Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

From audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring comes The Unborn, a shocking true story. My baby, please, my baby! One woman, two lives, and a secret she would kill to protect. She went crazy, was shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids, tried to burn her house down. Listen to The Unborn, on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite host, me, WZWTF and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex,

and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations.

From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, decision decisions is going to be your go to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to decisions decisions on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Trimarki. And I'm Holly Fry. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme from poisoners to art thieves.

We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day, in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Follow The Big Take Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York.

And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stand. Anya and I met through hockey and now we're married and mom to two awesome toddlers, ages two and four. And we're excited about our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, which talks about everything from pro hockey to professional women's athletes to raising children and all the messiness in between. So listen to Moms Who Puck on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey everybody, Robert here. It is the end of the year. You're cooling down from a Christmas, still probably finishing up pie and other goodies that you got. I hope you had a good one. We're all bracing for the new year to come. Behind the Bastards is, of course, continuing to publish

as we normally do around this time of year, but we've also got some specials for you from elsewhere in our network. And today we have collected two great episodes from cool people who did cool stuff about all of the people who tried to kill Benito Mussolini. This is with the great Margaret Killjoy. I think it is very fitting for the end of this year.

In the quiet town of Avela, Pennsylvania, Jared and Kristi Akron seemed to have it all. A whirlwind romance, a new home and twins on the way, but no one knew was that Kristi was hiding a secret, so shocking it would tear their world apart.

One woman, two lives in the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine. They had hers, one of the suspects, but they could never prove it. You're going to go to jail. You don't come with us right now. Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, nobody's that crazy, crazy. Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything. A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets. She went back shit crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals.

slotted him in front of the kids, tried to burn her house down. Audio represents the unborn on the iHeartRadio Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Trimarki. And I'm Holly Fry. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.

We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures, including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle. Yep, that's a fact. We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching. To see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.

and be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom-made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories. There's one for every story we tell.

Hi listeners, I'm Sloane Glass, the host of American Homicide, a podcast where we take you across the country to investigate some of America's deadliest crimes. We'll explore how these murders are shaped by their unique landscapes, and in turn, how these tragedies have shaped the fabric of these American communities forever.

And you can get access to all episodes of American homicide, 100% ad-free, and one week early through the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So don't wait! Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today!

The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day, in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC.

Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. This is for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello? And how would you feel if your doctor advised you to keep your life-altering medical procedure a secret from everyone?

And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets.

Some of you have been with us since season one, and others are just tuning in, whatever the case, and wherever you are. Thank you for being part of our family secrets family, where every week we explore the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Listen to season 11 of family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, and welcome to cool people to cool stuff. We're back! In case you noticed, we weren't here, but now we're here. The Wii, in this case, is me, my girl Kildrae, and my producer, Sophie. Hi, Sophie. Hi, Magpie.

And my guest, Robert Evans. Hi, Magpie. I listened to when I was buying hay today. Right before this, I went to go get hay for my livestock at the feed store. And they were playing that song, Brandy. And so now I am in my head, remixing that song instead of being about a woman whose lover dies at sea to be about you making podcasts. Excellent.

Well, we can make hay from that. One time, Robert and I went and got hay, and it was the first time in a little while at my pickup truck got to be a pickup truck beside, well, I guess it was a camper. Actually, we filled my camper full of hay is what happened. Yes, yes. And it took me a long time to get all the hay out. It does take a long time to get all the hay out. But it was worth it because then the goats got to eat hay. And the goats love hay. So this week, speaking of saying hay,

Oh, we should say hey to Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi Rory. Hi Rory. Hi Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And for no particular reason. Not at all. I actually genuinely picked the subject and started researching it before the activities that happened last week. You did. Like I can vouch for you. You 100% did. I'm glad you. You did. Hopefully you don't have to vouch for me in court about it. But I would and it would be I would be truthful. I have like documentation.

It's true, because the thing we're gonna talk about, Robert Evans, have you ever heard of people trying to assassinate people that they don't like? No, assassinations. No one would ever do such a thing. No one would ever do such a thing and then have it immediately cause Blue Cross Blue Shield to reverse the policy on denying claims arbitrarily when that surgery takes too long to pay for anesthetic. That would never happen.

No, there's not a whole saying about direct action against the goods. You all are listening to this in the future where the knock-on effects will have become more clear, but right now we know very, we only know one knock-on effect of last week's- Which is, if you've got Blue Cross, you now have to be less worried about getting surgery.

Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which is basically everyone's nightmare. Yeah. Literally, that is so, like so many people have that fear and that- It's ghoulish, yeah. It's so ghoulish, it's so gross. Mm-hmm. Well, the person that we're gonna talk about attempting to assassinate in the past, who's already dead, is a little fascist you might have heard of named Mussolini. Mussolini, I hardly know.

Okay, pass. It's not gonna work, sorry. Mussolini, originally this was gonna be a two-parter where one part was the people who tried when Mussolini was coming up, and then the second part was gonna be people who succeeded when he was coming down. But it's actually all gonna be about people who tried when he was coming up, because there were so many. Did you know that an awful lot of people tried to kill Mussolini?

Yes. I mean, it's like with Hitler, right? Like, you've got that guy who tried to blow him up and that, uh, and almost did that fucking carpenter who tried to blow him up and one of the halls he was speaking at, all sorts of pre-attempts. So I wasn't really familiar with the ones on Mussolini, but I was sure there had been some. We're going to talk about, I think, aid of them today, or this week. Yeah, that sounds like the right amount.

Yeah. And so far by my count, I was counting right before I recorded, I was talking to one of my friends about it. So far by my count, we've got one socialist, one Catholic, one Republican and five anarchists attempted to kill Mussolini. So.

Benito Mussolini is famously one of the founders of fascism. The ideology that is genuinely and truly bad, that 95% of the people on this planet agree is bad. We just don't agree about what counts as fascism. Yes, that's part of the problem. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't help that

I mean, cause some people use fascism to just being anyone I don't like or any authoritarianism, right? And that's not an accurate way to talk about things. We shouldn't call our enemies fascist when they're not fascists. No, like Stalin, Stalin wasn't really a fascist.

No, because in part, fascists come to power through popular acclaim as a result of setting themselves up in opposition to the left. There's this also idea that Stalin does kind of fit in with the attitude that the fascist dictator embodies the people in some way, although the way in which Soviet propaganda talked about Stalin was actually quite different from the way fascist propaganda tends to talk about the leader being an embodiment of the people.

Yeah, there are some similarities. There's a bunch of stuff, syncretism is a big part. Go read your umberto echo. Well, there's gonna be a bunch of umberto's in this episode, but not echo. Yeah, but it turns out umberto is sort of the mic of Italy. Well, there, yeah, Michaela is probably the mic of Italy, but.

Fascism is one of the most convoluted and complex political ideologies to ever come about, which is one of the reasons why you can kind of point to anything and call it fascism and be wrong, but also be like, you see where you're coming from about it, you know, because it's not actually a simple ideology. The more as I was reading this, because Italian fascism in particular comes out of where the right and the left meet. And it is not a, well, we'll talk about this.

I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds of defining fascism today, but I want to talk first about someone who 100% absolutely I am certain would have been fine with assassinating someone like Benito Mussolini about 15 years before Benito Mussolini came to power. That man who would have been totally fine with killing Benito Mussolini was Benito Mussolini.

Oh, well, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah. To open up a can of worms that the internet is not equipped to handle. Benito Mussolini, the founder of the world's deadliest far-right ideology, started on the left. Yep, he sure did. Kind of adjacent to anarchism. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. There's going to be a lot of... Also, started as a journalist. Hooray! Yeah, we have...

He was a socialist for a long-ass time. He was at least a second-generation leftist. Mussolini was born in the year 1883, and he was the child of a blacksmith socialist and a Catholic schoolteacher. He got named after a series of socialists and leftists because of his father, and then he was baptized Catholic because of his mom.

He's named Benito after Benito Juarez, the liberal president of Mexico, and his middle names, which I forgot to look up in Italian, are Andrea and Amalakare. And these are after two anarchists, because his father was part of the anarchist international, which was an anti-authoritarian socialist organization in the 1870s.

I'm just going straight into the, this is like when I have to talk about eugenics on this show. Whenever I have to talk about something that was really common and easily understood in the 19th century, that makes no sense in the 21st century, Italian nationalism is really intertwined with the left, and it's really intertwined with anarchism.

Yeah, and that, I mean, it makes sense when you're coming out of a world, well, not very long before this period, Italy had been fucking Habsburg property, much of Italy at least, had been Habsburg property, right? And when all of these things that we now just see is like, well, obviously Italy's a country, obviously Croatia's a country, when they're all the property of some guy in his inbred family, it's a lot less weird that it's a left-wing position to talk about nationalism.

Yeah, totally. Benito Mussolini never did really roll with the anarchists. He kind of wanted to at different points.

When he was a socialist, he was firmly in the authoritarian socialist camp, but he studied a lot of anarchist theory. He remained friendly with anarchists. He was either dating or just friends with. I've read both the anarchist orientalist poet named Lita Raffanelli. He translated two of the anarchist Peter Cropakkin's books from French into Italian. And because yeah, I was journalist. He read newspapers and.

If you were a political person in the 19th century, if you were like a political leader, your thing was that you were a journalist. Your thing is that you read a newspaper.

Yeah, I mean, it's the same. It's the same reason is that with the generation coming up and the next generation are all going to get their starts on TikTok and Twitter and like we were already seeing this on the right, right? I mean, and the left to a degree, you know, it's because that's totally it's not that's not the journalism tweeting is not or making TikTok is not journalism, but journalism wasn't what we would consider journalism back. It was just the best way of getting propaganda to the masses.

Yeah. And it was, yeah, you wrote polemics and propaganda just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea and you want to have to tell people about it, you would propagandize the idea. So.

Mussolini, the thing that's going to come up throughout this week's story is that he's clearly into authoritarianism, right? But there's something he liked about the anarchists. He liked their courage, he liked their commitment, and he liked action. He wasn't the kind of guy who wanted people to wait around and talk about things. He wanted people to go out and do things. He also, for a long time, shared their opinion that killing autocrats was just fine. I mean, look,

There's a Venn diagram. We do not like to say it, but there's a Venn diagram at points between me and Mussolini's life, right? Yeah. Totally. I'm not against killing early 20th century autocrats, theoretically. Right. Yeah, totally. Yeah. If we had a time machine, we would feel justified in going back and killing absolute monarchs from the 19th century and earlier. Look, if I could go back in time and stab the king of Italy, I would try to.

Well, that's going to bring us to this week's first assassin. Is it the guy you stabbed the king of Italy? I actually can't remember whether this guy stabbed or shot him. This is the first, okay, this is the only successful assassin we're going to talk about for a while. But he shaped a lot of Italy's politics for a long time. And that man's name was Gattano Breshee.

He was a weaver from Italy who emigrated to the US in the 19th century to Patterson, New Jersey. And it's kind of funny because there's all of these different hidden secret anarchists strongholds of the past. I don't normally think about New Jersey when I think about anarchism, but Patterson, New Jersey, very strong Italian anarchist scene.

The next little bit, because it's been a little while since I've looked up Katana Brescia. I used to write about him a lot. So I'm kind of going into a little bit of story mode. When I talk about Katana Brescia, I'm going to have more direct sources for the rest of the rest of the people I'm going to talk about, just so everyone knows. Katana Brescia was hanging out in New Jersey with his Irish wife, Sophie, which is a good name. I agree. Right? Yeah. And his two daughters. And she's going to, she's going to be all right in this story. Cool. Cool. Cool. Don't, don't bring the name down.

Yeah, no, no, she's great. No, no negative notes on Sophie. In 1898, there are these food riots in Italy, and the government was like, well, a specific general was like, what do we just murder the entire crowd that's rioting? And so they did that. And we will think food riots, they usually think like, oh, everyone like lost their mind and was running around and burning things or whatever. These were organized strikes that were met with lethal force. At least 80 protesters and two soldiers were killed. Jesus.

And so King Umberto the first.

What did he do? And everyone at the time was like, oh, the king is the true, you know, a lot of like populism is based on the idea that the government's bad, but the king's good, you know. And this translates to fascism too, right? During the third Reich, there was always this idea that like if only Hitler knew, right? The worst Nazi policies. Yeah. Yeah. The same thing with the czar. Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, we see this again and again. And so I think everyone was kind of expecting a burrow to come in and be like, well, you probably shouldn't have done that.

Right? Oh, I did promise you more than one I'm Birdo, and this is one of them. There's gonna be another one probably on Wednesday. But what I'm Birdo the first did is awarded the guy who ordered the massacre of Medal of Honor. And Catano Breshee, he didn't like that. He was living in New Jersey with Sophie. He'd started an anarchist paper with some folks, and he'd put up a fuck ton of money to start that paper. It was like 200 bucks at the time, which is like several thousand dollars now.

He didn't want anyone else to get in trouble for what he decided to do, so he didn't tell anyone. He didn't tell Sophie. He just told her he had to go deal with some stuff like family stuff in Italy. He didn't tell his comrades. He went into the newspaper and said, hey, all that seed money I put in, I need it back now.

And they were like, why? And he was like, does it not your business? Give me my money back. And so everyone kind of thought he was a sellout and he was just like getting his money to go fuck off, right? Everyone thought he left the movement, but he got his money back and he bought two things. He bought a Smith and Wesson and he bought a one-way ticket to Paris.

That's a song. That's a Warren Zevon song right there. Smith & Wesson and a one-way ticket to Paris. Excellent. The king is going to die. Unlike a lot of would-be assassins that we've talked about on this show, Breshy practiced with the revolver, which is always key. Yes. Yeah.

He made his way probably to Rome. He made his way to Italy. He spent two days scouting out the area where he knew the king was going to be. And then on July 29, 1900, he went out and he got some ice cream. I think he had lunch with like a stranger and just hanging out. And he was like, you're going to remember me guy. And then he waited for him, Berto to come through waiting in the crowd. That was all there to cheer on their, you know, glorious leader. And he shot him, Berto to death.

The crowd immediately grabbed him. Gatano said, I did not kill him, Birdo. I have killed the king. I have killed a principal. Hell, oh, oh, that's a good line. That's a good line. Back home in New Jersey, his anarchist friends were like, oh, I guess we judged him wrong. And they started a fun to look after his kids and support his family. His wife came to Italy and testified to his good character in court.

His whole family was like arrested in an investigation into conspiracy, but eventually everyone was let go. And Italy under a king was actually had a more fair criminal justice system than the United States does today. They didn't have the death penalty. Mussolini is going to bring that back later. So he gets life in prison. He was held in solitary confinement. He had one hour a day of exercises like feet were like mannequled to the floor. They didn't treat him great.

Less than a year later, he was found hanging in his cell, and modern historians are recently certain he was murdered at the time. Everyone's like, nah, I just killed himself.

Interestingly enough, this assassination didn't bring in sweeping reactionary forces or anything. Usually people are like, oh, you killed the king and something worse is gonna happen. This changed things, but the existing kind of leftist government stayed in power and things kind of chugged along, okay. It didn't even lead to, they cracked down on the anarchist movement, but they didn't come through and destroy it. It did lead to more international cooperation between law enforcement.

When I first started dreaming up the show years ago, it was kind of in a different context. And I wanted to talk about anarchist history. And I was like, you know, they literally invented international policing to stop us. Why are all of our books born? Has been my like, go to tagline, because they did. International policing exists because of trying to stop the anarchist movement, because yep.

Nothing gets people to work together. When people go around and kill poor people, everyone's like, oh, that sucks. Whatever. When people go around and kill kings, kings work together to make sure that that stops. Yeah, no. Kings are great at really union-behaved. They really work like unions, royalty. Yeah. When someone comes for them as a class, they band together. Yeah.

One person who defended Gatano Breshey doing a little king murder was a man by the name of Benito Mussolini. His fellow socialists were claiming Breshey was crazy for having killed the king, right? Mussolini said that Tyrannicide was, quote, the occupational hazard of being a king, which, I don't know, I mean,

Talking about occupational hazards. Yeah, I feel confident saying that being a king is a pre-existing condition, yeah. Yeah, totally. But what isn't a pre-existing, no, but what else we're obliged to do is play ads for you now. Yeah, like these ones. And we're back.

Now, this might shock you, Robert. Did you know Mussolini didn't stay leftist? Really? Now, I thought you were talking about Benny Mussolini, the man who invented the three-day weekend.

Well, I was reading a whole bunch on that website X about how actually the fascists are socialists and leftists. You were, of course, referring to the website that just plays a looping video of the song, X gon' give it to you. That's where I get all of my historical information about anarchists in the early 1900s as well. Yes, uh-huh. Yeah. My X-feet is certainly playing looping videos of something right now. And so,

Mussolini was kicked out of the Socialist Party because he supported interventionism. He supported Italy fighting in World War I. And along the way, he started developing his theories on fascism, which was basically, what if you took revolutionary socialism and then replaced it with revolutionary nationalism? Instead of class solidarity, you had national solidarity. What if you made all of the poor people suck up to the rich people and then defend the nation as a concept?

the leftist trappings and some of the leftist strategies, but with right wing goals. Because at the time, right wing was just like the status quo, right? If you defend like the monarchy or whatever, your right wing. So there's nothing really revolutionary about it. But fascism was like, no, but we want the revolution and we want to like feel cool and edgy, but we also wanna, we really like the taste of boots. And so we're gonna become fascist and invent this new ideology.

For a few years, a lot of politics in Italy was happening in the streets, fascist versus anti-fascist fighting it out. And for a good several years, Mussolini tried to make common cause with the anarchists specifically to join him against the socialists and the communists. After all, this is the period where the Bolsheviks in Russia were murdering anarchists on mass. And so some folks, there was a chance that Mussolini was even gonna go anarchist during this time. I actually don't buy it, but I read one person making this argument.

He actually risked alienating his base with how much he appreciated the anarchists. Interesting. Because his base was like, no, those are the people we just go fight in the streets. But Mussolini kind of admires their commitment, right? And the anarchists don't want him. Mussolini said, quote, we are always ready to admire men who are willing to die for a faith they believe in selflessly. And this is him contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists.

The anarchists, in so many words, told them to eat shit and die. They refuse his overtures again and again, and soon enough, they're going to try really, really hard to just outright kill this man. The most famous Italian anarchist, then and now, is this guy named Erika Malatesta.

He's popped into a bunch of our stories on this show, like when comrades got him to Argentina by smuggling him in a crate of sewing machines, and then he helped the Bakers Union there become the most radical union in that country, and the model that all the other unions rushed to follow, and how today in Argentina there are still pastries named by the anarchist Bakers, like little books and little bombs. I really like Malatesta. He's always in and out of jail. He's an older fellow now. I think he's in his 60s at this point that we're talking about.

And while he's imprisoned in Italy, there's a huge campaign to free him. And who supports that campaign? But Benito Mussolini, even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the streets during this time. Malatesta gets out and he can't get any paper for his newspapers because of political pressure against him. And Mussolini offers him paper to print on. And Malatesta is like, no, what? No. So Mussolini keeps trying to be friends with him.

But some anarchists and folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right? Because you can't have a new ideology without starting with people who used to have other ideologies. An awful lot of anarchists turn fascist. Orwell has a really good essay about this. George Orwell has a really good essay about this called Notes on Nationalism. It basically lays out the case that a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get people going from the radical left to the radical right reasonably often.

And this, unfortunately, ties into the first time that I've found of someone trying to kill Mussolini. Some anarchist got together in 1921 before Mussolini ever even took formal power. He does that in 1922. And they're like, all right, we got to kill this guy. They delegated one among their number, a man named Biaggio Masi, to go kill Mussolini.

Instead, Biaggio went to Mussolini and told him the whole plan. Mussolini protected him. And then the very next day, because Mussolini is just being, I don't know, cunning or whatever. Yeah. Mussolini goes and gives a speech about how the government needs to really release Malatesta, right? Even though he has just learned that the anarchists are trying to kill him. He's a 40 chest kind of man, this Mussolini.

Yeah, yeah, unfortunately he is. One thing you learned about Mussolini and all these guys, the exception of Franco, who unfortunately kept a pretty good grip on his rationality throughout his life, is most of them are a lot more cunning and better at planning before they get into power, and it's almost like power damages your brain in a way that makes you less capable of clamping down on your own worse impulses and analyzing things logically.

That makes sense to me. There's also this thing where people are always, like Mussolini's like the little brother of Hitler, you know? And he's kind of a joke because Italy's military might is not the same as Germany's, right? Mussolini pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible, evil, but like he did become dictator of a major country. That is like a hard thing to do.

I mean, I think I could become dictator of Italy. Yeah, no, I know. But you give me six months, Margaret. Okay. Six months and a lot of pizza pies. If we know anything about our Italians. Pizza Hut's probably fine.

I really like the pizza in Italy. I like how every country, not every country, but most countries I've been to, the American version of their national food is hard to get vegan, but in the country that I'm in, it's actually reasonably easy. It's really easy to just go into any train station in Italy and buy vegan pizza.

You could feel about how this, however you want, but undeniably, like one of the most intense flexes in the history of international conflict is when the US had the former premier of the Soviet Union become a spokesman for Pizza Hut. It's just such a, wow, well, I guess I guess you guys lost that, God bless Jesus. Jesus.

Mussolini comes to power in October 1922, first as the prime minister. There's something that's like not a coup. I mean, it's not a coup, but it's also not not a coup. Right. 30,000 of his black shirts, his personal army marched on Rome in the March on Rome. The liberal government was like, hey, let's declare martial law to stop this. But then the king was like, no, let's just put that guy in charge instead. Mussolini immediately helped out the rich people. He was not a fucking leftist at this point.

Immediately helped out all the rich people, centralized power, and just was a right-wing shitbag. By 1924, he was like, look, there's not a democracy anymore, okay? It's just fascism, and Italy became fascist. And people didn't really like that. There are some occupational hazards to be in a dictator.

First and most famous at the time, but not the most famous now, was a socialist politician named Tito Zanaboni. And don't worry if you're like, hey, that sounds like Zanaboni and you think that's clever. Don't worry, there's two Zanboni's later, okay? Okay, but this one's Zanaboni. This is not a serious country. Look, I know we're talking about serious things, but Italy, I just, I'm sorry, it's just not.

One time I was at Italy and my friend took me to like her very nice apartment in, I don't remember which city, I was on tour for like a month, I went to a bunch of cities. And she was like, looks out and I'm like, how do you afford this like amazing, fantastic place? And she goes to the window and points down to this like public square right outside. And she's like, that's where the mafia assassinates, like executes people in public.

No one wants to live here. I mean, shit, you could do that in front of my house. If I could have paid like 30% less, absolutely. Look, I'm not, I'm not getting involved with the mafia. They got no reason to be pissed at me. Yeah. I don't see shit. Yeah. I stay here gunshots at night. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. Mafu what?

Most of the places that have been really nice that, like, have been aesthetically really nice that I can afford to live in, have had gunshots outside at night. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I have twice been coming home to my house when someone has a couple of blocks away, been shooting it out with the police. Yeah. You know, like... Am I supposed to live? A nice place to live. And like, I'm not the police, so I'm not worried if I can't shut up. I'm not the police. These people have no reason to be angry at me. Yeah. So...

Before we talk about Tito, we're going to talk about another Italian socialist politician, Giacomo Matiottoi. Matiottoi. And his best friend, Buca de Beppo.

Emma Matty-yody was a socialist politician who tried repeatedly to expose Mussolini and fascism for what they were. After he published a book against the fascists and accused them of fraud, the fascists, who were certainly people of action, on June 10, 1924, Giacomo was kidnapped by the fascist secret police, who stabbed him to death with a carpenter's file, I believe in the car.

This wasn't a lot of ways the thing that paved the way for Mussolini to declare himself dictator. I'm going to oversimplify this dangerously, but after a lot of hand-ringing and investigations and castigations of the fascists for this kind of thing, eventually Mussolini was like, look, I'm a fascist, though. I'm in charge, and we're going to stab people to death with Carpenter's files, and you're just going to deal with it.

This had an enormous amount of knock-on effects. One of them was that this other socialist politician, Tito Zenoboni, he got real mad. He had been part of the search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and the fascists. But after they killed his friend, oh yeah, the socialist signed a peace treaty with the fascists. I think after I talk about all the like anarchists who became fascists and stuff, it's worth pointing out the socialist signed a peace treaty with the fascists.

After they killed his friend, he's like, all right, fuck this. We gotta shoot this guy. And he and his friends conspired to kill Mussolini. Tito is a war hero, so he got a precision rifle, and he set himself up to station himself in a window to shoot Mussolini from far away. But among his co-conspirators was an informant. So Tito, and actually a general in the Italian army, were both sent to prison. I think they got the maximum sentence, which was 30 years at the time.

Great. The United Socialist Party was no more. In court, Tito used the same defense as most of Mussolini's would-be assassins used later, which is the defense of, yeah, but fuck Mussolini, though, somebody should shoot him. Mm-hmm. Just, you know, not always the best way to get off in court, but like,

Looks good in history books. Yeah, looks good. I mean, there's right around this time, the case of Sagaman Tolirian, who Berlin jury decided like, oh no, no, it was totally fine that he assassinated that guy who did a genocide. Oh yeah, you're totally. That Turkish politician. Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian genocide episode. I'm just saying, everybody who might wind up in a court in New York, start looking up jury nullifications right now. Yeah, absolutely.

So Tito was released in 1943 when the fascist government fell, which is the other thing that comes up a lot is that revolutionaries, or in this case, I mean, it wasn't even a revolutionary as a politician who was like, yeah, but other politicians shouldn't murder people, you know? And people go to jail for a really long time. Right wing governments often fall. And if you can stay alive in jail long enough, you'll be free again. But

Someone else was directly inspired by the death of Giacomo, Matiote. One of my favorite strange and misunderstood assassins in history, Violet Gibson. Have you heard of, I feel like that there's one assassin. I've heard the name. Yeah. If there's one assassin, people have probably heard of Violet Gibson. This is the most widely known attempt on his life in the modern era because it's the one that makes the coolest social media headline. Is there like a, I'm,

There are, there's actually, there's songs about her, there's documentaries, yeah. And I really hope I'm thinking of the right person or else I sound dumb. She was like really short, right? Yeah, she's five foot one.

Yeah. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So I love stories about short ladies doing badass that my grandma was like four foot 11. Hell yeah. My grandpa was six five. And because she was so small during World War II, she had a special job. They would hold her by her feet and shove her inside the wings of P-51 Mustangs so she could like weld them

or like do bolting or stuff. She was, I think, welding them on the inside. There was like an area that needed welds that only the tiniest girls could fit. Hell yeah. Fucking rat. Hell yeah. As somebody who definitely can't reach things on the top shelf, I'm very excited to hear more about Violet. Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about today who successfully shot the man.

Well done. I mean, one of the lessons is that nobody knew how to shoot in the past. Yeah. And most people don't know how to shoot today also. Yeah. So Violet Gibson was a 49-year-old Irish woman from Dublin who lived in a convent in Rome and shot Mussolini in the face on April 7th, 1926. Man. Oh, God. Ireland stays winning. Yeah, you know? I don't.

Mostly, the part to not like about the story is that he turned his head at the last minute. Yeah, he didn't die. And she only grazed his nose. But there are good pictures of him like with the bandage on his nose or whatever. There's no comparisons that can be made now to the modern world. No. About people turning their heads. Yeah, I'm getting grazed. Yep. The world would have been a very different place if he had not turned his head. Yep.

Violet Gibson was a thin woman about five foot one. Her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. She grew up, she's Anglo-Irish, right? And she grew up like. Oh wow, so they're like the English landlord Irish type deal, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, totally. And like Lawrence of Arabia, she's crazy as shit. But people use this to invalidate and claim that her action wasn't political or thought out. And that's what I wanna argue against. But I can't argue against her being crazy as shit and I'm gonna tell you why.

She grew up rich as hell. She was a debutante, debuted in Queen Victoria's Court, which I only vaguely understand what is through mostly my friends who are from the south. Most telling to the story come down to, I don't know if she did it because she was crazy. I am going to make the case that she did it because she was a politically committed Catholic socialist who wanted to do right by God and people by killing a man who went on to be responsible for millions of deaths, who was also crazy.

She was always esoteric. She was raised Protestant, right? Her mother became a Christian scientist. And so she herself experimented with Christian science. And then she got into theosophy for a while, but then she converted. She found another esoteric religion to get involved in Catholicism when she was 26 and she stayed a Catholic for the rest of her life. She was sick all of the time. Her body carried the scars of many surgeries and she spent years working at various pacifist organizations.

The craziest thing she did, which is left out of the leftist accounts of her story, but it's included in the right-wing accounts of her story that are demonizing her. But they're verifiable. I believe this happened. So she used to walk around Dublin with a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other. And I hate to say it, but that is pretty cool. Oh yeah, no, like, yeah, no.

She's, I would want to meet her, maybe from a distance, but I would want to meet her. I would want to like observe her from a safe distance. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

She talked all the time about the necessity of mortifying the flesh, which is normally about killing the urge to sin, but she seemed to want to kill. That was part of her way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around 1920, she attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's face and hands, and so she spent two years in an asylum.

And I don't know enough about that attack to know if there's any motivation beyond something about how she wanted to replicate the sacrifice of so-and-so in the Bible or whatever. When she got out, she moved to a convent in Rome. I believe this was kind of a like, yeah, you're like super rich though, so you can go be in this convent. Her friends thought to themselves, she's probably gonna kill somebody. Maybe the Pope.

But they didn't try to stop her, which is really funny, because they're probably all Irish Catholics. And they're just like, eh, whatever. Then in 1924, when Jacama was murdered, the guy had murdered a death with a carpenter's file, she was heartbroken because she was a Catholic socialist, right? And so she decided to like revenge that killing by shooting herself in the chest. The bullet bounced off her ribs and she survived.

And if you want to survive in the world that's coming, you need to buy literally everything that is advertised on this show. It is the only way to survive, I believe. It's not a guarantee. But here's ads. And we're back. Mussolini at this point,

And I read a whole bunch of New York Times articles and other newspaper articles from this time, and they're all like, Mussolini's great. We all like Mussolini, because he's stopping the Bolsheviks, you know? Mussolini was being courted by the Western world. The King of England awarded him the Order of the Bath, which is not in order to take a bath, unfortunately, but instead a knighthood. And Violet Gibson decided that the way to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini.

So she showed up at one of his talks in 1926 with a revolver and a rock. The rock was to break his windshield, if necessary, which later assassins would have been more successful if they had also brought a rock. The modern mind can't really understand her motive, I think, because her motive was primarily religious, but it was also political. She did it to, quote, glorify God and an angel kept her arms steady.

I told this story to a Catholic anarchist friend of mine whose response was basically like, oh, those Irish and their angels. Mussolini turned his head at the last minute. She grazed his nose. She tried to fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've read that what he yelled at the time that he was shot was, fancy a woman!

But that might have been later. He told the crowd, don't be afraid. This is a mere trifle. And then like later, he went on this rant about how he's totally down to die violently as long as like a good, glorious death. But if he's like killed by an old lady, he just can't handle it. Which is why I wish Violet had succeeded over everyone else. Alas. Yeah. The crowd caught her and beat her. And she was whisked away by the cops and declared insane.

People said that she was paranoid, and that was why she tried to kill him, because she was paranoid. I hate to break it to the people back then. She was correct about this particular thing. She spent the rest of her life in various institutions. She wrote letter after letter pleading to be set free, but those letters were never sent. Because, you know, women are crazy, right? That's fine. That's a sarcastic reminder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You probably caught on to that.

She told people that her mood controlled the weather. Okay. Well, did it? If she'd killed Mussolini, she would have stopped like 3 million deaths. Maybe her moods like I want to kill Mussolini have a pretty major impact. Yeah, I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong. Yeah.

It reminds me of when I covered Joan of Arc on this show where people are like, oh, feminist icon, except, you know, obviously she was just crazy with her visions from God. And it's just that people were conceiving of reality in different ways than we conceive of it now. And I think that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. She died in 1956 at the age of 79. She did outlive Mussolini. No family members came to her funeral.

History has vindicated her and there's now a plaque for her on her childhood home in Dublin that describes her accurately as a committed anti-fascist. And it was articles about this from like right wing Irish people is how I learned about how she would run around and stab people and things like that.

Is it possible that there was like no one at her funeral because this, I mean, I had just made a comment about Ireland staying winning, but Ireland's history are either fascists in this period is not particularly clean in large part because the fascists were in opposed to the British government. And so there was a lot of at least the enemy of my enemy is my friend thing among the Irish, as well as the fact that Franco was like a Catholic like it. It's not a clean period for Ireland entire now either.

It's not, but she's also Anglo-Irish, right? Well, I mean, yeah, that also makes sense. You read it, forgotten that. And I think overall, it was just like, oh, there's our crazy aunt. She's just crazy. She just wanted to kill a guy. That's like my best guess, but I'm not certain. People didn't like her at the time, and now there's been kind of this reclamation of her legacy.

But Mussolini was particularly good at turning attempts on his life into popular support, which is like what you do if someone tries to kill you, right? You either say like, oh, no, I'm afraid and the enemy is scary and bad, which is not a good way to gain power. Or you can say like, ha, ha, ha, they can't get me, but they want to because they're evil, you know?

Almost every article about attempts on Mussolini's life from then or now is basically like, but this particular attempt is what Mussolini used to consolidate power. Everything was fine until this person tried to kill him. And then, whoosh, he just like swept in with fascism. Yeah, I, yeah, exactly. I think that that's people, number one, it's like working backwards, which you shouldn't do when you're trying to analyze people psychologically.

Now, that said, I don't know that I would say it didn't have an impact on the character of the regime, just like it's probably fair to like whatever Trump does next, the shooting will probably have impacted because it clearly affected his mental state, right? Totally. Maybe it'll mean that he's a little less coherent and a little less like maybe even less willing to take risks he might otherwise have taken. Maybe it'll mean he's more vengeful. We don't know yet. We'll all be learning soon.

But it definitely, the presidency we are going to get out of him now is different than if he had won and nobody had shot him, right? Like that's just, we don't know how and we'll never know how, but that's just a reality because nearly being shot to death on live television changes you, changes anybody. You don't have to be a good person. And it's like,

People talk about hindsight as 2020, but it's not because you don't know what the other options were. You can only see the one thing that happened.

Mussolini would have become dictator if no one had tried to kill him. He used moments like this to consolidate power because anyone would. Yeah, because you can't let something like this go to waste and also just continuing to work after you've nearly been shot to death in the head, probably also just mentally necessary. You're going to make use of that because otherwise you're going to sit alone in a room and think about how you nearly get your brains blown out.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, he keeps busy, you know, he's got a lot of mistresses. Although New York Times just is going to run articles. We'll talk about him later, but New York Times is like, oh, he's just hanging out with his family. He's a family man. Like, oh, they loved Mussolini, but Nito, I mean, a lot of Americans really liked Mussolini, in part because like he was, he was a very, very much a celebrity dictator.

in a way that Hitler was, but not in this, Hitler was famous and managed to become beloved in Germany. Mussolini had a level of international movie star cloud in part because he looked handsome in his photos in a way Hitler didn't really. He looked like a movie star, not in real life, but he had good people worry. And he had a lot of movie stars hanging out with him, by the way, a lot of American ones.

And he knew more about philosophy and art and shit like that, which was a lot of the ways to be cool at the time. I mean, he created a philosophy, one that is still around. It's a bad one.

So there's another thing that's going to tie into this that is going on the Italian anarchist world and the Italian-American world and just the news in general. And it's another thing that, like, looking back, it's hard to see why this is as big of a deal as it was. And this is the trial of Sacco and Venzeti. Have you heard of this?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are the two American anarchists, too. There was a bombing. They got accused of it executed, didn't do it, right? Am I okay on the basics there? So what's funny about it?

It's messy. The general version is- Usually it is. Yeah. This was like cumulatively four sentences over the course of my high school education. And it's probably the only time during anyone's high school education that the word anarchist gets mentioned. Besides like, maybe you're gonna get show gosh killing McKinley, but probably not. I don't even think I learned about McKinley getting assassinated. I don't think I learned it was an anarchist, but maybe I barely remember high school.

Yeah, fair enough. I honestly, whenever I'm like, my high school teacher didn't teach me this, I'm like, I don't know. How would I have known? I got C's. Like what? You know? But I definitely remember knowing that Sacco and Vinzetti had been anarchists. Because that one is inescapable. And it was this incredibly important celebrity trial all over the world. And

Basically, some Italian-American anarchists, or mafia, but almost certainly anarchists, were robbing a guy who carried the wages, basically the equivalent of an armored truck robbery, and someone shot and killed the paymaster and a guard.

Two Italian-American anarchists, Saco and Venzetti, were put on trial. The entire leftist world, not just the anarchist, was convinced that they were innocent. And basically, this whole thing was seen as like a travesty of justice. In 1921, they were found guilty and sentenced to death, but it took years for the state to kill them because the outcry was so much that they had to have all these appeals and investigations and things like that. This dragged on for years. Later historians have been like, well,

Sacco probably did it. And Venzeti, maybe? It's possible Venzeti was there and therefore actually criminally liable but didn't pull the trigger. It's also possible that they weren't there because a lot of the evidence that they did do it comes from a guy we're going to talk about later who's an anarchist bomb maker who turned into a fascist informant named Mario Buddha.

Well, it's also an unfortunate truth that a lot of times the people who are most willing to make things like bombs are also driven more by rage than like political conviction and thus very easy to swing to a politics that entirely exists on the basis of rage. Why we really do try here not to

idolize people whose only contribution is that they did a violence. Yeah. Totally. Even when everybody's making some very funny jokes on social media right now about a thing that just happened.

No, it's true. And that is like something that, yeah, fun time to have decided to write this episode. But the important thing about the Saccoon-Venzetti case is that this trial was huge. The outcry was enormous. And one thing that happened in this is that the fascists tried hard to capitalize on it.

and did capitalize on it. Because most of the outcry against the trial was that the trial was unfair as a result of the US's anti-Italian and anti-anarchist bigotry. A fuck-ton of the Italian-American crowd was either anarchist or fascist. And so both the fascists and the anarchists rallied for Sacco and Venzeti,

Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir up nationalism at home, and continuing his odd overtures to the anarchists, even though he was in power by most of this point, and he's cracking down on the anarchists left and right.

His soldiers are burning photos of that guy, Malatesta. Anarchists are being rounded up and stuff. Yet Mussolini is telling his ambassadors to try and intervene on behalf of Sacco and Ben Zetti because Mussolini wanted to be seen as the man who protected Italians everywhere. And he has all these quotes that are like, I cannot agree with anything that these men stand for, but

They're Italian, my God, and America shouldn't kill them or whatever. I'm now paraphrasing terribly. Great stuff. Yeah. And I don't love their murders, but I support them being Italian. They, thus, they ought to be free. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Fair enough. And what does this have to do with Violet Gibson? Well, this is going to turn into one of the best zings against America that I've ever read about.

On July 23, 1927, Mussolini wrote, The fascist government, which is strongly authoritarian and does not give quarter to the Bolsheviks, very often employs clemency in individual cases. The governor of Massachusetts should not lose the opportunity for a humanitarian act whose repercussions would be especially positive in Italy.

And fascist newspapers were now contrasting the American government as more totalitarian than the fascist Italian government, because the Italian system, the fascist system, had let Violet Gibson return to her own country. And there is no death penalty in Italy at this point. That's nice. People could literally kill kings and get life in prison.

comparing this to the barbaric United States. And this is the thing that I love about it. It is like, the dude's got a point. The US presidential system is like a nightmare. It sure is. And was worse than the fascist government.

I mean, it depends on the stage, but at the early stages, Mussolini does eventually invade Ethiopia and deploy chemical weapons. That's certainly an argument that you could have made earlier in Mussolini's regime. You have to remember, he definitely was killing his political enemies.

Oh yeah, stabbed a dude with a file. Yeah. Not necessarily in a way that's a higher body count than for example, the number of black people being murdered by police in apartheid states in the United States, right? Yeah. Like, which is not a different thing to me. I don't consider that to be better than, I don't know, rounding up like a few dozen socialists and murdering them or whatever.

like that and the constant mass, the constant murder at a pretty high rate of black men in the South by cops and vigilantes, like both, both things that I would put on a similar moral level. Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to be like, Benito Mussolini is great. No, no, no, no, I didn't, I didn't think you were. Yeah. I'm just saying like, yeah, that's not an irrational statement to make at that point in time knowing what they knew. Yeah. Yeah. And.

Violet, she was not alone in her quest to see the Duke die. The next attempt was on September 11th, 1926. And this is why people remember September 11th. And this is probably the most organized attempt. Sophie clearly agrees with me. The meeting else happened on September 11th.

Ever? That seems like one of those- It was like who that happened somewhere. It was such a smooth joke. Yeah, thank you. I'm looking at my calendar of various September 11th that I keep for no reason. It doesn't look like anything's ever happened on another September 11th that I've got.

Okay. You're the funniest person I know. That must be why I celebrate 9-11. Yeah, exactly. Shit. Margaret, Margaret, I'm getting some very bad Google results suddenly. We need to edit that out. Oh my God. Oh my God. All those poor people. Holy shit. Yeah. I lived in New York City on September 11, 2001. So it's all the towers on fire. I saw the smoking remains, but anyway,

The socialist politician had failed. The Catholic wingnut had failed. Time to bring in the professionals. If there's one group that knows about killing kings and monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again, we all know they failed, but you know what? They tried real hard. The next attempt was by a man named Gino Lucetti, who I'll tell you about, along with his cousin, Gino. Because his name's Gino, but so is his cousin. That's the thing I'm saying. Well, I'll tell you about it on Wednesday.

Excellent. You know, Wednesday, Margaret, is the day that comes after Tuesday. That's a little science fact for those of you in the audience. Robert, just thank you so much for telling us that I have no idea. I have no idea how we would have gone on. We tried to shoot a little bit, a couple of facts in your way. Yeah.

That's why it's edutainment. That's why it's edutainment, right? Yeah. So remember folks, Wednesday, day after Tuesday, Thursday comes the day before Monday. And that's all I gotta say. Comes before Monday. Yes, yes, yes. Tomorrow is Saturday. And after Monday is the weirdest thing about Thursday. I know, I know. It's the day so nice they made it happen twice.

Can't even something I can do with that. Yep. Oh, Morgan. I wish you and I could hang out all 11 days of the week. I know. I know that'd be nice. But I only have so many hours in the day and I don't remember how many it is. 41. Oh, okay. No, yeah, that makes sense.

Yes. But Robert Evans, where can people find more about you or what do you do? Well, you can find me sweating away in my basement because you and I only use an antique Coptic Christian calendar and day system based largely on a step pyramid that used to exist but was bulldozed in what was once Sumeria. So it takes a lot of time to remember what day it is. Yeah.

I don't know. We really kept this bit going for a while. I feel like at the end of a G.I. Joe episode where you tell kids to like not hide in refrigerators, right? I feel like it's worth pointing out that I really am talking about history here and that nothing necessarily good happened for many of the attempts that I'm describing. I am not morally against the attempts that I am describing. I'm clearly not of this thing that happened in the 1920s, but I want to be like clear on that.

That is the thing. I can think of very few assassinations in history where ultimately you would look at it and say that worked out really well. Particularly that worked out well by the person carrying out the assassination standards.

Really, the one that, like, Sagamantalirian, who shot, you know, one of the young Turks who orchestrated the Armenian genocide, that worked out great by his standards and everyone else's. That guy who shot Abe, seems to the long run of that, seems to have been positive. Very few other instances. Like, I don't know that I'd say McKinley worked out very well in the long run. Obviously, shooting the Archduke fucking disaster. Yeah.

No, it is worth thinking about that anarchist had given up on propaganda by the deed at this point. Propaganda by the deed was this anarchist idea that people were like, well, the masses don't really read theory, so let's just show them by killing all the kings and the people who are in charge of them.

And it, overall, was disastrous for the anarchist movement because it just led people to then defend the very systems that the anarchists were opposed to. And this happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During the run-up to the Russian Revolution, you have like, from 1903 to 1917, anarchists and other groups were all doing these attend-tots, all doing these assassinations. And it did lead to a revolutionary situation, which of course all kind of ended badly.

and created the USSR. But usually these kind of things destroy a social movement. Sometimes if enough people are interested in it, it builds a social movement. But usually it doesn't. And that is the like, it's a crapshoot at best. It's a like, let's redraw our hand of cards and probably get something worse. But still,

If someone had successfully killed Mussolini, I bet the world would have been a better place. Yes, yes. But the if within the if contains a lot of reasons why, you know, we're going to say for legal reasons here, assassinations, probably not worth it. And we're going to talk about like five more of them on Wednesday. Yeah.

Um, at the end here, I just want to plug, uh, if you, you haven't listened, I just am plugging this on anything I can. I just want to plug, uh, our colleague, James Stout series from reporting from the Darian gap, um, yeah, about one of the worst land migration, uh, places in the world and just, you know, the stories and people he talked to there. And I just want to plug that. Cause it's an amazing series and I'm very proud of James.

I started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet. It is really good. It's really good. Um, yeah. So if you have time around the end of the year and you're like, who might need something to binge James did five episodes on it could happen here. Oh, and it could up. Thank you. And it could happen here. All right. See you all on Wednesday. Bye.

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In the quiet town of Avela, Pennsylvania, Jared and Kristi Akron seemed to have it all. A whirlwind romance, a new home and twins on the way, but no one knew was that Kristi was hiding a secret, so shocking it would tear their world apart.

My baby, please, my baby. One woman, two lives in the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine. They had hers, one of the suspects, but they could never prove it. You're going to go to jail. You don't come with us right now. Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, nobody's that crazy, crazy. Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything, a story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets. She went best shit crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals.

slaughtered them in front of the kids, tried to burn their house down. Audio represents the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Trumaki. And I'm Holly Fry. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.

We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures, including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle. Yep, that's a fact. We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching. To see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.

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The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day, in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC.

Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. This for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time he didn't even say hello? And how would you feel if your doctor advised you to keep your life-altering medical procedure a secret from everyone?

And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets.

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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, people try to confront those bad things in various ways. Lots of various ways. One of the way, no, just a person. One of the people who's also on this podcast with me is Robert Evans, my guest. Hi. That's right. I'm Robert Evans, and I'm Robert Evans. That's me.

Well, I brought you on because you're an expert about Italy. Yeah, I mean, I know several things about Italian's Margaret. Number one. Number two. Spicy meat da balla. Here's where we remind the listeners. You know that hat? You know that hat is Italian. Whatever the hat is that they, that the chefs wear and those kind of racist caricatures. Yeah. Look, it's fine. We all decided that it's okay with Italians now.

Yeah, despite the huge trial that we talked about last time about anti-aty, in prejudice in the United States. Look, if they'd been, yeah, I have the opposite position of that guy. I'm fine with the murder. If they'd been on trial for being Italian, I would have said fucking. Yeah, hang on. You know? Yeah, exactly. Hang on my eye. Yeah, maybe upside down, maybe. That's a dead Mussolini joke, which is not gonna happen in today's episode.

A lot of people are going to try. Give it the old college try. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie. It's me. I'm Sophie. Hi.

I realized when I got my podcast you listened to the most in 2024, that four of them were Sophie podcasts. The loyalty is unmatched, unmatched. That's right. I'm a little bit surprised that not all five were, but I think the problem was that the Pathfinder podcast I listened to was really long episodes. You need one break. Yeah, you need one break for me.

We should do a Pathfinder podcast, Margaret. I would love to do a live play podcast. Maybe I'll reach out to the guy who created Pathfinder and listen to our podcast. Talk to him about that. I would love that guy who created Pathfinder. You all are great and your system rules and I play it anyway.

But yeah, no cools on media needs a live play podcast. That's all I'm saying. And if you listen or agree, bug these people on the internet about it, and then, because I needed more podcasts to be on, whatever. Yeah. There's a shortage of podcasts. I don't know if you're aware of this. Yeah. But the CDC has said that it's probably the largest threat to our national collective health.

Well, it's the only thing that they're trying to put a tariff on that everyone's in favor of is that they're trying to make it harder for people to make podcasts. That's right. That's right. All podcast mics. Oh my God, that actually is good. Most of the podcast mics are probably not made in the US. Whatever, I got mine. I have no idea. I have no idea where they make our microphones, Margaret. No. No, I do not. Yeah.

Anyway, this is part two on a two-part episode about people trying to kill Mussolini. Later, we'll probably talk about the people who succeeded. It took a whole war. But some people tried to cut to the chase and circumvent the need for the war. And we've already mentioned several of them, but we're going to talk a lot more of them today.

First, we're gonna talk about Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. And that our theme music was written for us by On Woman. And that Gino Lucetti was born working class in the year 1900 in Karara, Tuscany. Mm-hmm. You ever heard of Karara?

I've heard of Tuscany because the Tuscan coast is pretty famous. I've never heard of Parara. Other than that, it makes me think of that song that goes, Tara, boom, which I don't know what that's a reference to. Is that a slur? I have no idea. I should probably look into that song, see if there was anything fucked up. It's like celebrating a genocide. That's often the case with old songs.

What a lovely tune. Oh, no. Yeah. Well, Carara is famous for two things. It is famous for its marble quarries. It produces some of the finest marble from which the most iconic buildings and statues in the world are made. There's a whole list of them and I forgot to write them down.

But think of an old Italian statue from Rome, old Rome, and the marble might have come from Carrara. It has like blue veins. I spent way too long reading about this marble.

It's good ass marble, yeah. The other thing the Carrara is famous for is anarchism. Oh, okay. When my anarchist friends took me through Italy, when we were near Carrara, they pointed out and they were like, hey, that place was an anarchist stronghold for a long, long time among the stone masons who put that town on the map.

Enough so that I was double checking this today. I was like, Carara, that sounds familiar, right? And I was looking at a mainstream tour company's website, Carara Marble Tour, and they offer an anarchic Carara tour. Oh, wow, really double dipping. Yeah. And that's, you know, because there's so many, it's like you and I always say, Margaret, with so many anarchists in our audience, you know, there's nothing that goes together like anarchism and marble quarries.

Yeah. Two great tastes that taste great together. That's why, by the way, let's have a word for our sponsor. Big marble. Marble. Maybe we could use it again for some stuff. Marble, one time, a statute of limitations ago. I had to empty all the marbles out of my pocket before I mass arrest.

Yeah. Marble, if you use it to make all of your streets and sidewalks like they do in Greece, it makes things incredibly treacherous in the rain. Actually a horrible, horrible material to use the way that they use it. Yeah, but it's pretty though. Yeah. Years and years ago, my dad told me this spooky story that he wrote called the 37 marble steps. And I was like a kid, so I was just assuming that these were steps with marbles embedded in them.

But Gina Lucetti was from Carara. In the early 1920s, there are factory occupations all over Italy. I don't know enough about these yet, but they've come up a bunch of times and they'll probably be one of their own episodes at one of these points.

I know that in the end of these factory occupations, the socialist parties kind of gave up and gave power back to the bosses, which made an awful lot more anarchists from those socialists who, you know, had just seized the means of production and were like, but isn't this our goal? Isn't our goal that the workers control the means of production? Why would we give them back? I don't know enough about the ins and outs of that struggle, but a lot of people were mad.

Gina Lucetti was at these occupations, and somewhere along the way, he got into a gun fight with the black shirts. He got a guy in the ear who got him in the neck in return. And the second time we've had an anti-fascist get it in the neck and survive on this show, the other one was George Orwell.

Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, I'm not gonna say, but that's very lucky. Yeah, exactly, don't get shot in the neck. The neck is very low on the number of places on your body you would wanna get shot. Yeah, not a good tourniquet spot, it turns out. Hard tourniquet in neck, unless you're Google AI, which has told me repeatedly that you can tourniquet the neck. Hell yeah. That's just a hanging, folks. You're just strangling someone to death.

Oh my God. Don't turn a kitten next. Yeah. It seems so evident, but an AI does not have our best interest in heart. No, it just sees, well, there's fucking, there's fucking arteries there. Turn a kid away. Yeah. Yeah. It detaches a limb. If a head is a limb, the appendage, I don't know, whatever, whatever a head is anatomically. I guess it's a head.

So he couldn't find a doctor in Italy to get the bullet out. I do not know why. So comrades smuggled him to France where he was finally treated and he was like, you know what? I don't need to be in Italy right now. They are in the middle of a fascism and I am in the middle of just got shot in the neck by a fascist. Yeah.

There was a large political refugee scene in France at the time. Anarchists, socialists, and communists had formed a popular front against fascism there, not only just in general in France, but specifically the Italian refugees had. They were like, all right, look, all that stuff going on in Russia, we're all mad at each other, but right now Italy is being taken over by fascists. We got to do something about that. And they all agreed what needed to be done was kill Mussolini.

And this action was intended to be anything but a propaganda of the deed action, which is I think actually a really important point for kind of what we were ended on talking about last week. Right. As a libcom.org article put it, quote,

Propaganda of the deed attacks were supposed to inspire the working classes to rise, and in this they were entirely unsuccessful. In this instance, however, the urge to kill Mussolini was the expression of a convergence of opinion among many popularly representative political groupings, and was commonly perceived as a necessity at that point in time. So it wasn't like, oh, we're gonna...

spur on the revolution and radicalize people by showing them that, you know, our opponents are made of flesh and blood. It was like, no, Mussolini is basically the enemy war leader that we're in a war against, you know?

One word that has never been successfully applied to anarchists is cowardice. Geno agreed to do the deed. And I mean, it's the thing that you come across over and over again when you read about like militant movements and like civil wars and where there are anarchist groups is that the anarchists are always very brave, not always the best fighters, but always very brave. Yeah. And specifically,

other groups like putting us in the front. Yeah, that's that that's an aspect of it. Yeah. I remember when I when I first became an anarchist, I was like, just going to protests and things 27 years ago. And my my roommate in college was like, you anarchist, you're just the berserkers of the protest movement. People just throw you in the front to like soak up all the damage. And I was like, no.

He was a little bit right, at least in terms of how people perceive us and use us. So, of course, when they're like, who's going to go risk their life to go do this? An anarchist volunteered. And twice he returned to Italy to meet with comrades there to plan the assassination. And they met aboard a ship at sea, which is aesthetic as fuck off the Tuscany coast. And this time, there were no informants among them.

He had several co-conspirators worth mentioning. Stefano Vadironi was an anarchist tin smith from Rome, who was the secretary of the library. The fucking librarian was in on this assassination. The secretary of Mussolini's library supplied all of the details, including Mussolini's routes by car. Vadironi funded the thing by selling his family's land near Carara.

Another anarchist Leandro Soria was a waiter who was planning to finance the group's escape from the country. But then they all decided basically they were like, well, we're actually just all going to get arrested and stand trial. There you go. We want to make a statement. Malatesta, the anarchist guy who's old at this point, was briefed on the plan and signed off on it. So this wasn't a like spur of the moment attack. This was a, you know, huge conspiracy across borders to try and kill this guy.

Our man Gino went back to Italy and he went to Rome. He waited for Mussolini's car and then he threw a pineapple grenade at it. The grenade had been made by his cousin and he threw it into the windshield. Famously, grenades are on timers, not pressure sensitive. They don't explode on impact. No, because that would be very dangerous. Margaret, have I told you the story about the Iraqi soldier? We're behind this berm embedded with this unit of the Iraqi federal police that are in this very

active gunfight with some ISIS guys. But they're also kind of showing off because I'm there and my photographers there with the camera and so one of the dudes clips into the buttons of his button up shirt, a grenade over each button. He sticks the little handle arm of the grenade around and he runs up and he fires and then he leans over to pick up a magazine that's lying behind the berm and all of the grenades fall off of his shirt and roll down directly towards me.

So thankfully they're not set off by impact. Fair enough. In this case, it didn't get through the windshield. This is the guy who should have brought a rock. Violet Gibson was right. You need to get through the windshield.

The grenade bounced a few meters away and exploded. Mussolini's bodyguards caught up with Gino and beat the shit out of him. That sounds about right, yep. And when they arrested him, they found him with a second bomb, a handgun with six hollow points poisoned with myriatic acid, which I don't know anything about.

And a dagger. Isn't myriatic acid the thing in like swimming pools? Isn't that chlorine? No, no, I mean, I think you have myriatic acid for swimming pools too. I remember I've seen like jars one sec. I actually didn't want to Google this today. That's what happened to me today is I was like, I wonder what this stuff is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You use myriatic acid to lower like pH in your pool. It's like, I'll let like a shit millions of Americans have this shit and like their shed. Okay.

Yeah, I have no idea why you would either he was being really extra or like, or he just thought it and he might have thought it was more sketchy than it was. I don't know. Yeah, like this one says acid, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When it's really. No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know much about it other than that. I know I've seen it in people's like backyards because they have pools.

Yeah. And also, there's so much myth building, both positively and negative, about all of these things. So it could have been like, oh, he had a dagger and muriatic acid. It actually used the word dumb, dumb bullets instead of hollow points, because that's what they called a round that expands at the time.

So he's tortured. He gives a false name and location. And eventually they get the truth out of him. Lucetti was given 30 years in prison. The waiter got 20 years and the tin smith got 19 years and nine months. 30 years is the maximum anyone's allowed to be given an Italy at the time. Which again, more. I mean, later they're going to start killing people, but yeah. For three years, Lucetti was in solitary and had only a sparrow that would visit at the window for company.

Okay. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. This is best for in the sparrow. I mean, that's sweet, actually. I know. I bet he was giving it some of his very, very rare bread that he didn't have a whole lot of because he was a nice man. Yeah. He lived off of, I think, is just literally soup and bread. Yeah, that sounds about right.

He died after 17 years in prison in 1943. He died during a US air raid. Some claim that he was killed by the shelling, but the man who identified the body said that he had been killed by the occupying Germans during the raid. The Italian Communists tried to claim his legacy. They published that one of his fellow inmates claimed he had become a communist in his later years.

But his brother and his fiance, who kept visiting him until the end of his days, denied this adamantly. And we're like, no, he wasn't an anarchist, he died an anarchist.

During the partisan reclamation of Italy, two different anarchist battalions named themselves after Gino Lucetti. Each was about 60 fighters. I believe both men and women. I know one of the other anarchist battalions I'm going to talk about later was both men and women. And they helped rid Italy of fascism. So he won in a way after his death. And that is all most of us can hope for, I would say.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, in the long run, it's all any of us can hope for, right? Because as we've seen, every struggle worth fighting occurs over a long time frame. Yeah, absolutely. As for the man who made the bomb, that's a different story about another Geno, because his cousin's name was also Geno. And I want to tell you about that story, but did you know what I want to tell you about more?

Uh, products? I love products. Services maybe. I don't know if you'd ever, if there'd ever be a service on here. I do like a good service. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Fascinating. Yeah. No. Yeah. Whatever, whatever they pay me to talk about or whatever they pay to someone else to talk about and then insert into my podcast. All right. I'm really excited about here.

And we're back. We are. Gino Lucetti had a cousin, Gino Bibby. Very serious country, as you said. Yes, absolutely. Gino Bibby was from a more middle-class background. His father owned a sawmill. Gino Bibby, did you know what anarchist invented the missile? No, hap. Was he like a scientist being forced to do stuff by the not?

So I'm going to get to it. You know what? That's got to be one of the top anarchism fails. Yeah, it didn't work out well in the end. I would say missiles. I mean, there's definitely some anarchists, you know, an anarchist related groups that have used missiles and are using them right now. But boy, howdy is a general rule, not a tool that has that has reduced state power. Yeah. Oh, that's an L. I know. And it's so messy. That's a big L for us.

If you Google, I'll talk about it a little bit more later when he actually does the invention when I get to it, but if you Google who invented the missile, you get the Nazis, but he's gonna pull out missiles, guided missiles that go 20 kilometers in the Spanish Civil War. Shit. Missile in this case being a rocket but guided. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And as a teen, his second Geno, Geno Bibby, went around on a bicycle and distributed anarchist leaflets until Fascist dragged him off his bike, beat him up, burned his motorcycle, and then burned his father's sawmill. Great. Because they were a little extra, the fascists. This did not make Geno less radical. It just made him more angry. He's going to have the last laugh against Fascist and Italy. That is often how things go. Yeah. Yeah.

He spent a while in lockup for fighting fascists in the early 1920s, then fled to Spain where he started learning how to fly in case he needed to do assassinate Mussolini from the air. Okay, which is kind of like how I learned a while ago for a prison break episode that an awful lot of the prison breaks in the early aughts were used to be a lot easier to get a helicopter. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, learn to fly. That's how you get people out of prison back in the day.

Yeah. Come the Spanish Civil War. He worked behind enemy lines blowing shit up and flying reconnaissance. And then he maybe designed the first missile. If you Google right now the first missile, you get Nazi Germany World War II. But Gino designed missiles that went 20 kilometers in the Darude column, fired them at Francoist forces. So it started off as a good idea, just a very Pandora's box. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

You know what else the Anarkis is not a product and services switch. Do you know what else Anarkis invented during the Spanish Civil War? No. You ever played foosball? Yeah.

Is that ours? Do you ever know what an anarchist named Alejandro? I forget his last name because it's not my script. Invented Fusbo. Alejandro Fus, let's say Alejandro Fus. Cool. Yeah, there was a, again, I'm completely off script here and going from memory, but there was a guy who was injured in the Spanish Civil War and he was like an inventor and he was like, but I want to keep playing soccer, but I can't because I got really badly injured. I'm going to invent table soccer and other people had invented it.

But his invention is the one that people play today. Spanish Civil War, the anarchist gave us missiles and foosball. The two key cornerstones of modern civilization, missiles and foosball. Meanwhile, while Geno's inventing missiles and doing spec ops missions, the Stalinist murdered his sister.

Listen to any of our episodes about the Spanish Civil War for more about how Stalin's betrayed their comrades and started arresting folks that they didn't like and torturing people and killing them. Stalinists actually arrested Geno II, but the anarchists in the government, which is another odd thing that happened in the Spanish Civil War, were like, oh no, fuck no, and the Stalinists were forced to let him out. When the Spanish Republic fell, like everyone else, he fled into France and was held in a concentration camp, not a Nazi one, but a pre-Vg France one.

where from he escaped, and then he moved back to Italy, and he joined the partisans there, and he freed his own fucking hometown from fascists as part of an anarchist partisan unit. I really like this guy. To quote author Nick Heath, he died at the age of 100 on the 8th of August, 1999. He was cremated with a red and black scarf tied around his neck. His ashes were interred in the anarchist corner of the graveyard in Carara.

Man, that's dope. Yeah. Also, 1999, great year to kind of clock out. Yeah. Missed a lot of messiness, got to see most of the good Star Trek's. Yeah. And yeah, Gino Baby, I got kind of teary when I was writing about the life of the anarchist spy pilot, bomb maker, engineer, partisan and invention. Spil it, spylet, Margaret. Oh, spylet, yes. The spylet. Yes.

An inventor of the guided missile system, which, again, not our best move. Later, I'm going to talk about a military invention or actually a terrorism invention of the anarchist that's even worse.

Uh-oh. The Irish are mostly famous for it, but it was an Italian anarchist who later became a fascist. Anyway, back to our main story, people trying to kill Mussolini. Only a few months after Geno 1 through Geno 2's grenade at Mussolini, another young hero stepped forward to give it his all. A really young hero, kind of this is the most heartbreaking part of the story. A 15-year-old kid who had just quit the fascist youth and become an anarchist. That's good for him.

Antio Zamboni. God damn it. I promised you Zamboni. Get Jamie Loftus on the horn. She needs to know about this name. I genuinely thought I was very glad that you were my guest until I got to Zamboni and I was like, ah, if I was going to have anyone else, it would be Jamie Loftus.

Also more experience killing, never mind. No. No. No. I'm not allowed to join the bit about trying to implicate. Okay. Just checking. No. Yeah. Yeah. Until the court case is over and the grand jury rules on the new evidence brought forward in that case, we probably should keep our mouths quiet by a mysterious person with a bad fake Boston accent. No. For anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, I'm proud of you.

Well done. Way to be less terminally online. You should listen to Jamie Lopters' podcasts. You should. Antio Zamboni was born into a working-class political family in Bologna. His parents were anarchists who became fascists, or at least his father had. He was never baptized. His parents only had a civil union because they refused to let the state or the church have anything to do with their marriage before they became fascists.

His father, Mamolo Zemboni, when he became a fascist, the New York Times called it quote, disassociating from radical action. Because being an anarchist is radical. Being fascist is normal according to the New York Times in 1926. And now, yeah. Mamolo called himself quote, an anarchist and a fascist. So, what a guy.

I mean, there's a lot of that too, unfortunately. You could look into, I mean, he considered himself and was very angry about other, like people who call themselves anarchists because he had a different attitude towards it, but the guy who wrote a storm of steel earns to younger.

was like called himself an anarch. And I guess the difference is he just believed an anarchism for himself as like an individual choice. Oh, yeah, serving the Nazi state. He was kind of an incoherent fella politically, in my opinion, but wrote a very good World War one memoir. Well, I think that that sounds like approximately half of the modern libertarian party that the other half of the libertarian party is very embarrassed about. Yeah. Yeah.

Antio had two brothers, one of whom was in a fascist militia, the other of whom was in the army. Antio was a young anarchist with way better politics than his dad, and he took a shot at Mussolini while the man drove past him in an open car. He missed, he pierced the fascist collar, and the crowd killed him, just stabbed this child to death. You know, a 15 year old either looks like a kid or an adult,

Yeah. Antio is a kid. This is a child. Yeah. I mean, every 15 year old is a child, but the crowd knew they were killing a child. Yeah. Yeah. They did not. It was not just like somebody who could have passed for 17 or 18. They were very aware they were killing a kid. Yeah. He could have passed for 12.

Yeah, gotcha. I looked at the, I don't normally do this to myself, but I looked at the corpse photo because the only other photos that anyone has of him is when he's like eight, you know, and his coward fascist father tried to distance himself from the actions of his son until after the war, but we'll get to that.

The New York Times reported the father walked into the police station to see the body and said, quote, I knew it would happen. It was faded. He was a strange boy with strange notions. I had a dreadful premonition that something would happen to him. Our doctor said he might go mad one day. This is the father trying to save his own ass. It's not going to work.

Then New York Times writes a little glowing article about Mussolini playing as violin with his wife and kids at home, taking solace after the attack. Then they talk about how everyone is saying that if Mussolini stays alive, fascism will keep Italy normal and peaceful. But if he were killed- That seems like what fascism will do. Yeah. Yeah. Violent fascists might take over if Mussolini is killed.

And on the exact same page of The New York Times from 1926, there's a different article about fascist black shirts, raiding anti-fascist newspapers at gunpoint. But you know. But like in a normal way, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Being a fascist did not protect Momalo the father. He and his sister-in-law were both sentenced to 30 years for being vaguely connected to Antio. Basically, they're like, oh, the kid couldn't have come up with doing it. It must have been a plot by previously anarchy dad.

But by 1932, the elder Zamboni received a pardon directly from Mussolini in exchange for becoming an informant for the fascists. Then, after the war, Mamalo went 180 again and started writing pamphlets speaking of the courage of his son and started publishing anarchist material again. He died in 1952, and he's not the only anarchist in the story who went fascist and an anarchist again.

Yeah, this guy, I don't like him. Yeah, again, a lot of people are more, it will always be a decent number of people, sizable minority, always mostly just driven by whatever's pissing them off in the moment, as opposed to principles. Totally.

I'm just so mad at him for turning his back on his kid and trying to throw his dead kid under the bus to save his own ass. I mean, he sounds like a guy who sucks. Yeah. Sounds like a guy, a bastard that maybe someone should get behind. I know it's kind of a little weird guy too. Yeah. After Antio's attempts on Mussolini, all other political parties were outlawed, but they already didn't have any power and Mussolini was going to do that. Anyhow, it was my argument.

This more or less ends open anarchist organizing in Italy as I understand it. And Mussolini brings back the death penalty now for anyone trying to kill him or the king. That didn't stop people from trying to kill him. No one tries to kill a dictator thinking it's a safe thing to do.

Nope. Yeah. Nobody's ever killed a dictator being like, this is, this is more relaxing than staying home at night and reading the newspaper. Yeah. I'm going to get away from this just fine. Yeah. Yeah. Although later the people who do kill Miss Elini do, but yeah, that's a different time. That's really not an assassination. No, no.

The next attempt we're going to talk about was a man who, like a ton of brushy before him, abandoned the safety of the United States and kind of abandoned his family there to return to Italy to try and do what was right. His name was Michaela Shiru. Okay.

which to me looks like it's spelled Michelle, if anyone's curious. But it's like the French, but it's not. It's Italian, so it's Michaela. Michaela Shiro was born in 1899 on Sardinia, which is an Italian island. His father had already emigrated to the US. And Michaela was raised by his mother. He was twice arrested in demonstrations as a kid. He was conscripted into World War I. And like a lot of anarchists at the time, he was hoping the war would turn into a war of liberation.

It did not, famously. That's a bummer. Yeah. Michaela became convinced of anarchism after the Communist Party he felt sold out the factory occupations and let the bosses back in. He eventually moves to Manhattan. He starts fighting Italian fascists in the streets. He worked as a mechanic, and then he became a banana wholesaler in the Bronx. He married an Irish-American woman named Minnie. He had two kids. I think he had a son and a daughter.

But he was watching Italy fall to fascism, and he couldn't handle it. He was like, someone's got to do something. I'm someone. I'm going to do something. He went first to France and then likely coordinated with anarchist there, but he kept his mouth shut about it. So we never know. We'll never know like who else was involved because they were never arrested.

He went up to Belgium, and he worked in an anarchist bomb making workshop. I don't know if there's like a fly, you go to the punk show and there's a flyer. It's like, hey, come to the anarchist bomb making workshop this Saturday. Yeah. But he made himself two bombs, and then he traveled to Rome in January 1931. Mm-hmm. We've only got his confession under duress to work from, so we don't, you know, famously not always the most honest. Yeah, not a great source. Yeah.

But his original plan, he said, was that he was going to use the bombs in Paris against the Soviet embassy in revenge for the murder of anarchist in the USSR. But then he decided to kill Mussolini himself. I think that that was his backup plan. I think that he went to, I think he went back to Europe to try and kill Mussolini. But in Rome, he rented two hotel rooms, one for himself and one for his bombs because bombs need privacy too, you know?

Of course, yes. That's actually my primary political issue is extending privacy rights to modern military explosives. Nobody needs to know what a couple of J dams get up to in their spare time. That's between them and God and whatever village they're hitting.

While he was there, he was either shacking up with or conspiring with a Hungarian dancer named Anna Lukowski. If I were writing the story, it would be both. Also, everyone writes sex work out of history. So I would put money that she was a sex worker, but that doesn't make her less or more likely to have been one of the conspirators. And there is reason to believe that he is part of a broader conspiracy working, but he never rats them out. And the reason that we think this

is that he spent money really freely while he was there. He was renting two hotel rooms, but he had no money on him when he was arrested. And it was like no money in any of the rooms or whatever, right? So he was probably working with a bunch of people who wanted Mussolini dead. A lot of people wanted Mussolini dead. Yeah, for some reason. His plan was really simple. One of his hotel rooms overlooked a common route for Mussolini's car. He was going to wait and drop a bomb on Mussolini.

But he wanted to do it when there was no bystanders around. Of course. And this is a thing that has come up a bunch of times on the show, but has left out a lot of the sensationalist stuff about bomb assassinations as all of the bystanders who get killed. There have been so many times in history, and there's gonna be two in this episode, where people don't do it because they can't find a way to do it without hurting people.

He's there for like three weeks and he can't find a way to not hurt anyone else. He had all but given up and he was figuring he'd go back to Paris and attack the Soviets instead. When he was stopped on the street by cops on February 3rd, 1931, and I think he was just like stopped for being a sketchy guy because it's a fascist state, you know, and they take him to a holding cell for investigation. There were three cops in the room.

He pulled a gun and shot all three cops. Wow. And then he shouted log live anarchy and put the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Well, okay. All four men survived.

Oh my God. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that does have to win my award for worst with a gun of anyone on this podcast to shoot four people, including yourself and have them all live is a real. Honestly, though, I got us a given the time. Something that probably just goes down to how much worse ammunition was back then. You know, powder loads were less reliable. You may have loaded them self, you know. Yeah.

I think he seriously injured one of the cops in himself. Jesus Christ. He was rushed to emergency surgery and they wanted him fit to stand trial. Right. Stand trial for killing no one.

That's actually part of the thing. I was reading newspapers at the time and they were like, look, shooting cops didn't carry the death penalty. So it actually was against their own laws to try and give him the death penalty. But he admitted that he was there to kill Mussolini. In fact, they were like, what are you doing? He was like, I'm here to kill Mussolini.

He tried to write his wife and his wife tried to write him while he was in jail, but their letters were confiscated. He wrote to his father to the same effect. In May 1931, he was tried by a fascist judge with no jury, and all the lawyers and witnesses had to be put before a special tribunal before they could come in. His defense was basically, I came here to blow up Mussolini. During the trial, he decried both fascism and communism.

They told him he would be executed, shot in the back. He didn't say a word as the sentence came down. When he was asked if he had anything to add, he shrugged his shoulders. At 2.30 a.m. the next morning, they came into his cell and told him he would be killed at sunrise. He said he did not need a priest and he was shot in the back by a firing squad of 24 fascists. Folks from his home of Sardinia who had volunteered specifically to kill him.

Well, I guess that's a nice, at least you're, no, it's your guys who went to high school with murder. Yeah. Totally. It actually sounds much worse. Yeah. His wife, Minnie, lived to 1987, dying at 83. Their son, Spartico, died in 2005. I found an article I couldn't get access to behind an academic wall of the Spartico writing about his father, and I'm kind of sad I couldn't get it.

Here's an assassin who didn't go through with his actions because he couldn't do it without hurting anyone else. Now, let's talk about the opposite. Sure. But before that, let's talk about the other opposite. Products and services. I love products and services. Someone's going to get hurt. That's the promise we make. Here they are.

and we're Burke. We are Burke. Now I'm going to talk about my least favorite anarchist in history. Oh, there's a couple of jokes. There's a couple of jokes I could make about people we know, but yeah, no. My least favorite anarchist I've never met. You don't stay in a political scene without making a few. Let's go with frenemies. Yeah. So,

There's a long list of things anarchists have invented, which can be used for good or evil. The carriage-mounted machine gun. Missiles, apparently. The getaway car. Foosball. Steampunk. Free bike programs. Signal the messaging app.

One thing that you can say was probably invented by someone who called himself an anarchist at the time was the car bomb. Well, yeah. Look, I've seen a couple of car bombs. I've even seen one kill people and not a fan of car bombs. No. Well, it was a VBIED, which I guess is like, and it's in that line of dissent, yeah. I am still, sorry, I just deep, anyone die.

It's okay, I mostly, I mean, they were far enough away that I just kind of saw them turned into smoke. Okay, yeah. I know, I'm sure that doesn't have any effects on your psyche. No, no, not at all, not at all. Yeah.

Before the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history was the Wall Street bombing of September 16th, 1920. Oh, I have heard of this, yeah. Someone, it is not certain who used a horse-drawn wagon as the first car bomb. And every time I say the first in any show, it's like, I don't know, the first that I know about. Right.

There's a whole book about the history of the car bomb called Buddha's Wagon, because we're going to get to how it was probably Mario Buddha. In this car bomb, I thought there were some Buddhist history with car bombs that I hadn't heard, but OK, that makes sense. No, I mean, maybe, I don't know. But in this carriage was 100 pounds of dynamite, 500 pounds of cast iron weights for shrapnel.

And they rode the horse up and then the driver got out and left and blew up on Wall Street. Not in one of the buildings. It killed 40 people and then like injured hundreds of people. And almost everyone that killed were like fucking kids that worked as messengers and like quirks and shit. Again, this is like the problem of like just this thing you get on Twitter whenever stuff

happens where it's like somebody has attacked this group of people that like left us broadly dislike. And it's like, I don't know, wait a minute to see if that's who they hit. Yeah, you know, I'm not talking about, you know, the recent thing, but like it happens often where it's like, yeah, turns out like, Oh, no, no, that's not, that's not who got hurt. Yeah, because that's

You know, with bombs, very hard to be. It's the same thing. Like, it's not just a leftist thing. Like, it's mostly not a leftist thing. It's a thing that I grew up watching all of the adults around me celebrate as like bombs got dropped in places that I now know because I understand more about bombs and talk to people who were in those places when they were being bombed were largely killing civilians because precision bombing is mostly a myth. Yeah. Totally. It's just like people love explosions.

And the guy who had recently just tried to kill Mussolini earlier in the story didn't do it because there wasn't a good by chance. Don't make bombs. I shouldn't need to say that. Don't be making bombs. Don't do bombs. Bombs, bombs bad. You will not be the one who figures out how to use bombs ethically.

No one ever has been. Yeah. And this wasn't some kids who died as collateral damage, but we killed some big shots. This was all collateral damage, no regular damage. Cool. Really put the fear of God into those people who didn't get hurt. Yep.

And I would argue that of every major political ideology of the last 200 years, Anarchism probably is the least innocent blood on its hands. Oh yeah, yeah, in part because we generally don't wind up in power. Yeah, totally. Which is, you know, I mean, is part of the goal, but yeah, totally. But the Wall Street bombing is a decent chunk of the innocent blood on our hands of the Anarchist movement. That's a bad one. The most likely suspect is an Italian anarchist named Mario Buddha.

who was actually probably with Sacco when they robbed and killed those people in the Sacco and Venzeti case. Mario Buddha is like a mystery man in history. And there's a lot of like takes on him and he was like kind of almost everywhere that like violence was happening.

Mario Buddha went on to, almost certainly, become a fascist informant in Italy. Cool. Yeah. And almost certainly, foil another anarchist attempt on Mussolini's life.

He is the worst. Yeah, you're right. That is as shitty as you can possibly be as an anarchist militant. I know, honestly, I'm mad that I am a little impressed. Like if I was making up an anarchist for you to get mad at, I couldn't do better than this. Absolutely. After murdering a bunch of kids and shit in the name of anarchy, he made his way back to Italy, got caught up in the hubbub. Yeah, it stops someone from killing New Salini. Yeah.

Yeah, Jesus. By 1933, it seems likely that he was cooperating with police and informing on anarchists. And a lot of people who are really into anarchist history are skeptical of this, because for a while, the only information that anyone had about this was that a communist newspaper accused him of this at the time.

Yeah. And a lot of people even anarchists listened and were like, oh, we don't trust this guy anymore. But other people were like, oh, that's the communist plane sectarian politics. And then later you can see historians have done the work of being like, here's where Mario Buddha was dropped off the list of dangerous anarchists to keep an eye out for. And like, here's, you know, his basically like, the fascists took him under their wing.

And even if half of what they say about Mario Buddha is true. I don't like him at all. I don't like blowing up kids on Wall Street. I don't like cooperating with fascists. I don't like foiling an attempt on Mussolini's life.

Yeah, again, I, yeah, really one of my very few lines is you probably shouldn't don't go don't be killing kids. Yeah. DBKK, that's my little like, what would Jesus do bracelet in case you ever need to look at that. Look at abrasive. Oh, no, you know what? I shouldn't kill kids. Also, if you need to look at a bracelet to remind you not to kill kids.

I would say maybe there's a lot of things you probably need to do. Therapy, yeah. Meanwhile, back to a regular anarchist, one I like who doesn't become a fascist. Sure. There's a blacksmith named Umberto, I promise you another Umberto, Thomasini. Umberto got involved in politics when he was 13. He joined the 1909 general strike in response to the murder of the Spanish anarchist educator and veteran of the pod, Francisque Ferrar.

He went on to fight in World War I. He won a cross for valor. But according to his own take, what happened is he got to the war because he was conscripted and he just shot into the air and he was like, trying not to kill anyone. Well, yeah, that's actually, I mean, there's some evidence, although the studies around it have been to a degree. There's a lot of critiques about them, but like some evidence that that was more than norm than not with combat soldiers. And I bet especially when you're talking about like trenches and stuff where you're like, yes, yes.

go shoot that dot on the horizon. Whereas if someone's running through a trench trying to kill me, I'm like, I'm going to shoot that man even if we have the same political ideology, if someone's trying to kill me with it. I just don't want to get shot. Yeah. But yeah, no, totally.

And he spent some time as a POW during the war, and then he returned home to return to work as a blacksmith, and he more formally committed to anarchism alongside his brothers, who, like everyone else, they left the Socialist Party in 1921 after the socialists sold out the movement. Again, I don't know as much about that, but that is what Alberto Felton and his brothers felt.

Umberto's life could easily be his own episode. He helped get the bombs from one genome to the other genome in 1926 and spent six years in prison during the crackdown on it. Like after Mussolini came to power, he sent a whole bunch of the anarchists to prison, right? During those six years, he met an anarchist in prison named Mario Buddha.

Then, Umberto fled Italy on foot to Yugoslavia, then he went to Paris, where he met his partner Anna and had his son René. In 1936, Spain was under attack, and so Umberto left the then-safety of Paris to go to the front lines. Teaching anarchists about trench warfare,

And then he became an anarchist spec ops guy, and he went off to go mine Francoist ships. Oh, cool. I know the opposite of the guy who just killed children and saved Mussolini. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And he shouldn't have been friends with that guy.

He was arrested by Stalinists and prevented from attacking the fascists while he was off to go mine these ships. He broke out of Stalinist prison, and then he returned back to the prison he had just broken out of alongside anarchist from the government to negotiate everyone's release. I think this is the same situation as the last man, the missile inventor man, but this might have just happened a bunch of times. Because I read about these in different sources.

Then, in 1937, he goes back to France so he can plot how to kill Mussolini. One problem. One of his co-conspirators, a man who he has absolute trust for, is Mario Buddha, whom he had met in prison. Mario leaked the plan to the Italian police, who foiled it. After the war, Mario Buddha went back to the anarchist movement. Hooray!

Great. He sounds trustworthy. I'm sure he's really worked on things. Don't want to cancel him just for saving Mussolini's life and murdering children. I can't find much about this particular assassination attempt that he foiled. Mostly I found a lot of ins and outs about the informant.

But to follow him, Berto, he, like so many other anarchists, wound up in a non-Nazi concentration camp in France. Then he was turned over to the Italian police where he was imprisoned until the end of the war. Finally, he's freed. He returns to his wife and his son and his work as a blacksmith and to anarchist organizing. When the spirit of 68 swings through, he starts organizing again. He's like,

about 70 years old, and he's organizing with a bunch of 20-year-old kids, right? Because it's 1968. Right. Yeah, that's who there's going to be to organize with. Yeah. I think it's cool as shit. He kept publishing shit that would send him back to jail. I think he was sent back to jail multiple times just for continuing to publish anarchist literature.

And then he died in 1980. He wrote an autobiography, but I don't believe it's been translated. And there's a documentary about him called an anarchist life from 2013 that I haven't seen yet that I want to see. And he was real cool, but I don't know what he did to try and kill Mussolini. I just know he made the wrong friend.

Yeah, well, we all do sometimes. Yeah. For example, I mean, there was one summer that Benita Mussolini and I were inseparable. I mean, we would spend just hours on the beach, telling each other's secrets, having picnics, you know. There was that one wine-drenched night, and then I found out he'd been the dictator of Italy this whole time. I had no idea, Margaret. I had no idea. I know.

I mean, what's funny is that pre him becoming Mussolini? That is the story that a lot of people tell. I don't want people to have that story. Like the woman Lita, who is probably his lover, who was an anarchist, who was like later, she was like, I misjudged his character, you know? Yeah. Hey. Whom stamangstas hasn't been friends with the inventor of fascism.

Well, Cohen, I mean, we've got, there was another Italian who might deserve that title a little more, but we talk about him on Behind the Bastards. Wait, which one? Oh, the guy who wore a banana hammock? One sec. Wait, what? Does he invent the banana hammock?

No, no, no, but he wants to remember this person's name either. We definitely talked about it though. Gabriel Denonzio. Yes. Gabriel Denonzio, who was a big influence on Mussolini and was like is often credited as the inventor of fascism.

Um, he never called himself a fascist. He's like partially, right? There's not just one guy. Okay. But he is earlier in the chain of the development of fascist messa concept than Mussolini, uh, and an influence on Benito. Yeah. Oh, huh. Yeah. Gabriel Denanzia. You can listen to our two parter on him. Very much worth it.

He is the guy who went fume as an independent city. He's a guy who marches into fume and takes it over as like a crew along with a bunch of Anna. There were anarchists and communists and fascists all kind of together because they were all very much anti just all of the things that are going on right now. But those ideologies hadn't really hardened into the in the concrete way they would a couple of years later. Fascinating time.

Kind of like how a lot of our most prominent right wing fat, a lot of more is prominent fascist media ideologues today. We're part of occupy. Yeah. God, actually, the occupy versus fume thing is actually makes a lot of really specific sense. That's the thing that's like, it's so hard to talk about is that in a certain way, fascism is the red-brown alliance because it is taking ideas from leftism and applying it to right wing ideology. Yes.