara is famous for is anarchism. Oh, okay. When my anarchist friends took me through Italy, when we were near Carrara, they pointed out and they were like, hey, that place was an anarchist stronghold for a long, long time among the stonemasons who put that town on the map.

Enough so that I was like double checking this today. I was like, Carrara, that sounds familiar, right? And I was looking at a mainstream tour company's website, Carrara Marble Tour, and they offer an anarchic Carrara tour. Oh, wow.

Wow. Really double dipping. Yeah. I mean, and that's, you know, cause there's so many, it's like you and I always say, Margaret, with so many anarchists in our audience, you know, every there's, there's nothing that goes together like anarchism and marble quarries. Yeah. Two great tastes that taste great together. You know, that's why, by the way, let's have a word for our sponsor. Big marble. Marble. Maybe we could use it again for some stuff.

Marble, one time, statute of limitations ago, I had to empty all the marbles out of my pocket before a mass arrest. Yeah.

Marble, if you use it to make all of your streets and sidewalks like they do in Greece, it makes things incredibly treacherous in the rain. Actually, horrible, horrible material to use the way that they use it. Yeah, but it's pretty, though. Yeah. Years and years ago, my dad told me this spooky story that he wrote called The 37 Marble Steps. And I was like a kid, so I was just assuming that these were steps with marbles embedded in them. But...

Gina Lucetti was from Carrara in the early 1920s. There are factory occupations all over Italy. I don't know enough about these yet, but they've come up a bunch of times and they'll probably be one of their own episodes at one of these points. And

I know that in the end of these factory occupations, the socialist parties kind of gave up and gave power back to the bosses, which made an awful lot more anarchists from those socialists who, you know, had just seized the means of production. And we're like, but isn't this our goal? Isn't our goal that the workers control the means of production? Why would we give them back? I don't know enough about the ins and outs of that struggle, but a lot of people were mad.

Gina Lucetti was at these occupations and somewhere along the way, he got into a gunfight with the black shirts. He got a guy in the ear who got him in the neck in return. And the second time we've had an anti-fascist get it in the neck and survive on the show. The other one was George Orwell.

Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, I'm not going to say, but that's very lucky. Yeah, exactly. Don't get shot in the neck. The neck is very low on the number of places on your body you would want to get shot. Yeah, not a good tourniquet spot, it turns out. Hard to tourniquet a neck unless you're Google AI, which has told me repeatedly that you can tourniquet the neck. Hell yeah. That's just a hanging, folks. You're just strangling someone to death. Yeah.

Oh my God. Don't tourniquet necks. Yeah. It seems self-evident, but an AI does not have our best interest in heart. No, it just sees, well, there's fucking arteries there. Tourniquet away. Yeah, yeah. It detaches a limb if a head is a limb. The appendage, I don't know, whatever. Whatever a head is anatomically. I guess it's a head. So he couldn't find a doctor in Italy to get the bullet out. I do not know why.

So Comrade smuggled him to France where he was finally treated. And he was like, you know what? I don't need to be in Italy right now. They are in the middle of a fascism and I am in the middle of just got shot in the neck by a fascist. Yeah.

There was a large political refugee scene in France at the time. Anarchists, socialists, and communists had formed a popular front against fascism there, not only just in general in France, but specifically the Italian refugees had. They were like, all right, look, all that stuff going on in Russia, we're all mad at each other, but right now Italy is being taken over by fascists. We got to do something about that. Right. And they all agreed what needed to be done was kill Mussolini.

And this action was intended to be anything but a propaganda of the deed action, which is, I think, actually a really important point for kind of what we ended on talking about last week. Right. As a Libcom.org article put it, quote,

Propaganda of the deed attacks were supposed to inspire the working classes to rise, and in this they were entirely unsuccessful. In this instance, however, the urge to kill Mussolini was the expression of a convergence of opinion among many popularly representative political groupings, and was commonly perceived as a necessity at that point in time. So it wasn't like, oh, we're going to

spur on the revolution and radicalize people by showing them that, you know, our opponents are made of flesh and blood. It was like, no, Mussolini is basically the enemy war leader that we're in a war against, you know? One word that has never been successfully applied to anarchists is cowardice. Gino agreed to do the deed.

I mean, it's the thing that you come across over and over again when you read about militant movements and civil wars where there are anarchist groups, is that the anarchists are always very brave. Not always the best fighters, but always very brave. Yeah. And specifically, other groups like putting us in the front. Yeah.

Yeah, that's an aspect of it. Yeah. I remember when I first became an anarchist, I was just going to protests and things 27 years ago. And my roommate in college was like, you anarchists, you're just the berserkers of the protest movement. People just throw you in the front to soak up all the damage. And I was like, no. He was a little bit right.

At least in terms of how people perceive us and use us. So, of course, when they're like, who's going to go risk their life to go do this? An anarchist volunteered. And twice he returned to Italy to meet with comrades there to plan the assassination. And they met aboard a ship at sea, which is aesthetic as fuck, off the Tuscany coast. And this time, there were no informants among them. He had several co-conspirators worth mentioning.

Stefano Vadieroni was an anarchist tinsmith from Rome who was the secretary of the library. The fucking librarian was in on this assassination. The secretary of Mussolini's library supplied all of the details, including Mussolini's routes by car. Vadieroni funded the thing by selling his family's land near Carrara. Another anarchist, Leandro Sorio, was a waiter who was planning to finance the group's escape from the country. But then they all decided, basically they were like, well...

We're actually just all going to get arrested and stand trial. There you go. We want to make a statement. Malatesta, the anarchist guy who's old at this point, was briefed on the plan and signed off on it. So this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment attack. This was a huge conspiracy across borders to try and kill this guy. Our man Gino went back to Italy, and he went to Rome. He waited for Mussolini's car, and then he threw a pineapple grenade at it.

The grenade had been made by his cousin, and he threw it into the windshield. Famously, grenades are on timers, not, like, pressure sensitive. They, like, don't explode on impact.

No, because that would be very dangerous. Margaret, have I told you the story about the Iraqi soldier? We're behind this berm embedded with this unit of the Iraqi federal police that are in this very active gunfight with some ISIS guys. But they're also kind of showing off because, like, I'm there and my photographer's there with the camera. And so, like, what are the dude's...

One of the dudes clips into the buttons of his like button up shirt, a grenade over each button. He like sticks the little handle arm of the grenade around and he like runs up and he like fires. And then he leans over to pick up a magazine that's like lying behind the berm and all of the grenades fall off of his shirt and roll down directly towards me. So thankfully they're not set off by impact. Yeah. Fair enough.

In this case, it didn't get through the windshield. This is the guy who should have brought a rock. Yeah, yeah. Violet Gibson was right. You need to get through the windshield. The grenade bounced a few meters away and exploded. Mussolini's bodyguards caught up with Gino and beat the shit out of him. That sounds about right, yeah. And when they arrested him, they found him with a second bomb, a handgun with six hollow points poisoned with muriatic acid, which I don't know anything about.

And a dagger. Isn't muriatic acid the thing in, like, swimming pools?

Isn't that chlorine? No, no. I mean, I think you have muriatic acid for swimming pools, too. I remember I've seen, like, jars. One sec. I actually didn't want to Google this today. That's what happened to me today, is I was like, I wonder what this stuff is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You use muriatic acid to lower, like, pH in your pool. It's like a shit millions of Americans have this shit in, like, their shed. Okay. Yeah. I have no idea why you would... Either he was being really extra or, like...

Or he just thought it, he might have thought it was more sketchy than it was. I don't know. Yeah, like this one says acid, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When it's really, it's not that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know much about it. Other than that, I know I've seen it in people's like backyards because they have pools. Yeah. And also like,

There's so much myth building, both positively and negatively, about all of these things. So it could have been like, oh, he had a dagger and muriatic acid. It actually used the word dum-dum bullets instead of hollow points because that's what they called a round that expands at the time. So he's tortured. He gives a false name and location, and eventually they get the truth out of him. Lucetti was given 30 years in prison. The waiter got 20 years, and the tinsmith got 19 years and 9 months. 30 years is the maximum anyone's allowed to be given in Italy at the time.

Which again, more, I mean later they're going to start killing people, but. Yeah. For three years, Lucetti was in solitary and had only a sparrow that would visit at the window for company.

Okay. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. It's his best friend, the sparrow. I mean, that's sweet, actually. I know. I bet he was giving it some of his like very, very rare bread that he didn't have a whole lot of because he was a nice man. Yeah. He lived off of, I think it's just literally soup and bread. And that sounds about right. He died after 17 years in prison in 1943. He died during a U.S. air raid.

Some claim that he was killed by the shelling, but the man who identified the body said that he had been killed by the occupying Germans during the raid. The Italian communists tried to claim his legacy. They published that one of his fellow inmates claimed he had become a communist in his later years. But his brother and his fiancée, who kept visiting him until the end of his days, denied this adamantly. They're like, no, he was an anarchist. He died an anarchist.

During the partisan reclamation of Italy, two different anarchist battalions named themselves after Gino Lucetti. Each was about 60 fighters, I believe both men and women. I know one of the other anarchist battalions I'm going to talk about later was both men and women. And they helped rid Italy of fascism. So he won in a way after his death. And that is all most of us can hope for, I would say. Yeah. Yeah.

Definitely. I mean, in the long run, it's all any of us can hope for, right? Because as we've seen, every struggle worth fighting occurs over a long time frame. Yeah, absolutely. As for the man who made the bomb, that's a different story about another Geno because his cousin's name was also Geno. And I want to tell you about that story, but did you know what I want to tell you about more?

I love products. Services? Maybe. I don't know if there'd ever be a service on here. I do like a good service. Oh, okay. Okay. Fascinating. Yeah, no, yeah. Whatever they pay me to talk about or whatever they pay someone else to talk about and then insert into my podcast. All right. I'm really excited about. Here. Here.

Yeah.

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And we're back. We are. Gino Lucetti had a cousin, Gino Bibby. Very serious country, as you said. Yes, absolutely.

Gino Bibby was from a more middle-class background. His father owned a sawmill. Gino Bibby, um, did you know an anarchist invented the missile? No. Was he like a scientist being forced to do stuff by the not-

So I'm going to get to it. You know what? That's got to be one of the top anarchism fails. Yeah, it didn't work out well in the end. I would say missiles. I mean, there's definitely some anarchists, you know, an anarchist related groups that have used missiles and are using them right now. But boy, howdy, it's a general rule, not a tool that has that has reduced state power.

Yeah. Oh, that's an L. I know. And it's so messy. That's a big L for us. And if you Google, I'll talk about it a little bit more later when he actually does the inventing, when I get to it. But if you Google who invented the missile, you get the Nazis. But he's going to pull out missiles, guided missiles that go 20 kilometers in the Spanish Civil War. Shit. Missile in this case being a rocket, but guided. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And as a teen, his second Gino, Gino Bibby, went around on a bicycle and distributed anarchist leaflets until fascists dragged him off his bike, beat him up, burned his motorcycle, and then burned his father's sawmill. Great. Because they were a little extra, the fascists. This did not make Gino less radical. It just made him more angry. He's going to have the last laugh against fascists in Italy. That is often how things go. Yeah. Yeah.

He spent a while in lockup for fighting fascists in the early 1920s, then fled to Spain where he started learning how to fly in case he needed to assassinate Mussolini from the air. Okay. Which is kind of like how I learned a while ago for a prison break episode that an awful lot of the prison breaks in the early aughts were... It used to be a lot easier to get a helicopter. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Learn to fly. That's how you get people out of prison back in the day. Yeah. Yeah.

Come the Spanish Civil War, he worked behind enemy lines, blowing shit up and flying reconnaissance. And then he maybe designed the first missile. If you Google right now the first missile, you get Nazi Germany, World War II. But Gino designed missiles that went 20 kilometers and the Darudi column fired them at Francoist forces. So it started off as a good idea, just a very Pandora's box. That's pretty cool. Yeah. You know what else the anarchists, this is not a products and services switch. Do you know what else anarchists invented during the Spanish Civil War?

No. You ever played foosball? Yeah. Is that ours? Did you ever know an anarchist named Alejandro, I forget his last name because it's not my script, invented foosball? Alejandro Foos? Let's call, let's say Alejandro Foos. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah, there was a, again, I'm completely off script here and going from memory, but there was a guy who was injured in the Spanish Civil War and he was like an inventor and he was like, but I want to keep playing soccer, but I can't because I got really badly injured. I'm going to invent table soccer. And other people had invented it, but his invention is the one that people play today.

Okay. Fascinating. So Spanish Civil War, the anarchists gave us missiles and foosball. The two key cornerstones of modern civilization, missiles and foosball. Yeah. Meanwhile, while Gino's inventing missiles and doing spec ops missions, the Stalinists murdered his sister. Listen to any of our episodes about the Spanish Civil War for more about how Stalinists betrayed their comrades and started arresting folks that they didn't like and torturing people and killing them.

The Stalinists actually arrested Gino too, but the anarchists in the government, which is another odd thing that happened in the Spanish Civil War, were like, oh no, fuck no, and the Stalinists were forced to let him out. When the Spanish Republic fell, like everyone else, he fled into France and was held in a concentration camp, not a Nazi one, but a pre-VG France one, wherefrom he escaped, and then he moved back to Italy, and he joined the partisans there, and he freed his own fucking hometown from fascists as part of an anarchist partisan unit.

I really like this guy. To quote author Nick Heath, he died at the age of 100 on the 8th of August, 1999. He was cremated with a red and black scarf tied around his neck. His ashes were interred in the anarchist corner of the graveyard in Carrara.

Man, that's dope. Yeah. Also, 1999, great year to kind of clock out. Yeah, totally. Missed a lot of messiness, got to see most of the good Star Treks. Yeah. And, yeah, Geno Beebe, I got kind of teary when I was writing about the life of the anarchist spy pilot, bomb maker, engineer, partisan, and inventor. Spilot. Spilot, Margaret. Oh, Spilot, yes. The Spilot. Yes. Yes.

An inventor of the guided missile system, which, again, not our best move. Later, I'm going to talk about a military invention or actually a terrorism invention of the anarchists that's even worse. Uh-oh. The Irish are mostly famous for it, but it was an Italian anarchist who later became a fascist. Anyway, back to our main story, people trying to kill Mussolini. Only a few months after Gino I threw Gino II's grenade at Mussolini,

Another young hero stepped forward to give it his all. A really young hero. Kind of a, this is the most heartbreaking part of the story. A 15-year-old kid who had just quit the fascist youth and become an anarchist. That's good for him. Antio Zamboni. God damn it. I promised you Zamboni. Get Jamie Loftus on the horn. She needs to know about this name. I genuinely thought, I was very glad that you were my guest until I got to Zamboni and I was like...

If I was going to have anyone else, it would be Jamie Loftus. Also more experienced killing. Never mind. No, no. I'm not allowed to join the bit about trying to implicate. Okay. Just checking. No. Yeah. Yeah. Until the court case is over and the grand jury rules on the new evidence brought forward in that case, we probably should keep our mouths quiet. By a mysterious person with a bad fake Boston accent. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

No. For anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, I'm proud of you. Well done. Way to be less terminally online. You should listen to Jamie Loftus' podcasts. You should. Antio Zamboni was born into a working class political family in Bologna. His parents were anarchists who became fascists, or at least his father had.

He was never baptized. His parents only had a civil union because they refused to let the state or the church have anything to do with their marriage before they became fascists. His father, Mamolo Zamboni, when he became a fascist, the New York Times called it, quote, disassociating from radical action. Because being an anarchist is radical. Being a fascist is normal, according to the New York Times in 1926. And now. Yeah. Yeah.

Momolo called himself quote an anarchist and a fascist. So what a guy.

I mean, there's a lot of that too, unfortunately. Oh yeah. You could look into there's a, I mean, he, he, he considered himself and was very angry about other anarch, like people who call themselves anarchists. Cause he had a different attitude towards it. But, uh, the guy who wrote a storm of steel, uh, Ernst Junger was like, called himself an anarch. Uh, and I guess the difference is he just believed in anarchism for himself as like an individual choice, uh,

while still serving the Nazi state. He was kind of an incoherent fella politically, in my opinion, but wrote a very good World War I memoir. Well, I think that that sounds like approximately half of the modern Libertarian Party that the other half of the Libertarian Party is very embarrassed about. Yeah, yeah. Antio had two brothers, one of whom was in a fascist militia, the other of whom was in the army. Antio was a young anarchist with way better politics than his dad.

And he took a shot at Mussolini while the man drove past him in an open car. He missed. He pierced the fascist collar and the crowd killed him. Just stabbed this child to death. Oh, I have, you know, a 15 year old either looks like a kid or an adult. Yeah. Antio is a kid. This is a child.

Yeah. I mean, every 15 year old is a child, but the crowd knew they were killing a child. Yeah. Yeah. They did not. It was not just like somebody who like could have passed for 17 or 18. Like they were very aware they were killing a kid. Yeah. He could have passed for 12. Yeah. Gotcha. Um, I, I looked at the, I don't normally do this to myself, but I looked at the corpse photo cause the only other photos that anyone has of him is when he's like eight, you know? Um,

And his coward fascist father tried to distance himself from the actions of his son until after the war, but we'll get to that. The New York Times reported the father walked into the police station to see the body and said, quote, I knew it would happen. It was fated. He was a strange boy with strange notions. I had a dreadful premonition that something would happen to him. Our doctor said he might go mad one day. This is the father trying to save his own ass. It's not going to work.

Then New York Times writes a little glowing article about Mussolini playing his violin with his wife and kids at home, taking solace after the attack. Then they talk about how everyone is saying that if Mussolini stays alive, fascism will keep Italy normal and peaceful. But if he were killed... That seems like what fascism will do, yeah. Yeah, violent fascists might take over if Mussolini is killed.

And on that exact same page of the New York Times from 1926, there's a different article about fascist black shirts raiding anti-fascist newspapers at gunpoint. Uh-huh. But, you know, whatever. But like in a normal way, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Being a fascist did not protect Mamalo, the father. He and his sister-in-law were both sentenced to 30 years for being vaguely connected to Antio. Basically, they're like, oh, the kid couldn't have come up with doing it. It must have been a plot by previously anarchy dad.

But by 1932, the elder Zamboni received a pardon directly from Mussolini in exchange for becoming an informant for the fascists. Then, after the war, Mamalo went 180 again and started writing pamphlets speaking of the courage of his son and started publishing anarchist material again. Great. He died in 1952, and he's not the only anarchist in this story who went fascist and then anarchist again.

Yeah. This guy. I don't like him. Yeah. Again, a lot of it's just like a lot of people are more will always be a decent number of people. Sizeable minority, always mostly just driven by whatever is pissing them off in the moment, you know, as opposed to principles. Totally. Totally.

I'm just so mad at him for turning his back on his kid and trying to throw his dead kid under the bus to save his own ass. I mean, he sounds like a guy who sucks. Yeah. Sounds like a bastard that maybe someone should get behind. I know. He's kind of a little weird guy, too. Yeah. After Antio's attempts on Mussolini, all other political parties were outlawed, but they already didn't have any power, and Mussolini was going to do that anyhow, was my argument.

This more or less ends open anarchist organizing in Italy, as I understand it. And Mussolini brings back the death penalty now for anyone trying to kill him or the king. That didn't stop people from trying to kill him. No one tries to kill a dictator thinking it's a safe thing to do. Nope. Yeah, nobody's ever killed a dictator being like, this is more relaxing than staying home at night and reading the newspaper. Yeah, I'm going to get away from this just fine. Yeah, yeah.

Although later the people who do kill Mussolini do. Yeah, that's a different time. That's really not an assassination. No, no. The next attempt we're going to talk about was a man who, like Gaetano Bresci before him, abandoned the safety of the United States and kind of abandoned his family there to return to Italy to try and do what was right. His name was Michele Sciarru.

Okay. Which to me looks like it's spelled Michelle, if anyone's curious. Yeah. But it's like the French, but it's not. It's Italian, so it's Michele. Michele Schiru was born in 1899 on Sardinia, which is an Italian island. His father had already emigrated to the US, and Michele was raised by his mother. He was twice arrested in demonstrations as a kid. He was conscripted into World War I.

And like a lot of anarchists at the time, he was hoping the war would turn into a war of liberation. It did not, famously. That's a bummer. Yeah. Michele became convinced of anarchism after the Communist Party, he felt, sold out the factory occupations and let the bosses back in. He eventually moves to Manhattan. He starts fighting Italian fascists in the streets. He worked as a mechanic and then he became a banana wholesaler in the Bronx.

He married an Irish-American woman named Minnie. He had two kids. I think he had a son and a daughter. But he was watching Italy fall to fascism, and he couldn't handle it. He was like, someone's got to do something. I'm someone. I'm going to do something. He went first to France and then likely coordinated with anarchists there, but he kept his mouth shut about it. So we never know. We'll never know who else was involved because they were never arrested.

He went up to Belgium and he worked in an anarchist bomb making workshop. I don't know. There's like a like fly. You go to like the punk show and there's a flyer. It's like, hey, come to the anarchist bomb making workshop this Saturday. Yeah. But he made himself two bombs and then he traveled to Rome in January 1931. We've only got his confession under duress to work from. So we don't, you know, famously not always the most honest. Not not a great source. Yeah. Yeah.

But his original plan, he said, was that he was going to use the bombs in Paris against the Soviet embassy in revenge for the murder of anarchists in the USSR. But then he decided to kill Mussolini himself. I think that that was his backup plan. I think that he went to... I think he went back to Europe to try and kill Mussolini. But...

In Rome, he rented two hotel rooms, one for himself and one for his bombs, because bombs need privacy, too, you know? Of course, yes. That's actually my primary political issue, is extending privacy rights to modern military explosives, you know? Nobody needs to know what a couple of JDAMs get up to in their spare time. That's between them and God and whatever village they're hitting. Ha ha ha ha!

While he was there, he was either shacking up with or conspiring with a Hungarian dancer named Anna Lukowski. If I were writing the story, it would be both. Also, everyone writes sex work out of history. So I would put money that she was a sex worker, but that doesn't make her less or more likely to have been one of the conspirators. And there is reason to believe that he is part of a broader conspiracy working, but he never rats them out. And the reason that we think this is

is that he spent money really freely while he was there. He was renting two hotel rooms, but he had no money on him when he was arrested. And there was like no money in any of the rooms or whatever, right? So he was probably working with a bunch of people who wanted Mussolini dead. A lot of people wanted Mussolini dead. Yeah, for some reason. His plan was really simple. One of his hotel rooms overlooked a common route for Mussolini's car. He was going to wait and drop a bomb on Mussolini, but...

He wanted to do it when there was no bystanders around. Of course. And this is the thing that has come up a bunch of times on this show but has left out a lot of the sensationalist stuff about bomb assassinations as all of the bystanders who get killed. There have been so many times in history, and there's going to be two in this episode, where people don't do it because they can't find a way to do it without hurting people.

He's there for like three weeks, and he can't find a way to not hurt anyone else. He had all but given up, and he was figuring he'd go back to Paris and attack the Soviets instead. When he was stopped on the street by cops on February 3rd, 1931, and I think he was just like stopped for being a sketchy guy because it's a fascist state, you know, and they take him to a holding cell for investigation. There were three cops in the room. He pulled a gun and shot all three cops. Wow. Wow.

And then he shouted long live anarchy and put the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Well, okay. All four men survived. Oh my God. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that does have to win my award for worst with a gun of anyone on this podcast. To shoot four people, including yourself, and have them all live is a real...

Honestly, though, I gotta say, given the time, something that probably just goes down to how much worse ammunition was back then, you know, powder loads were less reliable. He may have loaded them himself, you know? Yeah. Like, I think he, like, he seriously injured one of the cops in himself. Jesus Christ. He was, like, rushed to emergency surgery, and they, you know, wanted him fit to stand trial. Right. Stand trial for killing no one. That's actually part of the thing. Yeah.

I was reading newspapers at the time and they were like, look, shooting cops didn't carry the death penalty. So it actually was against their own laws to try and give him the death penalty. But he admitted that he was there to kill Mussolini. In fact, he pretty much, they were like, what are you doing? He was like, I'm here to kill Mussolini. He tried to write his wife and his wife tried to write him while he was in jail, but their letters were confiscated. He wrote to his father to the same effect.

In May 1931, he was tried by a fascist judge with no jury, and all the lawyers and witnesses had to be put before a special tribunal before they could come in. His defense was basically, I came here to blow up Mussolini. During the trial, he decried both fascism and communism. They told him he would be executed, shot in the back. He didn't say a word as the sentence came down. When he was asked if he had anything to add, he shrugged his shoulders.

At 2.30 a.m. the next morning, they came into his cell and told him he would be killed at sunrise. He said he did not need a priest, and he was shot in the back by a firing squad of 24 fascists, folks from his home of Sardinia who had volunteered specifically to kill him. Well, I guess that's a nice... At least you know it's your guys you went to high school with murdering you. Yeah, totally. That actually sounds much worse. Yeah.

His wife, Minnie, lived to 1987, dying at 83. Their son, Spartaco, died in 2005. I found an article I couldn't get access to behind an academic wall of Spartaco writing about his father, and I'm kind of sad I couldn't get it. But here's an assassin who didn't go through with his actions because he couldn't do it without hurting anyone else. Now...

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Now I'm going to talk about my least favorite anarchist in history. Oh. There's a couple of jokes I could make about people we know. Yeah, no. My least favorite anarchist I've never met. You don't stay in a political scene without making a few. Let's go with frenemies. Yeah. So there's a long list of things anarchists have invented, which can be used for good or evil. The carriage-mounted machine gun.

Missiles, apparently. The Getaway Car. Foosball. Steampunk. Free bike programs. Signal, the messaging app. One thing that you can say was probably invented by someone who called himself an anarchist at the time was the car bomb.

Uh, well, yeah. Look, I've seen a couple of car bombs. I've even seen one kill people. Oh, God. Not a fan of car bombs. No. Well, it was a VBIED, which I guess is like, it's in that line of descent. Yeah. I am still sorry to see anyone die. It's okay. I'm mostly, I mean, they were far enough away that I just kind of saw them turned into smoke. Okay, yeah. No, I'm sure that doesn't have any effects on your psyche. No, no, not at all. Not at all. Yeah.

Before the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history was the Wall Street bombing of September 16th, 1920. Oh, I have heard of this. Yeah. Someone, it is not certain who, used a horse-drawn wagon as the first car bomb. And every time I say the first in any show, it's like, you know, I don't know, the first that I know about. Right. Right.

Uh, there's a whole book about the history of the car bomb called Buddha's wagon. Cause we're going to get to, Ooh, that's how it was probably Mario Buddha. Yeah. In this car bomb. I thought there were talk. I was hoping there were some Buddhist history with car bombs that I hadn't heard, but okay. That makes sense. No, I mean, maybe, I don't know, but yes. In this carriage was a hundred pounds of dynamite, 500 pounds of cast iron weights for shrapnel. And they rode the horse up and then the driver got out and left and

And it blew up on Wall Street. Not in one of the buildings. It killed 40 people and then injured hundreds of people. And almost everyone it killed were fucking kids that worked as messengers and clerks and shit. Again, this is the problem of just... It's this thing you get on Twitter whenever stuff...

where it's like somebody has attacked this group of people that like leftists broadly dislike. And it's like, I don't know, wait a minute to see if that's who they hit. Yeah. You know, I'm not talking about, you know, the recent thing, but like it happens often where it's like, yeah, it turns out like, oh no, no, that's not, that's not who got hurt. Uh,

Because that's, you know, with bombs, very hard to be. It's the same thing. Like, it's not just a leftist thing. Like, it's mostly not a leftist thing. It's a thing that I grew up watching all of the adults around me celebrate as like bombs got dropped in places that I now know because I understand more about bombs and talk to people who were in those places when they were being bombed were largely killing civilians because precision bombing is mostly a myth. Yeah, totally. It's just like people love explosions. Yeah.

And the guy who had recently just tried to kill Mussolini earlier in the story didn't do it because it wasn't a good bomb chance. Yep. Don't make bombs. I shouldn't need to say that. Don't be making bombs. Don't do bombs. Bombs bad. You will not be the one who figures out how to use bombs ethically. No one ever has been. Yeah.

And this wasn't some kids who died as collateral damage, but we killed some big shots. This was all collateral damage. No regular damage. Cool. Really put the fear of God into those people who didn't get hurt. Yep. Yep.

And I would argue that of every major political ideology of the last 200 years, anarchism probably has the least innocent blood on its hands. Oh, yeah. Yeah. In part because we generally don't wind up in power. Yeah, totally. Which is, you know, I mean, is part of the goal, but yeah. Yeah, totally. But the Wall Street bombing is a decent chunk of the innocent blood on our hands of the anarchist movement. That's a bad one. The most likely suspect is an Italian anarchist named Mario Buda.

Who was actually probably with Sacco when they robbed and killed those people in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Mario Buddha is like a mystery man in history. And there's a lot of takes on him. And he was kind of almost everywhere that violence was happening. Mario Buddha went on to, almost certainly, become a fascist informant in Italy. Cool. Yeah. And, almost certainly, foil another anarchist attempt on Mussolini's life.

He is the worst. Yeah, you're right. That is as shitty as you can possibly be as an anarchist militant. I know. Honestly, I'm mad, but I am a little impressed. Like, if I was making up an anarchist for you to get mad at, I couldn't do better than this. Absolutely. After murdering a bunch of kids and shit in the name of anarchy, he made his way back to Italy, got caught up in the hubbub. Yeah. And stopped someone from killing Mussolini? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Jesus. By 1933, it seems likely that he was cooperating with police and informing on anarchists. And a lot of like people who are really into anarchist history are skeptical of this because for a while, the only information that anyone had about this was that a communist newspaper accused him of this at the time.

Yeah. And a lot of people, even anarchists, listened and were like, oh, we don't trust this guy anymore. But other people were like, oh, that's the communists playing sectarian politics. And then later you can see historians have done the work of being like, here's where Mario Budo was dropped off the list of dangerous anarchists to keep an eye out for. And like, here's, you know, he's basically like the fascists took him under their wing. And.

Even if half of what they say about Mario Buddha is true. I don't like him at all. I don't like blowing up kids on wall street. I don't like cooperating with fascists and I don't like foiling an attempt on Mussolini's life. Yeah. Again, I, uh, yeah, really one of my very few lines is, uh, you probably shouldn't, don't go, don't be killing kids. Uh, DBKK. That's my little, like, what would Jesus do? Bracelet in case you ever need to look at that. Yeah. Look at a bracelet. Oh no. You know what? I shouldn't kill kids. Uh,

Also, if you need to look at a bracelet to remind you not to kill kids, I would maybe there's a lot of things you probably need to do. Therapy. Yeah.

Meanwhile, back to a regular anarchist, one I like, who doesn't become a fascist. Sure. There's a blacksmith named Umberto. I promised you another Umberto. Tomasini. Umberto got involved in politics when he was 13. He joined the 1909 general strike in response to the murder of the Spanish anarchist educator and veteran of the pod, Francisco Farrar.

He went on to fight in World War I. He won a cross for valor. But according to his own take, what happened is he got to the war because he was conscripted and he just shot into the air and he was like trying not to kill anyone.

Well, yeah, that's actually, I mean, there's some evidence, although the studies around it have been to a degree, there's a lot of critiques about them, but like some evidence that that was more the norm than not with combat soldiers. And I bet, especially when you're talking about like trenches and stuff where you're like, yes, yes, go shoot that dot on the horizon. Whereas like if someone's like running through a trench trying to kill me, I'm like, okay,

I'm going to shoot that man even if we have the same political ideology. If someone's trying to kill me with it. I just don't want to get shot. Yeah. But yeah, no, totally.

And he spent some time as a POW during the war, and then he returned home to return to work as a blacksmith. And he more formally committed to anarchism alongside his brothers who, like everyone else, they left the Socialist Party in 1921 after the Socialists sold out the movement. Again, I don't know as much about that, but that is what Umberto felt and his brothers felt.

Umberto's life could easily be his own episode. He helped get the bombs from one Gino to the other Gino in 1926, then spent six years in prison during the crackdown. Like, after Mussolini came to power, he sent a whole bunch of the anarchists to prison, right? Mm-hmm. During those six years, he met an anarchist in prison named Mario Buda. Then Umberto fled Italy on foot to Yugoslavia. Then he went to Paris, where he met his partner Anna and had his son Rene.

In 1936, Spain was under attack, and so Umberto left the then-safety of Paris to go to the front lines, teaching anarchists about trench warfare. And then he became an anarchist spec ops guy, and he went off to go mine Francoist ships. Oh, cool. I know. He's the opposite of the guy who just killed children and saved Mussolini. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And he shouldn't have been friends with that guy. He was arrested by Stalinists and prevented from attacking the fascists while he was off to go mine these ships.

He broke out of Stalinist prison, and then he returned back to the prison he had just broken out of alongside anarchists from the government to negotiate everyone's release. I think this is the same situation as the last man, the missile inventor man. But this might have just happened a bunch of times. Yeah. Because I read about these in different sources. Then in 1937, he goes back to France so he can plot how to kill Mussolini. One problem.

One of his co-conspirators, a man who he has absolute trust for, is Mario Buda, whom he had met in prison. Mario leaked the plan to the Italian police, who foiled it. After the war, Mario Buda went back to the anarchist movement. Hooray! Great. He sounds trustworthy. I'm sure he's really worked on things. Yeah. You know, don't want to cancel him just for saving Mussolini's life and murdering children.

I can't find much about this particular assassination attempt that he foiled. Mostly, I found a lot of ins and outs about the informant. But to follow Umberto, he, like so many other anarchists, wound up in a non-Nazi concentration camp in France. Then he was turned over to the Italian police, where he was imprisoned until the end of the war. Finally, he's freed. He returns to his wife and his son, and his work as a blacksmith and to anarchist organizing. When the spirit of 68 swings through, he starts organizing again. He's like...

About 70 years old. And he's like organizing with a bunch of 20 year old kids, right? Because it's 1968. Right, yeah. That's who there's going to be to organize with. Yeah, I think it's cool as shit. He kept publishing shit that would send him back to jail. I think he was sent back to jail like multiple times just for continuing to publish anarchist literature. And then he died in 1980. He wrote an autobiography, but I don't believe it's been translated. And there's a documentary about him called An Anarchist's Life from 2013 that I haven't seen yet that I want to see.

And he was real cool. But I don't know what he did to try and kill Mussolini. I just know he made the wrong friend.

Yeah, well, we all do sometimes. Yeah. For example, I mean, there was one summer that Benita Mussolini and I were inseparable. I mean, we would spend just hours on the beach telling each other's secrets, having picnics, you know. There was that one wine-drenched night, and then I found out he'd been the dictator of Italy this whole time. I had no idea, Margaret. I had no idea. I know. I know.

I mean, what's funny is that pre him becoming Mussolini, that is the story that a lot of people tell. A lot of people do have that story. Like the woman, Lita, who is probably his lover, who is an anarchist, who was like later, she was like, I misjudged his character. You know? Yeah. Hey. Whomst amongst us hasn't been friends with the inventor of fascism.

Well, Cohen, I mean, let's we've got there was another Italian who might deserve that title a little more. But we talk about him on Behind the Bastards. Wait, which one? Oh, the guy who wore a banana hammock. One sec. Wait, what? Did he invent the banana hammock?

No, no, no. But he... I don't remember this person's name either. We definitely talked about it, though. Gabriel D'Annunzio. Yes! Gabriel D'Annunzio, who was a big influence on Mussolini and is often credited as the inventor of fascism.

He never called himself a fascist. He's like partially right. There's not just one guy. But he is earlier in the chain of the development of fascism as a concept than Mussolini and an influence on Benito. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Gabriel de Nunzio. You can listen to our two parter on him. Very much worth it.

He is the guy who, when Fume is an independent city, he's a guy who marches into Fume and takes it over as like a pro, along with a bunch of anarchists. There were anarchists and communists and fascists all kind of together because they were all very much anti just all of the things that are going on right now. But those ideologies hadn't really hardened in the concrete way they would a couple of years later. Fascinating time.

Kind of like how a lot of our most prominent right-wing, a lot of our most prominent fascist media ideologues today were part of Occupy. Yeah. God, actually the Occupy versus Fume thing is actually, makes a lot of really specific sense. That's the thing that's like, it's so hard to talk about is that in a certain way, fascism is the Red-Brown Alliance because it is taking ideas from leftism but applying them to right-wing ideology. Yes. Well...

Two more people, at least, tried to kill Mussolini. One of them, don't know much about, isn't even on the list of people who tried to kill Mussolini Wikipedia. His name is Domenico Bavone, and he was a Republican. He's the Republican on our list.

He tried to build bombs to kill Mussolini, but he didn't go to the bomb-making workshop that the punk show Flyer told him about in Brussels. That's a shame. So he failed at making the bombs properly, and he blew up his own house on September 5th, 1931, killing his own mother.

Well, bad job, bro. That's about as that's about as bad. I mean, and again, don't build bombs. There are so many by far the most normal story in political radical tries to make a bomb is political radical kills themselves, their friends or their family. Yeah. Yeah. Don't make bombs. Yeah. Very indiscriminate.

And under interrogation, he admitted he was trying to kill Mussolini. And he was shot in the back by a firing squad. And then there is Angelo Pellegrino Sibard Aletto. Angelo was born in 1907 in Mel, Italy. And he was the fifth of 11 children, which means I do not need to tell you he was from a Catholic family. But he was.

His family was poor as hell. The article I read specifically indicated they were poor as hell because they had 11 children. But, you know, whatever. You do you. People can make their own decisions about how many kids to have. They fled poverty to France, then Luxembourg, then Belgium. Angelo was a miner and a machine hand. He became an anarchist as a teenager, talking to other immigrant workers who were mostly political refugees. Soon enough, he was on lists of dangerous extremists and draft dodgers and shit.

And he was inspired by Michele Oshiru, and he met almost the exact same fate. In 1932, he went to Rome to kill Mussolini. But like Michele before him, he couldn't find a moment when he could bomb Mussolini without hurting anyone else. He spent months trying. Should have just bought a gun. That man should have bought a gun. I mean, whatever. I don't know how hard it was to buy guns in Mussolini's Italy. Fair enough. Yeah. But, you know...

He spent months trying, and he was on the verge of giving up when, like Michele, he was arrested seemingly by happenstance on a train station. Just like some cops were like, eh, you're suspicious, we're going to search you. Which is, you know, fascism. Also, the same thing happens in New York City subways, but, you know, whatever. Yeah. When he was searched, he had a Swiss passport, a pistol. Oh, he had a fucking gun. Oh, well, okay. I guess not that hard. Yeah. Question answered. Yeah. And two bombs.

And he was tortured, and under torture, he said he was there to avenge Michele Shiro. He'd written a letter previously that year that said, quote, I have no choice. To be free, tyranny must be beaten. To build tomorrow a new order in which all can enjoy the fruits of their labor and freely express their thoughts, we must destroy today all the injustices which render this impossible.

His trial was a show trial. It was two days long. Journalists decried him as surly and sinister and would like literally make stuff up about how he looked. They were like, he had a low forehead, you know, which he didn't. But even if he did, fuck you, you know. His lawyer asked him to write Mussolini for clemency. He refused. He shouted long live anarchy when he was shot in the back. After he was killed, the fascist government decided to hide forever his burial site. No one knows where his body is.

A biographer for Mussolini said that he would have pardoned the anarchists if they had asked, because he lauded their courage. I mean, considering a lot of his fucking people were former anarchists. Yep. I don't know. Maybe you would have. But, fuck that. I mean, whatever. I wouldn't be mad if anyone was like, oh, please don't kill me, Mr. Mussolini. Whatever. I wouldn't be like, you weakling. Give us a shit. Yeah. Mussolini, I hardly know ye. Yeah. Did I already do that joke? It just occurred to me. So...

Yeah, originally I was going to talk about the partisans who finally did him in, but I think we've covered a lot of trying to kill Mussolini. There are too many cool people I didn't want to skim past. You got a socialist, a Catholic, a Republican, at least five anarchists who tried to do him in. But it took a whole ass war. We got him in the end, though. And you know what, folks? What I'll say right now is you can still try to take a shot at Mussolini, and he's a lot easier to hit now. I assume he's buried somewhere.

I feel like, yeah, go dig them up. Yeah. And take a shot. Take a shot. Yeah. Harder to miss that way. Yeah. Gender neutral shooting range. That's what they say. That's right. That's right. Take a shot with, you know, it could just be with the, the tool that you have on hand, so to speak. Yeah.

That was a penis joke. Yeah. We know. It could have been a pee joke, because you could have a tool on hand without a penis. You're right. You can use a shiwi, for example. There's all sorts of great... Or just you cut the bottom of a water bottle out, and then cut the top to widen it, and you kind of jam it in there. It sort of works. Yeah.

And I can't believe that's the note we're ending on, but that's where we're at, everyone. Go kill Mussolini, but only Mussolini. We're talking about the past. Yes, only in the past.

And if you want to know more about the knock-on effects of various types of violence, listen to this entire show's history because it is full of knock-on effects, many of which are negative. And in terms of things I will continue to say for the modern era, don't make bombs. Don't make bombs. Don't make bombs.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

With Kroger brand products, you can get all of your favorite things this holiday season because our proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite. From sweet sugar cookies and holiday ham to that perfect slice of pie. Whether you shop delivery, pickup or in store, Kroger brand has all your favorite things. Kroger, fresh for everyone.

Whether you're ordering wings for the game, whipping up a seven-layer dip, or ordering pizza, there's something about football that makes you want to eat. And this football season, Uber Eats has the best deals on game day food. No matter what you're craving, from two-for-one pizza to buy one, get one wings, Uber Eats will be dropping new deals each week, all season long. Uber Eats, official on-demand delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Terms and conditions apply. See app for details.