1979
April 19, Milan
Andrea Campagna, 25 years old, a Public Security agent at the Digos

Campagna was killed at the end of his shift, around 2 p.m. on April 19, 1979, in an ambush on Via Modica, in Barona, in front of his girlfriend’s house, as he was about to get into his car to drive his future father-in-law to work. Ambushed by a terrorist group, he was hit by five revolver shots, reported by the press to be armored .38 caliber; the attackers then fled in a Fiat 127. The subsequent claim was made by the Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC). In the claim, Campagna was referred to as a “proletarian torturer,” although in reality, the agent worked as a driver for DIGOS in Milan.
Investigators linked Campagna’s murder to that of Pierluigi Torregiani as they considered it plausible that the PAC had associated the slain agent with the case, as he had been filmed by television cameras at the scene of the arrest of some presumed suspects in the Torregiani case, who later turned out to be unrelated to the crime. Several other claims of responsibility for the attack on Campagna reached the newspapers, but a new claim from the PAC was deemed the most credible because they provided details – known only to investigators – about the firearm used; in fact, contrary to what was initially reported by the media, the caliber used by the group was not .38 special, but .357 Magnum.
In an operation the following June, the police arrested about forty suspects in various parts of Italy; in Milan, several weapons were found, including a .357 caliber gun, which suggested a connection between the Torregiani and Campagna cases and the case of Santoro, a marshal of prison guards killed in Udine. During a hearing in the Torregiani trial in 1981, some pentiti (former terrorists turned informants) stated that they believed a member of the hit squad that killed Torregiani was also involved in both murders. These claims were later supported by statements from two other pentiti, Pietro Mutti and Sante Fatone, who in the trial on the terrorist activities of the PAC in Milan confirmed the responsibilities of several defendants.
The verdict came in 1985 and was life imprisonment for Claudio Lavazza, Paola Filippi, Luigi Bergamin, Gabriele Grimaldi, and Cesare Battisti (the latter convicted in absentia, as although he was arrested during the mentioned raid in June 1979 in the apartment where the .357 Magnum was found, and sentenced to 13 years for his involvement in Torregiani’s murder, participation in an armed gang, and illegal possession of firearms, he was freed from detention at the Frosinone prison in October 1981 by an armed group, one member of which was a woman who turned out to be Battisti’s girlfriend, who had stormed the security facility; thirty years were given to five other defendants, while Mutti and Fatone received substantial sentence reductions and were sentenced to nine and a half years and nine years in prison respectively. Battisti was the material executor of the crime. Bergamin, as an accomplice, had his sentence reduced on appeal, and, evading authorities in France (like Battisti for a long period), he was granted prescription in 2021. Paola Filippi, having obtained French citizenship, was not extradited.