1975

April 15, Milan
Carlo Saronio, 26 years old, engineer

Brilliant boy, a top-grade graduate in chemical engineering, Carlo only wants a family and children. This will cost him his life. In a Milan where the kidnappings were ordinary administration – on the morning of Carlo’s kidnapping, the jeweler Gianni Bulgari was freed and a few months earlier the little Daniele Alemagna, son of the patron of the panettone, had been kidnapped – exponents of a far-left terrorist group decide to ‘make a proletarian expropriation of a person to finance the armed struggle with redemption’.

On the evening of April 14, 1975, some elements of the Revolutionary Workers’ Armed Front, a group that had emerged from Potere Operaio, including a friend of Saronio’s, Carlo Fioroni, kidnapped the young man, helped by some men of the common underworld recruited for the occasion, including the former legionary Giustino De Vuono. Fioroni was known in his country for always shooting with an old Glisenti pistol unloaded in his pocket and was a former member of the Groups of Partisan Action of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

The purpose of the action was to extort from the family a rich ransom, which would go in part to the ‘manpower’ of the kidnapping and, in part, to finance the terrorist group. The contact between criminals and terrorists probably took place in prison. The group took Saronium, stunning it with chloroform. The incompet of the kidnappers, however, resulted in the death of the victim during the transfer to the place of detention, killed by a lethal dose of the vapors of the anesthetic.

The kidnappers initially asked for 5 billion lire. After some telephone negotiations through mediators, the family and the kidnappers agreed to pay a first installment of 470 million lire, paid blindly and without proof of Saronius’ health.

Saronio’s body was only found in 1979, thanks to the collaboration of Carlo Casirati, one of the common criminals who had participated in the kidnapping.