1980

March 19, Milan
Guido Galli, 47 years old, magistrate and Professor of Criminology at the State University of Milan

From the autobiography of Armando Spataro, who, despite their different roles, he as PM and Galli as examining judge, was his closest collaborator in anti-terrorism investigations:

“[Guido Galli] was killed on March 19, 1980, in front of the classroom at the State University of Milan where he was waiting to enter to give his lecture. He was forty-eight years old. I remember those hours as if I were living them now: on the morning of March 19, Guido tells me that at noon he needs to go home because it’s St. Joseph’s Day and they are celebrating his son’s name day. Even that day, I accompanied him home with my security detail. He tells me he will go to the university in the afternoon and that we would meet again in the office afterwards, as we did almost every day. So I wait for him in my room: it’s already afternoon. Mario Lo Schiavo, the head of the Digos, calls me: ‘Armando, run to the university, the State…’ I understand immediately. I don’t let him finish, I leave the office screaming and run on foot to the State University, a short distance from the courthouse. There aren’t many people yet, I remember two captains of the carabinieri (one is Sandro Ruffino) and a Digos officer trying to keep me away from Guido Galli because they know what he meant to me. My true teacher, the older brother I never had. He’s lying on the ground, in front of classroom 305 where he was supposed to give his lecture, with the code book open less than half a meter from him, near his hand. On his phone book, it says: ‘If something happens to me, call Armando Spataro tel. n…’. I still have a photocopy of that page. His daughter Alessandra attends the Law Faculty and is at the State University that day. She learns about the attack and approaches her father. Her friends gather around her. The ‘Corriere della Sera’ publishes the next day, on the front page, a photo of the corridor of the State University where the murder took place: the open code book, still on the ground, is in the foreground. Below the photo, an article by Giovanni Testori says: ‘The code that fell from his hand remains open in front of the terrified eyes of the young and all of us. Open to tell us what? That the law of human coexistence is stronger than any Cain…’.
In October 1980, when Marco Barbone began to collaborate, we learned that Guido could have died the day before, March 18: Barbone himself, Paolo Morandini, Daniele Laus, and Manfredi De Stefano (later members of the 28th March Brigade) were under his house, armed and with a stolen car, ready to kill him. A delay in Guido leaving his house gave him another twenty-four hours of life. Thus, Galli was the first and most important target of the Milanese terrorists.
I didn’t have the time to speak to his students, but I had the fortune to be the supervising magistrate for the internship of two of the ‘Galli children,’ Alessandra and Carla, our colleagues, two of the best listeners I’ve ever had the fortune to follow, so different from each other but both equal to Guido. I hope I have transmitted to them even a small part of what Guido taught me. The murder reunited the magistrates of Milan. Even the examining judges, as we at the Prosecutor’s Office had done after Emilio’s death, sent a document to the CSM asking that the office be equipped with adequate and modern work tools that were lacking and that ‘at-risk’ magistrates be subjected to security measures. ‘Repubblica’ also wrote that a first moment of unity was achieved when a group of examining judges climbed the stairs to the upper floor, to the Prosecutor’s Office. Destination: the office of Deputy Prosecutor Armando Spataro.
On Sunday, ‘il manifesto’ in an article had indicated Spataro as the ‘shadow office chief’ of the Milan Prosecutor’s Office, accusing him of centralizing the terrorism investigations. And the examining judges wanted to express their solidarity with Armando Spataro. I would never forget that. I discovered many other things about Guido later: Bianca, his wife, showed me, for example, the beautiful drawings Guido made. He had a passion: he drew battlefields and armies lined up against each other. Weapons and uniforms drawn incredibly precisely. Drawing was a true passion for him.
Fifteen days before his death, he sent me a postcard from the Passo del Tonale: above the signature, the drawing of a skier (him) under the sun and that of a magistrate in a robe (me) speaking to the Court. I later saw many photographs of Guido and all of us friends have one of him sitting and smiling – as always – in the mountains. In an interview with Ibio Paolucci of ‘l’Unità,’ even Bianca remembered that day: they were celebrating the name day of their son Giuseppe and Guido’s mother and had also invited the grandparents to their home. There were two cakes at home that March 19, one for lunch and the other for dinner, but Guido could only enjoy the first one and celebrate only once. And his father, a week later, sent a letter and a gift to my wife: ‘Dear Mrs. Spataro, I met your husband in these sad days and I understood why and how there was a brotherly friendship between him and Guido. For this reason, I ask you and your husband to accept this package that I enclose. They are two placemats – they are not new – we used them my wife and I at noon on Wednesday the 19th, a few hours before they killed Guido. I had given them to Guido’s mother for her name day, which we were to celebrate in the evening at Bianca’s house with Guido and his beautiful children. Please use these rags, together with your husband […] and tell him that Guido helped me forgive the wicked.’
Guido Galli had written a letter to his father in 1957 to explain why he decided to become a magistrate and not an entrepreneur: ‘Because you see, dad, I have never thought of big clients or beautiful sentences or books: I have thought, above all, and I beg you to believe that I speak the truth as perhaps I have never said it in my life, of a job that could give me the great satisfaction of doing something for others.’
A few months later, we arrested the killers: to two heads of Prima Linea in Milan (Bruno La Ronga and Silveria Russo), I asked why they had killed someone like Guido. After insulting me, the woman said they would only talk if there were no other people in the room and if I promised not to tell anyone about that conversation. I agreed: they told me that they well knew who Guido was, that they had their sources in the courthouse. They knew, therefore, that he was the true mastermind of anti-terrorism in Milan and that I was only a tool in his refined hands; they knew that he would move to the Prosecutor’s Office. Referring to Alessandrini and Galli, they said that it was men like them who legitimized the institutions, not the vile repressors (and I believe they placed me among these). I met Silveria Russo again many years later; she is a different person. I would be willing to talk to her about her children and her life; while I could not do it with a witness I still remember: he was a fairly educated young man (moreover, a student of Guido), whose father sold bicycles. A ‘penitent’ – Fiammetta Bertani – told us, fifty days after the murder, that in that shop she and others had bought the bicycles used for the escape in the maze of alleys around the University of Milan.
I heard him as a witness and he denied everything; I told him that someone had already confessed and that I only needed corroboration, that he, for example, should try to recognize some photos. He replied – and so did his father later – that he didn’t want to be involved in these things also because ‘if they killed Galli there must have been some reason.’ He stayed in jail, as did his father. I don’t remember the young man’s name, but I can’t forget the anger of that day.
I remember many other things after March 19: a work meeting in Parma, a few days after the murder, me still being mentally absent and Piero Vigna shaking me (once and for all) by gripping my arm and saying sharply and loudly: ‘Oh Armando!’; me and Giuliano Turone (our friendship and esteem had cooled a bit due to some disagreements on how to conduct the investigations on the Torregiani murder) finding ourselves in Guido’s office, where I had accompanied Bianca to collect her husband’s belongings, and hugging each other crying after Gerardo D’Ambrosio had asked us to look each other in the eyes. And I remember the pain and anger that assailed me while, in June 1980, I signed eight arrest warrants against those responsible for Guido’s murder, before the trial was transferred to Turin.”
**March 19, 1980: Patrizio Peci from the Red Brigades had just started collaborating. In April 1980, Roberto Sandalo from Prima Linea began to do the same, followed in the fall, as I mentioned earlier, by Marco Barbone and Michele Viscardi, also from Prima Linea, one of the material authors of the murders of Alessandrini and Galli; and then many others. On June 21, 1980, the Court of Assizes of Milan sentenced Corrado Alunni to twenty-nine years in prison and his accomplices to sentences ranging from twenty to twenty-eight years. The convictions were confirmed on appeal. Terrorism was on the verge of being swept away, but that 1980 was a horrible year for Italy, not just because of the Bologna massacre on August 2. If Sandalo had spoken a month earlier… Guido would be alive. If Guido had not gone to the university that afternoon… if I had gone to speak at the university that afternoon, with my escort… if the Alunni trial, formalized, had ended up with another examining judge… if… if…
Your light will annihilate the darkness in which you struggle (This is written on the plaque that Guido’s family wanted in the courthouse in Milan, on the second floor, next to the small door of his little office.)
Today, March 19, 1980, at 4:50 pm, a firing squad of the communist organization Prima Linea executed Judge Guido Galli of the examining office of the Milan court with three .38 Spl caliber shots […]. Galli belongs to the reformist and guarantor faction of the judiciary, personally committed to the battle to rebuild the Milan examining office as an efficient judicial work center, adequate to the needs of restructuring, a new division of labor within the judicial apparatus, and to the necessity of coping with the increasing contradictions of the magistrates’ work in the face of the expanding intervention fields, in the face of the simultaneous growing paralysis of the legislative production work of the chambers […].
(This is written in the Prima Linea communiqué claiming responsibility for the killing of Guido Galli, which paradoxically contains a high and unintended praise of him.) Guido lying on the ground, in the university corridor, in front of the classroom where he was about to give a lecture. He had the codebook next to him, on the floor. This is the image that keeps coming to my mind. And I can’t help but evoke it, even at the risk of appearing rhetorical, when I remember him in public or at conferences discussing the methods of fighting terrorism. A lump, then, tightens my throat and the audience listening to me – small or large as it may be – is forced, embarrassed and silent, to wait for it to pass. But I feel them close, involved, respectful, and this helps me a lot. And often, to overcome the impasse, I think of that Prime Minister who, in 2005, declared to the foreign press: ‘You can’t expect governments to fight terrorism with the codebook in hand.’
Here: the anger reanimates me and, always thinking of Guido and that codebook that was the guiding star of his life, I tell myself that perhaps that Prime Minister did not realize the gravity of what he was saying, perhaps he knew nothing of Galli or – more likely – he ignores that one can consciously accept the risk of one’s end only to defend the meaning of the law. The anger thus dissolves that knot. I resume talking about Guido, the audience overcomes its embarrassment, encourages me, and I manage to get to the end.
Armando Spataro