XXIII edition
10/15 December 2013
Poliziotto
Nicola Longo
Nicola Longo
One of Italy’s most important police officers, and it’s said the inspiration behind the Monnezza saga, Nicola Longo is a treasure trove of anecdotes and humanity. Born in a precinct, to a police office father, he was a boxer, fighter and later narcotics cop, who infiltrated the hippy movements of Piazza Navona, the Banda della Magliana and even the drug lords of Marseilles. He was also a close friend of Federico Fellini, with whom he was going to make a film, a "Mala Vita" to offset the Dolce Vita of the 1960s.
Poliziotto are six episodes that come from these preparatory conversations with Fellini. The outline of a film that could have been but never was, as well as a literary police report in which the stories of Rome’s criminal underworld intersect with those of a police officer who served his country, and whose country paid him back with trickery and deceit that, however, Longo successfully never succumbed to himself.
One of the anecdotes Longo shared with us was about diving off a bridge, and risking death, to recover a load of drugs in the Tiber one February night. That same courage and recklessness changed his life, when he was wounded in the leg during one of the operations that led to the arrest of Vallanzasca and his gang. Today, after having written a second book, and thanks to people in Aosta, he’s starting a nonprofit organization that searches for the too many people who go missing every day and for whom the state can do nothing.
