1978

October 10, Rome
Girolamo Tartaglione, 65, Magistrate Director General of Criminal Affairs at the Ministry of Justice

Eight months after Judge Riccardo Palma, the Red Brigades murdered in Rome another magistrate of the Ministry of Grace and Justice: Girolamo Tartaglione, a 65-year-old Neapolitan gentleman, Director General of Criminal Affairs. During the kidnapping Moro had opposed the granting of the pardon to Paola Besuschio, a former student of Sociology in Trento, proposed for an exchange of prisoners with the president of the Dc.

The dynamics of the amney

At 14.15 on October 10, 1978 – one Tuesday – two killers waited for him in front of the elevator of the condominium where he lived: a former Incis building in via delle Milizie 76 in the elegant Prati district. Although 142 families live there, no one saw anything. The hitmen went away, as with many other crimes of those years, without a trace, being quietly swallowed up by Roman trafficking: one of the murderers never even ended up in prison. Tartaglione didn’t have the escort. Yet he feared for his life. He knew that the function he exercised – the terrorists were campaigning against special prisons – exposed him to very serious risks. “It’s like traveling at 150 an hour on the highway and if a tire bursts you’re dead, there’s nothing you can do,” he had confided to a friend some time earlier.

He went to work by bus without an escort

The state lived the most distressing days of the Republic, but Dr. Tartaglione went to the office in Via Arenula by bus. Rome (first in the Supreme Court, then at the ministry) had been a landing place after a long career as a magistrate in the judicial districts of the South. Carlo Rivolta on Repubblica wrote an impeccable chronicle. The murderers, one of them dressed in a Saharan and a Basque, as the doorman noticed who asked them where they were going, placed themselves in the shadow of the elevator of staircase number 3. Here they fired two shots at the back of his head, Tartarglione fell losing his glasses that flew meters away; then the brigadists ran away, carrying the magistrate’s bag full of cards with them. Waiting for them, at the entrance, an accomplice; outside, parked in the second row, a small-displacement car, ready to disemble; a woman on the moped had followed the judge from the ministry to Via delle Milizie. Next to it is one of the largest barracks of the carabinieri of Rome. The brigadists made a mockery of it in their claim flyer.

He was not a public figure

Dr. Tartaglione did not appear in the newspapers. He was not a public figure. This detail, the same as Dr. Palma, long authorized the suspicion that there was a mole at the ministry (years later an official was also arrested, but the charges against her already fell under investigation). ‘My brother was deeply Catholic, and he never wanted the escort because he didn’t want innocent victims,’ his sister Maria explained to Giampaolo Tucci dell’Unità in 1993.

It took years to shed light on the crime. When Patrizio Peci repented, in the spring of 1980, Giancarlo Caselli immediately asked him if he knew the murderers of Tartaglione. He didn’t know anything about it. It had been “a thing” of the Roman column and the Br were now rigidly organized by compartments. It was later learned that the first target had been Alfredo Vincenti, another judge serving in the ministry, but at a certain point in the internal investigation the head of the column Prospero Gallinari said that it was not good and indicated in Tartaglione a goal of greater political importance.

To act Casimirri and Lojacono

The decisive meeting was held a few days earlier in a restaurant at the Aventino, the Cafè du Parc. There the assignments were distributed: Alessio Casimirri was the designated killer; Alvaro Lojacono would have performed cover tasks entering the palace with the Sahara and the fake mustache; Adriana Faranda was the woman the judge met entering the building; at the wheel of the black car Massimo Cianfanelli was waiting for them; Rita Algranati, Casimirri’s wife, was the lookout on the scooter. It was Casimirri who killed materially. Going out the doorman asked if by chance they had shot. And Lojacono: “No, it doesn’t seem like it to me.” They found the claim in a basket in Via del Tritone: ‘Tartaglione an expert among the experts, engaged against the proletarians in the courts and prisons’.

When it was learned how things had gone, it was too late. Casimirri was already sheltered – in 1983 – in Nicaragua and, although encumbered by six life sentences including the one for the Moro crime, he never went to jail. He is a restaurateur. Lojacono lives in French-speaking Switzerland after he took Swiss citizenship in 1986 thanks to his mother from Ticino. Perhaps the family lineages weighed; Casimirri is the son of an official of the Vatican press room. Both cannot be extradited.