Getting to Know the General

Abstract

It was at this point that Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, carabinieri general and the chief antagonist of the terrorists, made his first appearance on the scene. Dalla Chiesa was born in Piedmont in 1920. The son of a carabinieri general, he joined the corps. He participated in the Resistance. After the war he took two degrees at the university, studying, as the ironies of fate dictated, with the young professor, Aldo Moro. Carlo Alberto, now a captain, was sent to Sicily to lead the carabinieri of Corleone, one of the main mafia strongholds in the province of Palermo. In the 1950s and 1960s, his career prospered and he held important jobs in many postings around the country. In 1966, a colonel, he was again transferred to Sicily, where he remained for seven years as commander of a legion. There was then a new mafia, involved in drugs and the pollution of legitimate commerce, and the challenges for the carabinieri were great. It reveals something of his attitudes that he made a particular effort to see to it that the activities of the carabinieri were publicized so that the common people of Sicily, where fear of the mafia and lack of confidence in the state are epidemic, would know that the state was present and was actively defending itself and its laws.¹