Anghessa, self-styled secret agent, has died

Aldo Anghessa has died in Dakar whilst in exile. No official press releases have been released apart from the Italian newspaper Avvenire contacting one of his children who has confirmed his death. Anghessa, who died at the age of 76, had made rivers of ink flow in Ticino and Italy between the 1980s and 1990s and was involved in some major investigations of the time, sometimes as a witness, others as a defendant, and often as both. Fraud or police collaborator both in Switzerland and in the Peninsula say there is no certainty that he worked for the Italian secret services or was rather a skilled braggart, a ‘freelance’ capable of assuming the position most favourable to him from time to time. The true story is still a mystery.

Over-ash wood

Anghessa, of Apulian or perhaps Sicilian origins, was well known in Ticino. He had moved to the Sopraceneri in the mid-seventies, married a lady from Ticino and set up an international timber import-export business with a Bleniese and this company was his first judicial problem and, ultimately, one of the reasons for his exile to Africa. In 1983 Anghessa and his partner had been convicted of fraud on an Italian insurance company: one ship carrying their timber had been sunk, another had disappeared, and the two had reported the loss of cargoes of a much greater value than reality. Furthermore, the company had gone bankrupt leaving a multimillion-dollar hole, and the money has never been found.

Arms and drugs from Iran

Anghessa was imprisoned for four years, but a few months after the sentence he did not return to prison at La Stampa and fled to Italy following a permit, a few years later he hit the front pages of all the newspapers for his involvement in an arms and drug trafficking between Italy and Iran.

Ticino collaboration

From that story it appears that he came out clean, which fueled the idea that he worked for the Italian secret services. And certainly, as emerged from that investigation, he collaborated with the Ticino authorities. Also in those years Anghessa was in fact in contact with them and thanks to his tips (at first glance not considered valid) it was possible to reconstruct important drug and arms trafficking with ramifications in our canton. We are sure of this because it was the Ticino prosecutor who confirmed it in a long clarification statement in 1987.

Extradition

In the following years the name of Anghessa appeared in other Italian investigations relating to counterfeit treasury bills and arms trafficking, for which he was often arrested and immediately released. The serious trouble for him began in 1993 when he was arrested at Miami airport on an international arrest warrant. A mandate issued ten years earlier by the Ticino authorities for his escape from the Lugano prison. Anghessa was therefore extradited and finished serving his sentence in Ticino, only to be extradited to Italy for another investigation in Como for having helped a magistrate to stage false judicial police operations to make him a career. For this he was then sentenced to eight years in the first instance, while the magistrate was acquitted on appeal.