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In mid-March, a documentary was released in Denmark on Francesco Gullino, an Italian-Danish secret agent who was known under the code name “Piccadilly” and suspected of being the murderer of Georgy Markov, a Bulgarian dissident killed in London in 1978 with a tiny poison bullet probably fired from the tip of an umbrella. The episode was so unusual and striking that it became known as the “Bulgarian umbrella case”. Despite evidence and clues against him, Gullino was never charged with that murder; until his death in 2021, very little was known about him. The documentary Paraplymordet, by the Danish journalist Ulrik Skotte, shows new sides of his personality, including his Nazi sympathies.
Markov was a journalist and writer who was highly critical of the Bulgarian communist regime of Todor Zivkov which was affiliated with the Soviet Union. He was 49 when he was killed: he had lived in London since 1972, the year in which the regime had sentenced him in absentia to over six years in prison for desertion, and worked for the BBC and Radio Free Europe. He was poisoned while waiting for the bus: a man behind him bumped his leg with an umbrella, then apologized and walked away. In the following hours Markov felt hot flashes, dizziness, pain in the affected leg and a fever rose: he died four days later of heart failure. The poisoning was confirmed by the autopsy: in the leg affected by the umbrella a micro capsule was found containing ricin, a substance of vegetable origin which is lethal even in very small quantities.
Georgy Markov (EPA/STRINGER via ANSA)
While clarifying the causes of death, the investigations did not lead to identifying a person responsible: Gullino, the person on whom the most clues emerged, was interrogated only in 1993, when after the collapse of the Soviet Union the archives of Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS) were opened , the Bulgarian secret services, for which Gullino worked under the code name of “Piccadilly”, and which at the time were allies of the Soviet KGB. The interrogation lasted 11 hours, then Gullino was released due to lack of evidence. New suspects emerged in 2008, thanks to an investigation by Bulgarian investigative journalist Hristo Hristov, again without sufficient evidence to lead to his arrest. Gullino denied for life that he had any role in Markov’s death.
Gullino was born in Piedmont in 1945, was orphaned and raised by an aunt who ran a brothel. During the investigation it emerged that the Bulgarian secret services had recruited him in 1971, after his arrest in Bulgaria for drug smuggling. Information about him said that he had been trained and sent on missions several times, each time with false passports, and that he had been in London for several weeks prior to Markov’s assassination. It seems that in 1977, the year before Markov’s murder, he was reportedly notified that he had participated in an attempt to kill him.
In the Bulgarian secret service file on him, however, all the pages relating to the days of the murder are missing, perhaps eliminated to make incriminating evidence on the regime’s work disappear. In short, it was never possible to prove definitively that Markov had been killed by Gullino: the case was closed in 2013.
Skotte’s documentary contains no evidence of Gullino’s role in Markov’s murder, but gives him a much more detailed and less evanescent picture than known so far. Very little has always been known about Gullino: he has been described as a chameleonic and very ambiguous character, adaptable to any context. “He was a master of infiltration, he could enter any kind of environment and become the person he wanted,” Skotte told the Guardian.
The documentary is based on a large amount of material that Skotte had obtained years ago from the family of Gianfranco Invernizzi, an Italian-Danish director who knew Gullino well, who wanted to make a film about him and who had died in 2005. The material consisted in numerous boxes of documents, photographs and recordings of the conversations between Gullino and Invernizzi.
Among other things, the boxes contained hundreds of photographs of naked women, many of them in pornographic poses, which Gullino – at least according to Skotte – had taken posing as a fashion agent, and then asked the aspiring models for sexual favors. It is a remarkable detail: Gullino had always been told by those who had known him as a person with no interest in sex.
The documentary also tells of Gullino’s fascination for fascism and Nazism, told by himself in a series of conversations with Invernizzi, recorded without his knowledge: this too is an unprecedented and remarkable detail, considering that Gullino was a spy in the service of a communist regime. In the various boxes Skotte obtained were a Benito Mussolini calendar and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and a photograph of a model wrapped in a Nazi flag.
Among the sources consulted by Skotte, he himself said, there are some that mention information that Gullino allegedly handed over to the PET, the Danish secret services. It is not clear what this information is and Skotte is continuing to investigate it: his idea, for now not confirmed by evidence, is that they concerned important cases at the center of other investigations and Gullino had given them in exchange for his freedom, despite the evidence about his role in Markov’s murder.
Gullino died in the summer of 2021, in Austria, where he lived alone: ”he was the loneliest person in the world,” said Skotte. His body was found a week after his death: he was cremated and buried in an unmarked grave.
– Read also: The “Bulgarian umbrella case” has been closed
