With his Sherlock Holmes-style penchant for using multiple disguises to help crack his cases, Giuseppe Dosi was no ordinary policeman. And nearly 36 years after his death, Italians are still discovering the secrets of the "artist detective". Dosi, who was born in 1891, abandoned his dreams of a career on the stage as a young man.
A priest, a banker, a German doctor and a Czech army officer with a pronounced limp were just some of the parts the Rome-born officer played in the course of a long career. And like Arthur Conan Doyle's eccentric creation, Holmes, the Italian was not opposed to a little cross-dressing, if he felt posing as a woman would help him get his man.
Interest in Dosi has been spurred by a new biography, written by a serving police chief, a documentary about his life and by some of the detective's professional archives being placed online. After his entry into the police force, Dosi's bosses quickly found ways of making use of his talent for imitation, trusting him with sensitive missions in Italy and abroad. One early one involved infiltrating a group of Swiss-based Italian anarchists who were, it was feared, plotting to assassinate the then king, Vittorio Emanuele III.
In 1922, when the poet and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio fell from his balcony in mysterious circumstances, it was Dosi who was put in charge of the delicate investigation. By going undercover in this way, Dosi was able to establish that D'Annunzio's balcony mishap was down to a row with his combustible mistress rather than any political plot against him. In 1927 Dosi became involved in a famous miscarriage of justice case centred on a series of murders and rapes of young girls in Rome. Under pressure to find a culprit, the authorities pinned the blame on a photographer, Gino Girolimoni. Dosi was not convinced and managed to get the investigation reopened, putting together a case against a British clergyman who may have been the actual culprit but was able to skip the country before his arrest.
In an Italy then under fascist rule, this kind of independent thinking did not go down well, although Dosi was far from being an active resistant to dictator Benito Mussolini's authoritarian rule. Towards the end of the 1930s he began to think of leaving the police and wrote a memoir which revealed numerous details of his investigations as well as treating his bosses to some stinging criticism.
That was to prove a final straw for his superiors. Suspended from the police, Dosi was imprisoned in Rome in 1939 and then transferred to an asylum for the mentally ill until his release in January 1941. In June 1944, as Allied forces were entering the Italian capital, an angry mob attacked a former German prison, freeing the prisoners and then setting it ablaze. With the help of a young German soldier, Dosi went into the burning building and recovered a huge stock of documents that were to prove vital for subsequent prosecutions of Italians, who had collaborated with the Nazis. Dosi handed the papers over to Allied commanders and got taken on as a special investigator for two years. In 1946 he returned to the ranks of the Italian police, rising to the grade of commissioner before his retirement, 10 years later. He died, aged 89, in 1981.
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This story in 30 seconds
• With his Sherlock Holmes-style penchant for using multiple disguises to help crack his cases, Giuseppe Dosi was no ordinary policeman
• A priest, a banker, a German doctor and a Czech army officer with a pronounced limp were just some of the parts the Rome-born officer played in the course of a long career
• Interest in Dosi has been spurred by a new biography, written by a serving police chief, a documentary about his life and by some of the detective's professional archives being placed online
• Towards the end of the 1930s he began to think of leaving the police and wrote a memoir which revealed numerous details of his investigations as well as treating his bosses to some stinging criticism
• Suspended from the police, Dosi was imprisoned in Rome in 1939 and then transferred to an asylum for the mentally ill until his release in January 1941
• He died, aged 89, in 1981.
