The Body Snatchers.(Enrico Cuccia)

It would have taken at least four grave robbers, police reckon, to move the heavy marble stone sealing the tomb labeled Enrico, and make off with the oak coffin and body inside. The crime took place somewhere around the Ides of March, in a small cemetery in northern Italy's wealthy lake district. The body was that of Enrico Cuccia, the man who was revered and reviled as the father of modern Italian capitalism. Cuccia, founder of Mediobanca, the Milan-based merchant bank that dominates Italian finance, died just last June at 92. The culprits tried to cover up the crime, closing up the tomb behind them. But Cuccia's elderly housekeeper, still on the family payroll, visited weekly to change the flowers and noticed that the tombstone had been cracked. Police and family members were summoned and found an empty chamber but few other clues.

The Italian papers went wild, speculating that Cuccia's body had been taken by the mafia, by satanic cultists, perhaps even his own family or business associates. Only two days after the robbery, Mediobanca investors ruled against reform of an institution that has become a symbol of the secretive and undemocratic style of capitalism in postwar Italy. No one embodied that style more than Cuccia, the master puppeteer of Italian finance. After half a century under his autocratic direction, Mediobanca had gained hold of controlling or influential shares in most of Italy's major private firms, from banks and insurance companies to giants like Fiat and Montedison. He was an all-powerful, mysterious figure, but who would have wanted his body?

The hunt is on to find the grave robbers and divine their motives. Mediobanca spokesmen deny reports that the bank board held a secret meeting to discuss the scandal only hours after the crack in Cuccia's tomb was discovered. No ransom note has turned up. In the village cemetery in Meina, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, police combed the tomb for clues and announced they had a new theory, but wouldn't say what it was. "This is an investigation we have to do in the office. It's secret, completely secret," prosecutor Fabrizio Argentieri told NEWSWEEK. But he would say this: "The crime was organized well and done with a maximum of attention [to detail]. They had a purpose."

Cuccia was a holdout against the forces modernizing European finance. Italy's largest investment bank, Mediobanca is one of the few that have not merged with larger international banks. Partly as a result, critics say, Mediobanca is in a decline that accelerated with Cuccia's death. Slow to pick up on the high-tech sectors, the bank managed only three of Italy's 49 initial public offerings last year. Onetime ally Fiat, the carmaker, turned to Goldman Sachs instead of Mediobanca to do a stock deal with General Motors. And when Mediobanca suggested merging two chemical and energy companies in which it is a major shareholder, investors in one of the firms, Montedison, rejected the merger. "No one would have dared tell Cuccia the things they're telling [CEO Vincenzo] Maranghi," said one Mediobanca insider. "People had a really hard time saying no to Cuccia."

Cuccia is often lionized as the father of Italian capitalism, but he began his career as a creature of the Italian Treasury. Formed in 1946 by Italy's three largest state-owned banks to provide medium- and, later, long-term financing for industry and business, Mediobanca was led by Cuccia from the start. He managed to maintain a reputation for absolute integrity even during Tangentopoli, the scandal involving business bribes to politicians that convulsed Italy in the 1980s and '90s. Cuccia leveraged his reputation when he took Mediobanca public in 1988, with a syndicate that took 50 percent ownership and gave Cuccia virtually total control. "He was a powerful figure," said Giorgio La Malfa, leader of the Republican Party and an old friend and associate of Cuccia. "He could make a deal or prevent a deal just by saying he could not agree with that. Shareholders were happy, the bank was fruitful and they did what Mr. Cuccia wanted them to do."

Still partly state-owned, Mediobanca had an inside track in the wave of privatizations that are still transforming Italian business. But the art of the deal was everything, and Cuccia didn't hesitate to pit Mediobanca's own holdings against one another. Mediobanca first managed the privatization of Telecom Italia, and then engineered its takeover by the much smaller Olivetti computer firm. Even today, Mediobanca has major stakes in 65 firms, most of them Italian, and many of the stakes are large enough to dictate management decisions and board appointments. When he died last summer, former prime minister Giulio Andreotti remarked, "At ...