Pozzi, who was so articulate in defense of her films that she earned wide acceptance in the largely conservative country, allegedly died of liver cancer while in France more than 11 years ago. But prosecutor Attilio Pisani said the official version of her death is flawed and inconsistent, and is baffled by the resent discovery that records of her internment do not exist.
Pisani’s decision to investigate the decade-old case follows the recent publication of Moana: A Political Mystery, by Brunetto Fantauzzi. In his book, Fantauzzi points out that while Pozzi’s family claims she was cremated, the hospital where she was reported to have died did not offer cremation services at the time, nor was her cremation registered with Italian officials as the law demands. Additionally, Pozzi’s death certificate was not registered in Rome until seven months after she died, for reasons neither the hospital nor the family can explain.
"Just before she died Moana told me she wanted to stop being a porn star altogether but was very worried,” said Fantuazzi. “She was at the center of a huge money-making business."
At the time of her death in 1994, Italian papers widely published accounts that Pozzi had high-level political connections and was having affairs with a number of men in the Italian Parliament. The allegations were supported in Pozzi's 1991 memoirs, The Philosophy of Moana, in which she referred to several illicit trysts with famous men. Her death came at the same time as considerable governmental reorganization in Italy, supporting the theory that she faked her death to avoid political turmoil.
Pozzi’s family are denouncing the allegations, claiming that her ashes were spread in a private location at small cemetery in the Swiss Alps to avoid heightened public interest in her death. However, upon questioning a priest at the cemetery where she was allegedly interred, Pisani said there was no record of Pozzi in the cemetery’s archives.
Pisani added that, upon her death at a clinic in Lyon, France, "nobody saw the body apart from her mother and sister.”
