ITALY: Alias Mike Hammer

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Though his proud fellow citizens like to think of him as their own Mike Hammer, Milan's Tommaso Ponzi, 37, really does not quite meet TV specifications for a private eye. Big Tom weighs 270 lbs., is a happily married homebody (three children) who has no time for slinky blondes. But otherwise, Tom is up to fictional standards. He is a proven skullbasher: in Italy's first chaotic postwar days he tangled with the Communists in (by his own estimate) 1,300 street brawls, mowing them down with a chunk of railroad track. And he has cold nerve: when two madmen terrorized a school full of children near Milan in 1956, Tom defied the maniacs' gunfire, closed in to capture them.

Recently, when Milan's Maggioni pharmaceutical company learned that a drug counterfeit ring was using its label to sell fake tranquilizers, cortisone and heart tonics (distilled water for liquids, common starch for pills), the call went up for Tom and his 31-man "Mercury" detective agency. Going after a gang that he called "hairy-gutted animals—worse than Murder Inc.," Tom recorded conversations with suspects, using a tiny microphone worn like a wristwatch, snapped telephoto pictures with cameras guyed on field glasses, rigged up a periscope on the radio aerial of his car to enable him to peek inside suspects' homes.

Soon Tom cornered Giovanni Battista Volonté, 53, flashed a press pass at him, told him he was a "policeman," and dragged a signed confession from him. After Volonté sang, Tom located the printing presses where false labels and boxes were made, dragged two more of the gang in and extracted confessions from them too. Then he went to Milan's Police Chief Mario Nardone and handed over his suspects.

On television, the cops grudgingly allow the private eyes to solve their cases for them. But, like Tom himself, Police Chief Nardone did not quite meet TV specifications. Before he knew what had happened, Tommaso Ponzi, private eye, found himself charged with impersonating an officer, violation of domicile, restraint of person and arbitrary arrest. Tom's suspects, who had admitted to being part of an estimated $500,000-a-year ring, walked out of the station free men—because the police themselves had not caught them red-handed as the law requires.