1978

January 4, Piedimonte S. German (FR)
Carmine De Rosa, 51, head of the security services of Fiat di Cassino

Political murder enters the factory, for the first time the victim is a Fiat executive. Killed by five machine gunshots. Carmine De Rosa, head of industrial safety at the Piedemonte San Germano plant, was murdered at 8 a.m. at the wheel of his car, while he was about to go to work. Next to him sat Giuseppe Porta, 61, his friend and superior, wounded in the right calf by a bullet perhaps exploded by a gun.
Two young people shot and killed, who acted with their faces uncovered. They fled on a green ‘125’, where an accomplice was waiting for them. In the early afternoon the deadly attack was claimed by the ‘Armed Workers for Communism’ with a phone call that came to the editorial staff of the Messenger of Frosinone. ‘We executed a fascist criminal,’ a voice said, and added the signature. An inappropriate definition: there is no neo-fascist membership of Carmine De Rosa.
The acronym is not new. It had already been used – the investigators say – by another anonymous interlocutor in April ’76. Then a phone call preceded a flyer of the ‘Proletarian Armed Teams’, which claimed the attack against Stefano Pettinotti, a head of the painting workshop. A still unknown terrorist injured him in the legs with a few gunshots. On that occasion the ‘Armed Workers for Communism’ appeared as the ‘Internal Core’ at the Fiat plant in Piedemonte San Germano. A kind of ‘subsidiary’ of a larger organization that called itself ‘Proletary Armed Teams’, under the emblem of the five-pointed star of the ‘red brigades’. by La Stampa of January 5, 1979, signed by Silvana Mazzocchi
The murder of Carmine De Rosa is a more important episode than the scarce traces he has left in his historical memory. Because in addition to being the first murder of a Fiat executive, it is also the first “political” murder carried out by the “autonomous” armed galaxy, a couple of months before the kidnapping of Moro and the “slaughter” of via Fani. The two previous ambings, the work of First Line militants, were in fact hot ‘reprisals’. The Missino provincial councilor Enrico Pedenovi was killed to avenge Gaetano Amoroso, a Leninist Marxist militant stabbed to death by Milanese fascists. They killed the brigadier of Ps from Turin Ciotta in retaliation for the death of Francesco Lorusso in Bologna.
At the end of a complex procedural process, the only one convicted of moral concurrence in the murder was Paolo Ceriani Sebregondi. He was the southern leader of the Combatant Communist Formations, an armed group that escaped from the Organized Workers’ Autonomy. A group with a double “soul”: the national leader is Corrado Alunni, one of the founders of the Red Brigades, a coach of Sit Siemens. Escaped with Susanna Ronconi (who will become the leader of the First Line) and Fabrizio Pelli (who will die in prison of leukemia), in rupture with the strategic choice to “bring the attack to the heart of the state” in the name of a greater rooting of the armed struggle in the factory and on the territory, Alunni had become the head of the illegal network of “Rosso” and from there the new armed structure had germinated.