1980, May 27, Milan
Walter Tobagi, 33 years old, journalist
Walter Tobagi, a political and trade union journalist for the “Corriere della Sera,” was stationed on the frontlines of terrorism. He had left his home and was heading to the garage to get his car. A terrorist commando was waiting for him, confronted him, and killed him with five gunshots. Within a few months, the investigation led to the identification of the assassins, who belonged to the “Brigata 28 marzo,” an extreme-left terrorist group, which was formed after the killing, a few months earlier, of four Red Brigades in the “covo di via Fracchia” in Genoa.
The investigations revealed that the terrorists had identified Walter Tobagi as a “possible target” some time ago. For the Corriere della Sera, he had covered all the events related to the “years of lead” and had warned about the danger of the phenomenon taking root in factories and other workplaces. One of his last articles was titled “They are not invincible samurai.”
The night before his murder, he had attended a meeting at the Milan Press Club on the responsibility of journalists in the face of the terrorist bands’ offensive and referring to the long series of their attacks; the chronicles recall that he had said, “Who knows who will be next time.” Ten hours later, he was killed. Tobagi’s journalistic career began very early, after high school, at the Avanti and later at Avvenire. He was President of the Lombardy Association of Journalists. Later, he moved to Corriere della Sera where he dealt with issues related to terrorism, both black and red. Walter Tobagi was married to Maristella and had two children: Luca and Benedetta.
Marco Barbone, leader of the Brigata 28 Marzo, material killer of the journalist, was arrested in October 1980. He collaborated with the investigators, became a turncoat, and as a result of his statements, all the members of the organization were identified and arrested.
The memory of his colleague and friend Marco Volpati: If on May 28, 1980, Walter Tobagi had escaped the ambush of his young murderers, today he would be 76 years old. An age for pensioners, even if one cannot imagine such a lively spirit, such a fertile intelligence “in retirement”. Those who were his colleagues, friends, and comrades in political and trade union struggles find it hard to realize that among the Milanese and Lombard journalists, there are not many who had the privilege of knowing him and spending time with him. On violent and murderous terrorism, everything has now been said or almost; even if around many tragic events, including those of Tobagi and Moro, there remain obscure points on which some stubborn and courageous journalists, magistrates, and politicians continue virtuously to investigate.
The group of young aspiring brigatists struck a prestigious correspondent, who at the age of 33 signed on the front page of the Corriere della Sera, and was also president of the Lombardy Journalists’ Association, the category union: in the flyer claiming the murder this qualification is emphasized. A young family man who leads a very intense existence: he works for the newspaper, leads the press union, conducts studies of contemporary history, and publishes essays. Tobagi knows how to study, learn, deepen, understand reality, and share his research with readers. Since he was a boy, he practiced in the student newspaper of the Liceo Parini, and then, still a student, he wrote on specialized magazines about football and winter sports. Physical disciplines that he did not practice, but which he knew how to follow as competitive events. Then he grew up the passion for history, customs, political and trade union chronicles, up to the facts of terrorism that dominated in those years. He did it with scrupulousness, depth, courage, attention to all subjects. What condemned him, putting him in the crosshairs of his murderers, was certainly his willingness to see and listen to even the most bitter extremists, even sympathizers of terrorists. Walter’s exceptional trait was generosity: a young envoy of the leading Italian daily agrees to be the trade unionist, and spends days and nights to the benefit of colleagues, to achieve better working and living conditions for all of them. He has an extraordinary professional success, but he does not avoid civil commitment. In these times of individualism and exaggerated competitiveness, it is really the case to cultivate the memory and study of his work, his writings, deep and current reflections on the responsibilities and duties that the profession of journalist carries.
The attack and judicial developments
Tobagi was killed in Milan in via Salaino, at 11 am on May 28, 1980, with five gunshots fired by a “commando” of left-wing terrorists belonging to the Brigata XXVIII marzo (Marco Barbone, Paolo Morandini, Mario Marano, Francesco Giordano, Daniele Laus, and Manfredi De Stefano), most of whom were children of Milanese bourgeois families. Two members of the commando in particular come from the journalistic environment: they are Marco Barbone, son of Donato Barbone, editorial manager of the publishing house Sansoni (owned by the RCS group), and Paolo Morandini, son of the film critic Morando Morandini of the newspaper Il Giorno.
The shooters were Mario Marano and Marco Barbone. It is the latter who gave him what in his intentions should have been the coup de grace: when Tobagi was already lying on the ground, the terrorist approached him and fired a shot behind his left ear. In reality, according to the autopsy, the fatal shot was the second fired by the two killers, which hit the heart and caused the journalist’s death.
Within a few months of the murder, the investigations of the Carabinieri and the judiciary led to the identification of the assassins, and in particular to that of the leader of the newborn Brigata XXVIII marzo, the same Marco Barbone who, immediately after his arrest, on September 25, 1980, decided to collaborate with the investigators and thanks to his revelations the entire Brigata XXVIII marzo was dismantled and more than a hundred suspected left-wing terrorists, with whom Barbone had come into contact during his terrorist militancy, were imprisoned.
The 102 hearings of what was a maxi-process to the left-wing subversive area began on March 1, 1983, and ended on November 28 of the same year. The sentence aroused many controversies because Judge Cusumano, interpreting the law on turncoats differently from the Rome Court (where sentences of over twenty years in prison were nevertheless imposed on the repentant terrorists of the Communist Fighting Units), granted Marco Barbone, Mario Ferrandi, Umberto Mazzola, Paolo Morandini, Pio Pugliese, and Rocco Ricciardi “the benefit of temporary freedom by ordering their immediate release if not detained for other reasons”[, while the other members of the XXVIII marzo, De Stefano, Giordano, and Laus, were sentenced to thirty years in prison[7].
The investigations did not clarify the role played by Marco Barbone’s girlfriend, Caterina Rosenzweig, belonging to a wealthy Milanese family, daughter of the businessman Gianni and the principal Paola Sereni[9][10]. In 1978, that is, two years before the murder, Caterina Rosenzweig had long been following Tobagi, who was also her Modern History teacher at the University of Milan. Although she was arrested in September 1980 together with the others, Caterina was acquitted for lack of evidence, although during the trial it was established that the group of terrorists met at her home in Via Solferino, not far from the offices where Tobagi worked. After the trial, she moved to Brazil, where she had already lived because of her father’s business affairs, until she disappeared.
Controversial was the choice by the judiciary to organize a trial with over 150 defendants and related not only to Tobagi’s murder but to the entire area of left-wing subversion. This, according to Ugo Finetti, provincial secretary of the PSI, made the trial appear “a process that on paper should go on stage because little is said and badly about the victim and with the murderers mostly put on the bench not of the defendants, but of the accusers, because the script provides that the center of procedural attention concerns other facts and other people”. Marco Barbone was in fact chosen as the privileged referent, who, having turned immediately after arrest, began to provide a considerable amount of information about the environments of the “armed struggle”. This choice appears unusual considering that General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa in an interview with Panorama released on September 22, 1980 (three days before the terrorist’s arrest), mentions Tobagi’s murder and the XXVIII marzo Brigade and talks about having “[…] used the same technique adopted in Turin in ’74-’75 for the capture of Renato Curcio: maximum secrecy, even cultural knowledge of the opponent, infiltration.” That is, the forces of law and magistracy could already have a series of information related to the terrorist group and the crime. However, as already said, during the trial it was based on the statements of Barbone, who was not arrested as a suspect for murder[11] but on the following charges: membership in the FCC, Red Guerrilla and participation in the robbery of the City Police of Via Colletta. In the same interview, the general states that there are supporters of the XXVIII marzo Brigade among journalists.
Another oddity is the unusual uniformity of views between the PM and the defense of Barbone and the equally unusual opposition between the accusation and the civil party, which saw every request to clarify the dynamics of the crime