Giuseppe Dosi has gone down in history as one of Italy ’s great tec , a master of disguisewho go clandestine to correct the thorniest of crimes . Famous in Italian police force circles for his pioneer endeavor , Dosi has been getting wider tending recently thanks to thepublication of a life history , the airing of a young documentary about him , and the digitization of some his paper , now in theMuseum of the Liberation of Rome .
stomach in 1891 , Dosi ’s first love was for the theater . He move for two years and worked briefly behind the scenes , but he fail to make his career on the phase a winner . Instead , he teem his love of performance into his job as a detective . His enthusiastic embrace of disguises became know asfregolismo detectivistico(“detectival transformism ” ) after the late 19th / early 20th C level thespian and warm - modification artist Leopoldo Fregoli . Dosi himself had at least 17 confirmed disguise , including a femme fatale , two priest ( one foreign , one Italian ) , a Galician banker , a German doctor , a Yugoslavian merchant , a nihilist , and a Czech World War I veteran with a bum leg . Five of them were fully flesh - out identities complete with fake identicalness written document , background story , and even their own penmanship .
Dosi ’s impersonation of a Czech veteran completely horse around poet and would - be dictator Gabriele D’Annunzio , who in August of 1922 had cryptically “ fall ” out of a window and cracked his skull . Dosi fail undercover to find out what had really happened — a politically sensitive investigation since D’Annunzio ’s greatest rival was one Benito Mussolini , who two calendar month later would border on Rome with his Blackshirts and secure an appointment as the new Prime Minister of Italy .
Dosi discover that D’Annunzio had been pushed , not by a political assassin , but by his volatile schoolma’am . The case was quietly close . D’Annunzio , who had dubbed his limping Czech Edgar Guest the “ liberator of butterflies and smiling rhymes ” while inadvertently being investigated , called Dosi a " dirty cop " when he found out he was really a agile Roman .
Actually , Dosi was the contrary of a dirty cop as we mean the set phrase today . He was a man of resolute integrity , fearless in pursuit of the truth even when his bosses would have preferred he look the other way — and he pay off a in high spirits price for it . In 1927 , he direct on a case that had rag Rome for the old three yr . It was a horrific series of crimes , the assault of seven little girls and the murder of five of them , the young just three years old . The atrocity had been breathlessly cover in the interior and local press , and the city was in turmoil . Mussolini saw the bankruptcy to solve the crimes as a major embarrassment because it made it seem like his law - and - order of magnitude political party could not deliver on its promise . He pressured Chief of Police Arturo Bocchini to arrest someone , and quickly .
So the police found someone . for certain , lensman Gino Girolimoni did n’t match the verbal description of a tall , midway - older mankind with a bristling mustache and an imperfect command of the Italian oral communication — he was average height , in his thirty , uncontaminating - shaven and Roman - born and raised — but he was a warm eubstance , and between riled up public popular opinion and Mussolini breathing down their cervix , that was enough for the police . They ginned up some blatantly fake evidence and arrested Girolimoni in 1927 .
Dosi knew the grounds against Girolimoni was flimsy , and was win over the literal manslayer was still out there . He reopen the case over the protest of his superiors , and quickly zero in in on a more likely suspect : a British Anglican non-Christian priest named Ralph Lyonel Brydges who had been caught in the act molesting a fille in Canada before decamping to Rome . In April of 1928 , Dosi got a hunt imprimatur for Brydges ’s room and found a annotation in a journal reference the placement of one of the murders , newspaper trimming about the crimes , and handkerchiefs monovular to the ones used to strangle the little girl . Brydges had champion in high places , however , and diplomatical interference from Britain and Canada ( his married woman was the daughter of a very prominent Toronto politico ) kept him out of jail . He was in short committed for observation to the insane asylum Santa Maria della Pietà , only to be unblock and fly the land .
With the pillowcase against Girolimoni in shambles , the police quietly drop the electric charge against him . But every newspaper publisher in the country had splashed his name and face on their front pageboy as the " Monster of Rome " when he was arrested , while his release was cut across only in cursory articles in the middle section of just a few papers . He could no longer make a decent living because everyone thought he was a youngster raper and murderer . He died in 1961 , penniless and alone . Only a fistful of friends show up to his funeral . Dosi was one of them .
But when Dosi cleared Girolimoni ’s name , the authorities no longer had their patsy , and the only other suspect was far out of reach . Mussolini , who several years earlier had praise Dosi and recommended him for a promotion after the police detective spoil an assassination plot against him , was deep displeased by Dosi ’s dogged perseverance . ( A memoir Dosi wrote in the 1930s , which was critical of his superiors , did n’t help oneself matter . ) Dosi ’s law bosses , already fretful about him exposing their corruption and lies in set up poor Girolimoni , again feel the pressure from the top to inhibit their military personnel ’s hubris .
First they fired him . Then they just write out to the pursuit and stop him . He was imprison in 1939 in Regina Coeli , a in truth scary slammer in Rome that during the Fascist period was packed with political prisoners . Apparently that was n’t dangerous enough , because they strike him to Santa Maria della Pietà , where the police force tec spent 17 months forcibly detained in the same psychiatric adeptness where Brydges — a sure child molester and possible serial tike murderer — had expend only a few night . Dosi was finally released in January 1941 .
Before the closing of the war , Dosi ’s great courage and opening would execute another historical service . On June 4 , 1944 , Allied troop under General Mark Clark liberated Rome . The Nazi occupant beat a hasty retreat . A mob piece at the notorious SS torture prison on Via Tasso to free the political prisoners and Jews who had n’t been murder by the recede Nazis . On the way out the room access , the SS had set their paper on fire in the attempt to cover their tracks , and when the mob freed the prisoners , they cast aside bunches of record out the window in a sort of debauchery of de - Nazifying the stead .
Dosi , who lived on a neighboring street , exhibit up with a cart and have it upon himself to accede the burn construction and redeem all the pull through records . He turned them over to the Allied Command , who appointed him a particular investigator for two years . His testimonial and the records he single - handedly redeem from the flames , let in the tilt of 75 Jews taken from Regina Coeli to their death in the monstrousArdeatine massacre , would be crucial in the pursuance of numerous Nazi war criminal . In November of 1946 , he rejoined the Italian police force as director of the Central Office of International Police .
Over the course of instruction of his tenacious and storied calling , Dosi lend oneself his slap-up energy and loyalty to areas of police force body of work that are now standard but were then considered new . He publish essay on scientific policing , was a outspoken counsellor for women law military officer , promoted shoot and fingerprint arrestees , and encouraged the preservation of ethnic birthright as well as cross - border law enforcement . He retired in 1956 with the title of Chief Inspector General . He also write several books about his detective work and lived a long life , dying in 1981 at the old age of 90 . He lived as he go , pouring his persistence , discernment , sempiternal noetic curiosity , and vision into everything he did . As he wrote [ PDF in Italian ] in an article on law work in 1929 :
