Notes on the Death of Alfredo Frisina

In the early afternoon of August 10, 1934, a gunshot rang out in the restaurant of the Bel Air Hotel in Georgetown, British Guiana. Zepherina Roach, a maid at the hotel, walked nervously down a staircase to investigate. As she rounded a corner near the hotel bar, she saw a young man running towards her. His shirt was covered in blood, and he was calling for a doctor. Roach hurried to find help, but it was of no use. “I returned downstairs about 10 minutes after,” she later testified, “and saw this gentleman lying on the ball-room floor. He was dead.”

I first came across the story of Alfredo Frisina’s death in a Colonial Office file at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. The file, an overview of the investigation into Frisina’s death, gave some background on his life. Born in 1899 in Egypt, Frisina was an Italian drug smuggler with a network stretching from Shanghai to Rio de Janeiro. But why had he come to Georgetown? And who shot him? The main clues I had to answer these questions came from excerpts of Frisina’s diary—the diary itself was nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, these fragments revealed his worldwide itineraries, criminal network, and smuggling routes.

Frisina’s story stuck with me, but subsequent searches led to similar dead ends. Was there any value in trying to recover his story? Even if I was able to pull these fragmented sources together, how could I do so without reinscribing the naturalized coherence of the archive? Rather than trying to narrativize Frisina’s story, this paper considers the strategic composition of the Frisina file itself. By focusing on the ideological and linguistic processes that produced this collection of sources, the paper offers a model for writing history in the face of archival fragmentation.