People and institutions

Zjednoczone Przedsiębiorstwa Rozrywkowe (ZPR, "United Entertainment Enterprises") was a state enterprise created in 1948 by order of the Minister of Culture and Art, in agreement with the Minister of the Treasury and the head of the Central Planning Office. Its task was written down as "providing decent and popular entertainment by organising and running culture parks, circuses and funfairs, and travelling menageries".^[20] In time ZPR came to cover almost all of communist Poland's mass entertainment: circuses, stage and variety shows, training of performers, festivals including those in Sopot and Opole, "developing foreign cooperation and exchange in artistic and entertainment services", lotteries, and arcades with pinball and slot machines.^[21] It was under this "international exchange" that ZPR's Artistic Events Office and its export and import department signed contracts with Italian agencies.^[2][3]

Where it came from

ZPR's predecessor was a state enterprise called the Chief Directorate of Entertainment Shows, created by an order of the Minister of Culture and Art of 2 May 1946. An order of 30 March 1948 renamed it Zjednoczone Przedsiębiorstwa Rozrywkowe, with its seat in Łódź.^[20] ZPR had no founder in the sense of a person: it was created by the minister and run by a Directorate "appointed and dismissed by the Minister of Culture and Art, consisting of a Director representing the Directorate independently and two deputies".^[20] That was the ordinary arrangement for a state enterprise. Online sources name no directors from the 1950s to 1970s; in 1981 the director was Stanisław Nowotny.^[2]

How it got into this business

Performers' trips abroad were a state monopoly in communist Poland, and the state earned hard currency from them. The main intermediary was the Polish Artistic Agency Pagart, created on 31 December 1956 and wound up in 1992.^[23] "Without Pagart nobody could go abroad on a contract," the broadcaster Wojciech Mann recalled. Pagart took 10 percent of earnings for performances in "fraternal countries" and 20 percent in capitalist ones, and acted as a passport office: performers collected their passports there before leaving and handed them back on return. The singer Maryla Rodowicz wrote that a Pagart representative would sometimes "come to collect a sum he had invented himself, sometimes even hinting that he would not mind another form of payment, in kind".^[44] Those were the manners of the state trade in performers in which ZPR also operated. ZPR had "developing foreign cooperation and exchange in artistic and entertainment services" in its statute and its own Artistic Events Office with an export and import department.^[21][3] Director Nowotny stated the purpose plainly: "By exporting our troupes we earn the fees of the foreign artists we bring to Poland."^[2] How and when ZPR's export department came into contact with Olivero is told by a single sentence: Cassaglia "met a Hungarian variety artist who gave him the contacts to ZPR staff", and in 1980 "began penetrating this market".^[2] Dobrowolska dates the recruitment from 1977.^[5] The earlier history of this channel is unknown.

Who allowed it

The advert was signed by the Ochota District Culture Centre with ZPR's Artistic Events Office; the auditions were run by ZPR's "authorised committees"; service passports were issued to the women as ZPR employees; the contracts were signed in the ZPR office; the money went through the Polish consulate in Milan.^[2][3] Every one of those rungs was the state. Only staff of the export and import department were charged and convicted, with suspended sentences.^[1][2] Nobody in ZPR's management, in the Ministry of Culture or in the consular service was held responsible, at least according to the available sources.

What became of it

ZPR was therefore neither a shell company nor a private middleman. It was an institution of the state. That is exactly why, as the militia spokesman admitted, the scheme "bore the marks of legality".^[2] It survived to the end of communism. On 23 September 1991 the culture minister launched the enterprise's transformation and the same day dismissed its director-general Zbigniew Benbenek; a week later an employee company, ZPR S.A., was formed, which on 7 October signed a lease of the assets with the State Treasury, with the same Benbenek at its head. The Supreme Audit Office later found the privatisation had been carried out contrary to the statute and the assets undervalued by 4.81 million złoty.^[24][25] Today ZPR S.A. runs a casino chain and is the majority shareholder of a media group.^[21] According to press profiles, Benbenek, born in 1949, worked at ZPR from the late 1970s on arcade and slot machines, a different part of the enterprise from the department that exported troupes.^[25][39] No source on the 1981 case mentions him or any later owner; their connection to the case is the continuity of the firm. A records fonds titled "Zjednoczone Przedsiębiorstwa Rozrywkowe w Warszawie" is listed in the Polish state archives database szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl.^[22]

The Omnibus is the only one of the clubs that can be located and described today. It stood in Cassano Spinola, a municipality in the province of Alessandria in Piedmont, not far from Alessandria, where the Olivero agency was based.^[27][28] In 1981 Magda placed it "near Florence";^[2] the Italian press and local sources point unambiguously to Cassano Spinola, which fits Piotrowski's account of reaching Alessandria and sleeping at the Omnibus.^[2][27]

The building began as a hotel and restaurant when the area lived off spa tourism at the sulphur springs of Sardigliano. In time a night venue with dancers was added to the restaurant, one of the first in the province.^[29][30] According to La Stampa in June 1981 the Omnibus was "the first stage of the Italian road" for the Polish women: there "the girls' 'abilities' were checked", and their job was "entertaining the clients, drinking wine or champagne with them".^[27] The venue had previously belonged to Cassaglia, Cassalia in the Italian press.^[27] Who owned it in 1981 the paper does not say.

The venue carried on and stayed in the crime pages. In September 1984 a crude bomb went off at 3 a.m. at the entrance of the Omnibus restaurant, on via Villalvernia on the road from Cassano to Tortona; the damage exceeded 50 million lire, and the carabinieri of Novi Ligure leaned towards a protection racket. In December 1984, on the night of a lavish reopening of the renovated venue with striptease and a television star, the carabinieri arrested the then owner on a warrant from a Modena judge, on charges of extortion and threats over a debt. We do not name the 1984 owners: no source links them to the 1981 case.^[31][32] In summer 1985 a Polish troupe brought in through Pagart performed there.^[2] In the late 1990s and early 2000s the police intervened there repeatedly; renamed Biblos, it closed in 2003.^[29][30] In 2010 an Asti property company bought it, planning flats, but never obtained the change of land use. In 2014 the Rio Predazzo stream flooded the complex. After several failed auctions, including one in 2017 with a starting price of 396,000 euros, it was sold in April 2021 for 53,000 euros with plans to reopen a hotel and restaurant.^[29][30] The present owners have no connection whatever with the 1981 case.

The Italian press described Mario Gaviraghi's agency in autumn 1980, before anyone in Poland wrote about "Dziwex". What follows rests on four articles in the communist daily l’Unità, read from the page scans; the translations are ours.

• The agency. A "theatrical agency" in via Pietrapiana in Florence, run by Mario Gaviraghi, 35, "controlled about five hundred young dancers, mostly foreign, who under threat of losing their jobs or being sent back to their countries of origin were forced to prostitute themselves". The business had been running "for about two years", turned over "hundreds of millions" of lire, and reached across Tuscany and the Marche.^[35] Among the women the paper lists Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Arabs, Spaniards and Poles, "drawn to Italy by the mirage of making it in show business".^[34][35]
• How it worked. The women signed contracts as "dancers or hostesses", then "one way or another had to turn into prostitutes, on pain of losing their jobs". After about two weeks came "the rude awakening": either they accepted and joined the organisation, or they lost their jobs and had to go home. Floor managers and head waiters "introduced" them to wealthy clients; payment was "a bottle of champagne" per 10 to 15 minutes, and to leave the venue with a woman the client paid the owner the price of 15 to 20 "consumptions", 150,000 to 250,000 lire, carefully entered in a ledger. The woman got 5 percent of that, the same as the waiter who had introduced her.^[34][35] The same sums and the same percentage, 200,000 to 300,000 lire and 5 percent, are given by Mariola from Rzeszów in the 1982 Polish report.^[2]
• The clubs. Around the agency "revolved three Florentine venues and one in Fucecchio": the "Pic Nic Caprice" in Fiesole, the "Liberty" in via Verdi and the "River Club" on the Lungarno Corsini in Florence, and the "Mulin del Topo" in Fucecchio, the Moulin del Topo of the Polish reports.^[34]
• How it came out. The inquiry began about eighteen months earlier with a complaint by a young Black woman to the labour inspectorate; the Ministries of Labour and Foreign Affairs then asked the Florence inspectorate to check the contracts of the "Agenzia Gaviraghi".^[34][35][36] In early November 1980 the carabinieri arrested fourteen people: Gaviraghi, "the theatrical agent who hired the dancers", and the owners, partners, managers and waiters of the four clubs. The charges: procuring and exploiting prostitution.^[34][35] We do not name the other people arrested, because we do not know whether they were convicted.
• The murder. On 3 October 1980 the body of Anna Maria Lazzeretti, 51 (Lazzarotti in other articles in the same paper), was found in a flat in the Rifredi district of Florence. She was the partner of the manager of the "Pic Nic" club in Fiesole, who was also the "escort of the dancers" and was among those arrested. Her hands and feet were tied and her mouth stopped with a pair of stockings and tape; the killer struck her on the head and then strangled her. Two of the club's dancers, a Mexican and a woman from Turin, had been staying in the flat for a week.^[33] After the arrests the paper wrote: "The killer had pushed a stocking down her throat. It was clearly a warning for whoever had to understand", and quoted prosecutor Antonino Guttadauro saying that "perhaps a crack has opened".^[36]

This is almost certainly the event the Polish reports describe as "a girl strangled with a nylon stocking forced down her throat" in Gaviraghi's venue, "the mafia's calling card, for a victim who talked too much".^[2] The stocking in the throat and the reading as a warning are the same. Two things differ: the victim was a woman of 51, not a girl, and she died in her own flat, not in a club. The paper linked the murder to the case only as a hypothesis. The searched issues of l’Unità up to 1987 say nothing about whether the murder was solved or how the case against the agency ended.

The Turin daily La Stampa covered the case three times on its pages for the province of Alessandria. These articles are the only Italian period source found, and they show how the case looked from the other side of the border. The translations are ours.

• 8 May 1981. Headline: "Both work for a night venue in Cassano Spinola. Arrested in Poland for white slavery. But the police and carabinieri who looked into it rule it out". Citing Antena, the paper writes of three hundred Polish women and of two Italians detained in Warsaw "at the end of April", and of the arrest of officials of ZPR, which it calls "the state tourist agency". The Alessandria police headquarters: "For some time, especially since the start of Wojtyła's pontificate, there has been a large phenomenon of young Polish women who come to our province too as dancers; none, however, has ever reported being deceived and forced into prostitution." According to the Italian police the girls moved from venue to venue, renewed their residence permits, held valid work contracts and had one dream: to find a husband and become Italian citizens. There was no "scandal", "apart from the corrupt officials who demanded money for every visa".^[26]
• 5 June 1981. "Were the Polish dancers who came to Italy forced into prostitution?" The paper summarises a Życie Warszawy article of the previous day: more than 1,500 women were said to be involved; one dancer informed the Polish consular authorities and was told "she could not be helped"; Cassaglia had "connections at the consulate" and for 100 dollars had the girls' passports extended; "some, in truth few, knew before leaving what they were heading for; most, however, suffered a trauma when they were forced to 'sell their bodies'"; eight Polish citizens were in prison. On the victims: two disappeared, one had her cheeks pierced by pistol bullets, one who "could have told the police a great deal" died tragically just after crossing the Polish border, three came home pregnant. In a box, "Perplessità ad Alessandria", the local police repeat that none of the girls questioned "spoke of trafficking or violence", and suggest that it was Cassaglia and other agents who had to pay Polish officials to keep the documents in order.^[27]
• 6 June 1981. A second Italian inquiry, at the prosecutor's office in Savona, in Liguria, so far as "preliminary acts". Prosecutor Giuseppe Stipo had earlier received "a long memorandum" from the impresario of a group of Polish dancers performing in night venues in the province of Savona, accusing them of breach of contract and theft of costumes and warning the magistrates against believing any accusations of pimping; the investigators did not reveal his name. The paper asks whether it was the same man. According to Życie Warszawy the dancers' passports, held by Cassaglia, served "as an instrument of blackmail to push into prostitution the dancers who preferred to stay in Italy". The Alessandria prosecutors and police had established that the Omnibus hosted Polish dancers "like other venues" but had "for the moment" found no crime or irregularity. Over the case, the paper writes, "hangs the shadow of the death of one of the dancers, the disappearance of two others and the mysterious wounding of a fourth".^[28]

We machine-searched the text (OCR) of the La Stampa issues for 1974 to 1985 held by archive.org (roughly a fifth of the issues could not be downloaded) and the l’Unità archive for 1977 to 1986. Apart from the three 1981 articles they contain no mention of Cassaglia, Massieri or the Olivero agency: nothing on the Omnibus under Cassaglia, nothing on what became of the two Italians. Nor did we find any Italian register entry or article confirming that an agency called “Olivero” existed; it is known only from Polish sources. How the inquiries in Alessandria and Savona ended is not known.

Śpiewak's report drew a response from the Inter-Enterprise Coordinating Committee of the Solidarity union of entertainment-industry workers: "Revealing to the public an affair of this type, of a character and scale hitherto unknown in our country, was necessary in every respect. It became possible thanks to the changes taking place in Poland after August 1980."^[3][5]