Rival Scandal

Only seven months ago Italy's Communists, starchy with the stiffest kind of bourgeois morality, piously raised their voices in horror at the revelations of "bourgeois decadence" in the Wilma Montesi case. In the hullaballoo over drugs and sex among high-placed Romans, both Foreign Minister Attilio Piccioni and the national police chief quit their posts, and there was much talk of cover-up and hush-up. But the talk was not followed by proof.* Meanwhile, Magazine Publisher Edgardo Sogno began finding political and personal scandals about the Communists themselves (TIME, Nov. 1). And last week the Communists were saddled with a sort of Montesi case of their own.

Privileged & Perverse. About the same time last spring that the Montesi case hit the headlines, another girl named Adelaide Montorzi died, obscurely, after babbling deliriously, in a Rome hospital. The police thought that Adelaide might have been kicked and beaten by a man, probably a pimp. While following up their leads, the police found that Adelaide Montorzi had frequented several call houses, one of them a decently furnished apartment in a respectable district of Rome. Watching two of these places, the cops identified two furtive but highly important visitors: Communist Giuseppe Sotgiu, president of the Rome provincial council, and his wife Liliana, an existentialist painter.

Giuseppe Sotgiu, 52, once a poor but very clever lad from Sardinia, had worked his way through school and taken a degree in jurisprudence with the highest honors. A onetime Socialist newspaperman and then a law professor, he emerged as a Communist lawyer after Mussolini's downfall, much honored for his anti-Fascist record. It was he who acted as defense counsel for the journalist who first published the allegation that Wilma Montesi had been murdered. At that time Giuseppe Sotgiu indignantly declaimed: "This Montesi case stigmatizes a whole putrid and corrupted society, a privileged class which is perverse and needs replacing by a healthy workers' society."

Agents Aplenty. Apparently, however, Sotgiu himself was not entirely healthy. The police frequently saw his big, black official car stopping discreetly in front of the houses of ill repute. Shortly before or after her husband's arrival, Liliana Sotgiu would appear on foot. The cops put 110 agents on the case, some of them elaborately disguised. They discovered that Sotgiu, the Communist moralizer, was causing his wife to have sexual relations with an 18-year-old grocer's son named Sergio Rossi, while Sotgiu and others looked on. The police obtained a full confession from young Sergio Rossi, and learned there had been a passionate correspondence between Lim and Liliana. Other episodes involved whips, and Sotgiu was not merely a spectator, but had several young partners of his own.

Last week police felt they had an airtight case against the Sotgius for inciting to prostitution and corruption of a minor. But when they visited the Sotgius' apartment, they found that the couple had fled. Rome's fascinated newspaper readers promptly labeled Giuseppe Sotgiu a "collectivist of love." Plainly embarrassed, the Rome section of the Communist Party banned Provincial Council President Sotgiu from all party activities until he took steps "fully to restore his honor as a citizen."

*Last week Piero Piccioni, jazz-playing son of the ex-Foreign Minister, was released from jail, pending trial. Roman newspapers broadly hinted that police had not been able to link him to Wilma Montesi's death.

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