ITALY: So Long Ago

They called him l'uomo che la morte non vuole—the man whom death does not want. Amerigo Dumini, the St. Louis-born Italian gangster-politician, had sent many men to their death, but somehow always managed to dodge it himself. He lost a hand in World War I, and lived. He stopped a bullet with his head in World War II and lived, recovering miraculously after he had been abandoned as dead in a cave near Bengasi. Yet his most famous dealings with death occurred in the infamous days between the two wars, when he organized the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the brilliant...