Mussolini heir wants death of WW II leader investigated
Guido Mussolini is not exactly the spitting image of his infamous relative. When a bald man with a prominent brow and an imperious frown entered the briefing room of Rome's foreign press club last Friday, the hacks who'd gathered for an appearance by the 61-year-old grandson of the Fascist dictator leaned forward for a better look. But the object of their attention turned out to be one of Mr. Mussolini's lawyers.
Minutes later the main attraction himself shuffled in, a hefty man with a blown-dry mane of gray-and-white hair and a shaggy beard. Mr. Mussolini's flushed complexion, with its tracery of burst capillaries, suggests that he has possibly not inherited Il Duce's abstemious attitude toward wine. Nor would his soft, gasping voice be much good at haranguing crowds from a balcony. Yet the gaze behind the thick lenses of his wired-rimmed glasses does recall something of his grandfather's intensity.
Unlike his late uncle Romano -- who married Sofia Loren's sister and had a celebrated career as a jazz pianist -- or his cousin Alessandra -- a former movie actress and Playboy model who's now an outspoken far-right politician -- Guido has not spent his life seeking notoriety. Until 1991, he lived quietly in Venezuela.
Today he works in the management of a cheese factory outside Rome. But Mr. Mussolini is unabashedly seeking publicity for his campaign to reopen the official investigation into his notorious ancestor's death.
Photographs of the battered bodies of Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci, hanging upside down at a Milan gas station, are among the most familiar images of World War II. Many details of the killings remain obscure, however, and over the last six decades the mystery has inspired a level of speculation and suspicion in Italy comparable to that surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination in the U.S. The dossier that Mr. Mussolini has submitted to the prosecutor of Como describes 19 different versions of the story.
"I believe all the hypotheses because I don't know the truth," said Mr. Mussolini. Most historians believe that Communist partisans shot Benito Mussolini, Petacci and several high-ranking Fascists on the shore of Lake Como on April 28, 1945. According to one alternative theory, which Guido Mussolini says he "believes very much," the British secret service played a role at the behest of Winston Churchill to prevent the Italian leader from revealing secret wartime negotiations between them.