1977

May 14th, Milan
Antonio Custra, 25 years old, Deputy Brigadier of Public Security

The murder of Antonio Custra was committed in Milan on May 14, 1977 (the death actually occurred in the early hours of the following day at the Policlinico di Milano where the non-commissioned officer had been hospitalized in desperate condition, as reported by both Corriere della Sera and the magazine Fiamme d’Oro. To protest against the arrest of two lawyers, Giovanni Cappelli and Sergio Spazzali, enrolled in Soccorso Rosso Militante, two days after the incident, on May 14 in Milan a demonstration was called by some militants belonging to organizations of the extra-parliamentary left. Around 17:00 the procession of protesters coming from the San Vittore prison and heading to Piazza del Duomo, once they arrived near Via De Amicis, was intercepted by the agents of the celere.
In a short time the demonstration degenerated into a real battle and the autonomous began to open fire on the officers. Agent Custra, lined up with the rest of his department, was hit in the face by one of the bullets exploded with a Beretta pistol 7.65 by the autonomous, who pierced the visor of his helmet, killing him.
During the event, thanks to the presence of several photographers, some photos were taken which were then published in the following days by all the newspapers of the time. One of all, which showed an autonomous, Giuseppe Memeo, in the act of holding with two hands a gun, pointed at the height of a man, became one of the symbols of the street violence of the years of lead and the degeneration of the political clash, which went from the street demonstrations to Molotov bombs and the use of firearms.
Ten years later, starting from that photo, the investigation was reopened and the culprit was identified in Mario Ferrandi, a left-wing militant, then passed into the ranks of the First Line and finally dissociated, who was convicted of competition in the murder of the vice brigadier. For moral competition in the murder, Giuseppe Memeo and Walter Grecchi were also sentenced to 14 years in prison. After being convicted and atone for 4 years of maximum security prison in Italy, Grecchi, who recognized himself in one of the young masks photographed, but always claimed to have never shot, lives a fugitive in France.
In February 2012, Maurizio Azzollini, another of the men identified among those masked and photographed that day in the act of shooting at the agents, became a close collaborator of the deputy mayor of Milan Maria Grazia Guida. A fifth self-employed person, involved and sentenced to 15 years, Pietro Mancini, fled to Brazil and in 2009 obtained the statute of limitations by the Court of Assizes of Milan. Thirty years after the fact, Ferrandi met in Milan, at the scene of the shooting, the daughter of the murdered agent, Antonia. Antonia was one who wanted to understand. Without secrets, without omissions, without cheating. She had found herself an orphan before being born, in San Giorgio a Cremano. And her mother, who had gone to the funeral with her belly, dressed in black, and confined herself to the house, had chosen her father’s name for her: ‘That bullet killed dad, mom, who is a withered flower, and me, who was born already dead, with a life colored black.’ Yet, in some way, ‘Antonia had been able to find the colors again’, as former terrorist Mario Ferrandi says. ‘She is one who fought thoroughly, even against the disease. And he also struggled to work in the police, like his father. She was a scavenger and she was busy, competition after competition. I learned of his death from Facebook. Sometimes we talked, and it will be a phrase made, but that she dies at 40, one like her is really an injustice.’ That to remember Antonia, daughter of a victim of the ‘years of lead’, she can be one with Ferrandi’s past can be annoying. But it is also through the former terrorist — who was 21 years old and the code name ‘Rabbit’ when his ‘Collective Romana’ shot and killed — that one can better understand Antonia’s choice. And also a piece of our history. There is always a leap to the past, but more recent, in the spring of 2007. There is another photo, you can see Ferrandi, who had then passed 50, had been in prison, and lived on precarious jobs, and the thirty-year-old Antonia who meet in via De Amicis. Right in the places of death, and bullets. It was Mario Calabresi, who was writing ‘Spindo la notte further’, who told the girl the new judicial details of the tragedy and for Antonia it had been like opening a dam. He had nothing about his father, other than the sometimes unbearable weight of the absence, more of a ‘some name to hate’ side. He juggled anorexia and bulimia, a complicated youth, but I ‘wanted to heal’. And the opportunity had come in the most unexpected way: with a phone call on a TV program, favored by Don Antonio Mazzi, who had been the first ‘employer’ of Ferrandi. A vaguely absurd proposal had bloomed like this, in public. But Antonia and what had been ‘Rabit’ had believed it. And they had gone together to the crime scene, and there Antonio’s daughter had felt ‘a very strong pain’, but also – these are his words – ‘dad next to me’. As much as everything was and can be very complicated and unspeakable, Antonia wanted to end that exaggerated and crucial meeting by giving the former terrorist a photo of her father. Not in uniform, but as a smiling young groom. ‘I have it, God forbid, I know that we snatched her dad and she gave me great good, and at least I managed to tell her, that she was a great soul.’ It will not be surprising to know that when Ferrandi asked for and obtained ‘rehabilitation’, Antonia gave her favorable opinion to the judges: ‘I know that the terrorists did not kill for money, or for a gain, but for wrong ideals, I do not want to hate anymore, I know that some have really changed.’ Not to be defeated, you know, is sometimes cancer: and so it happened to Antonia, in 2017, at just forty years old.