1979

February 16, Milan
Pierluigi Torregiani, 42 years old, goldsmith

Antecedent

Pier Luigi Torregiani was a jeweler owner of a small exercise in the northern outskirts of Milan, in via Mercantini, in the ‘Bovisa’ district. Active in public life, the night before he was killed he had participated in a dinner and award ceremony, as a sports sponsor, of the Silver Saracinesca Award, awarded to the Milan goalkeeper Enrico Albertosi. He had received the Golden Ambrogino, in the form of the Certificate of Civic Benemerenza, from the mayor Carlo Tognoli, for his commitment to social and philanthropy, a prize also granted to his son Alberto in later years; a similar recognition to memory, but more prestigious (Gold Medal) will be proposed in 2011-12. Sick of lung cancer, to be treated he had to attend a Milanese hospital in the previous years where he befriended Teresa, a widow with three underage children, who was also sick. Upon the woman’s death, Torregiani and his wife adopted their three children: Anna, Marisa and Alberto.

Giuseppe Memeo, one of the material executors of the murder of Torregiani, portrayed in the famous image-symbol of the years of lead, taken by Paolo Pedrizzetti, as he targets the police during the clash in via De Amicis in Milan (1977)

On the evening of January 22, 1979, after an exhibition of jewelry on a private television, Torregiani suffered an attempted robbery by some thugs while he was having dinner in a pizzeria, the restaurant Il Transatlantico, in via Marcello Malpighi together with family and friends.

Torregiani and one of his companions, also armed, reacted to the attempted robbery: a scuffle was born with a consequent shooting that caused the death of one of the robbers, Orazio Daidone, 34 years old and an patron, Vincenzo Consoli, a merchant from Catania[5], as well as the wounding of other people, including Torregiani himself.[ 2][6] Another of the customers was injured. According to his son, the deadly shots that killed Daidone and Consuls did not start from the jeweler’s gun.

Alberto Torregiani argues that the PACs chose his father as a victim because he had been defamed by the local press and presented as a “justifier” (in a headline on la Repubblica) and “sheriff” against the “proletarian expropriators”: “The rectification letter that my father sent to the Notte and la Repubblica, who had described him as a headhunter hunting for robbers, was useless.” He was assigned an escort, but on the afternoon of the ambush he must leave him to rush to the scene of a robbery.

According to Cesare Battisti, a member of the PAC and one of the convicts, they considered Torregiani, like Lino Sabbadin, who would be killed the same day, as ‘far-right men who practiced self-defense, who were always armed (a kind of militia)’, ‘far-right justices’ and the ‘counter-guerrilla’, practicing summary justice. Later, the jeweler suffered several threats.

The murder

Funeral of Pierluigi Torregiani

The following February 16, while he was opening the store with his children, he was the victim of an ambush by a group of fire made up of three members of the Proletarians Armed for Communism, Giuseppe Memeo, Gabriele Grimaldi[9] (son of Laura Grimaldi) and Sebastiano Masala, intent on avenging the death of the robber who was killed in the restaurant. Torregiani attempted a reaction but was hit by Memeo as soon as he pulled out his gun, from which a bullet started that reached his fifteen-year-old son Alberto in the spine, making him paraplegic. Torregiani was finished with a blow to the head by Grimaldi, after which the three terrorists fled.

The following 5 March the terrorist group, with an anonymous phone call to a journalist in Milan, indicated the place where the latter would find a statement claiming the fact in which, in addition to declaring themselves strangers to the wounding of Torregiani’s son, for which they expressed regret, the terrorists declared that the action was aimed at ‘conquering political hegemony over the small underworld’, otherwise destined to end up ‘…under the hegemony of the great underworld historically entwined with the power of capital’. This and the contemporary Sabbathin crime are then signed by the Communist Nuclei for the Proletarian Guerrilla through the flyer left in a telephone booth in Piazza Cavour in Milan. After the murder, the members of the PAC Sisinnio Bitti and Marco Masala were arrested.

Process

Trial of Cesare Battisti and other members of the PAC (Frosinone, 1981)

Giuseppe Memeo (cumulative penalty of 30 years) and Gabriele Grimaldi were convicted as material executors, and Sebastiano Masala as a competitor. For moral competition, as a participant in the meeting in which the murder was decided and therefore as co-creator and co-organizer, Cesare Battisti (13 years old, then life imprisonment on appeal for other murders) and others such as Sante Fatone and Luigi Lavazza were convicted. As instigators of the attack were recognized the members of the leadership team of the PACs, including Arrigo Cavallina and Pietro Mutti, who had reduced sentences because they became repentant: Mutti served 8 years for several crimes, Cavallina 12 (of the 22 initials), because he was dissociated and because it was recognized that he, together with Luigi Bergamin had tried to prevent the consent to the Torregiani crime.

Some PAC militants claimed to have suffered heavy torture, to make them reveal the culprits of the Torregiani murder. However, Battisti also reiterated that no one, not even under threat or torture, has ever made his name as the executor of the murders, except Pietro Mutti, in exchange for penalty discounts. Mutti also had Sisinnio Bitti arrested for the murder of Torregiani, then found not involved (he will only have a minor penalty) and a victim of police violence, together with other members of the Collective Politico della Barona, a group linked to the Autonomy Workers, which according to the investigators was linked to the PACs.

The autonomous Sisinnio Bitti, Umberto Lucarelli, Roberto Villa, Gioacchino Vitrani, Annamaria and Michele Fatone (brothers of Sante Fatone of the PAC, but not involved) will present exposed to the Judicial Authority for having suffered violence by the police[16]. Valerio Evangelisti, a writer friend of Battisti, reports that at least ten people would have confessed, under torture, that they were the material authors of the Torregiani murder. Moreover, Battisti’s own lawyer could not have built an effective defense as he was arrested because he was accused of complicity with his clients. Battisti was defended by an ex officio lawyer.[ 17] Among the witnesses in charge of some PAC defendants were also a fifteen-year-old girl, Rita Vitrani, induced to testify against her uncle Sante Fatone, and declared psychopathic by the experts; she was then temporarily arrested together with her brother in 1984, during the capture and injury of Fatone. Another witness, Walter Andreatta, fell into a state of confusion and was called ‘unbalanced’ and a victim of serious depressive crises by the same court experts. If Battisti declared himself innocent, Memeo, Grimaldi and Masala took responsibility for the Torregiani crime and never retracted.