The Orlandi case and the death of a boy

On December 20, 1983, 12-year-old José Garramon was fatally run over by a car. What really happened can never be clearly established. However, there could be links to the case of Emanuela Orlandi, who disappeared on the same day. After 40 years, all questions remain unanswered.

It was December 20, 1983, shortly before 8 p.m., when a bus driver near Castel Fusano, a town between Rome and the coastal municipality of Ostia, noticed a bundle on the side of the road that prompted him to stop. The bundle was a fatally injured boy who died in the ambulance. The victim's name was José Garramon, he was 12 years old and his parents came from Uruguay, where a military dictatorship had been in power since 1975.

Almost 40 years to the day have passed since this tragic incident. Back then, the 28-year-old photographer Marco Fassoni Accetti, a colorful and extremely enigmatic person, was sentenced to 26 months in prison for manslaughter and failure to render assistance. However, it was never really clarified how the accident happened, whether it was an accident at all and what role the photographer played in it.

The girls and the photographer

The case has now been brought back to mind by the weekly newspaper "Il venerdì - di Repubblica", which devoted a three-page article to it with the telling title "Too many mysteries for the death of a child". It is said that "all roads lead to Rome", a proverb from which the following could also be deduced in view of the facts described here: "(Almost) all criminal cases of the last 40 years in and around Rome lead to the disappearance of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi on June 22, 1983".

However, it was not only Emanuela who disappeared, but also Mirella Gregori, who was the same age, a few weeks earlier on May 7. As with Orlandi, the Gregori case was also linked to the Vatican, although there were no clear indications of this. This was not the case with Emanuela, who was the daughter of a Vatican employee. One of the proponents of the theory that the Vatican was behind the disappearance of the girls was the Turk Mehmet Ali Ağca, who carried out the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981. Decades later, the photographer Accetti confirmed this theory and also brought the death of the young Garramon into play.

Do you still follow? As the weekly newspaper reports, the photographer disappeared for a whole 27 years after serving his prison sentence, or rather, he did not make a name for himself again. And that was until March 27, 2013, when Accetti, now 58 years old, went to the public prosecutor's office in Rome to file a self-report about Gregori and Orlandi. He accused himself of abducting Emanuela and Mirella, but added that this had been consensual with the girls, whom he had promised would be free again in two months. The fact that this had not happened was not his fault, he emphasized, without providing further details.

Cold War, crusades and Operation Condor

Accetti was interrogated several times and in great detail, as can also be seen from the prosecutors' minutes, writes "Il venerdì". He told of tensions, hostilities, espionage and counter-espionage, power struggles that characterized everyday life in the Vatican at the time. The disappearance of the two girls was intended to serve as blackmail and leverage against one or other cleric who was involved in pedophile activities. The photographer also claimed to belong to one of the Vatican factions at the time, which is why the young Garramon was thrown onto his car from a bridge as an act of revenge. This all took place during the years of the Cold War and the anti-communist crusades of Pope John Paul II. A detail that will be returned to later.

When asked why he only came out with the confession that he had abducted the girls in 2013, Faccetti is said to have replied that it was the appointment of the current Pope Francis that made him take this decision. However, despite the many hours of questioning, the case was shelved in 2015. For the prosecutors, the photographer's statements were not credible and there was no corroboration. Rather, they sounded like the script for a movie.

However, since Pope Francis personally announced at the beginning of 2023, immediately after the death of his predecessor Benedict XVI and to everyone's surprise, that the Vatican would investigate the Orlandi case, and this announcement was followed by action, it may well be that Faccetti's statements and thus the Garramon case will become topical again. In the meantime, the Vatican commissioner is working together with the Roman public prosecutor's office, and a parliamentary committee on the Orlandi and Gregori cases has also been convened.

As far as the boy's death is concerned, this could also lead in another direction. His mother Maria Laura Bulanti told the daily newspaper "Corriere della Sera" a year ago: "They had hired this Marco Accetti to scare us. But he was a total idiot and lost control of the [kidnapping] operation."

When asked why she and her husband, who was an official at the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), wanted to scare them and who had ordered the operation, she replied by referring to "Operation Condor". This refers to the collaboration between various South American secret services and the USA in the 1970s and 1980s, whose task was to persecute, torture and disappear left-wing opposition members. "And we, my husband and I, were also members of the opposition."

Accetti had probably been instructed by the international fascist network to frighten the Garramons so much that they would lose the desire to protest and denounce. But something must have gone wrong and it cost the boy his life. The mother finally wants to know what went wrong, why her boy had to die.