​​1972

May 17, Milan
Luigi Calabresi, 35 years old, Chief Commissioner of Public Security

On the morning of May 17, 1972, a commando killed Commissioner Luigi Calabresi in front of his house in Milan. Calabresi – deputy head of the political section at the Milan police station – was considered by some to be responsible for the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, who fell from a window on the fourth floor of the police station while he was undergoing interrogation for the Piazza Fontana massacre, in circumstances never completely clarified. It will be discovered later that the commissioner would not even have been present in the room at that moment. In those days on various walls we read ‘Calabresi murderer’ and Lotta Continua had pronounced these words: “This marine with the easy window will have to answer for everything. We are on his tail now, and it is useless for him to struggle like an angry buffalo […] Someone could demand that Calabresi be reported for forgery of a public document. We, who more modestly than these enemies of the people, want death.” That morning Calabresi was heading to the police station. A man got out of a parked car, approached him and fired two gunshots – one in the head and one in the back – before fleeing in a Fiat 125 where an accomplice was waiting for him. The following day, in an article in Lotta Continua we read: “Political murder is certainly not the decisive weapon for the emancipation of the masses from capitalist domination, just as clandestine armed action is certainly not the decisive form of the struggle of class in the phase we are going through: but these considerations cannot absolutely lead us to deplore the killing of Calabresi, an act in which the exploited recognize their desire for justice”.
When he died, Calabresi was 34 years old, with two small children and his wife was pregnant with his third. 200 thousand people attended his funeral, but for years the investigations into the murder led to nothing. The turning point came only in 1988 when Leonardo Marino, a former Lotta Continua militant, confessed to having participated in the assassination and named other people. On 28 July 1988 he was arrested together with Ovidio Bompressi, described as the perpetrator of the murder, Giorgio Pietrostefani and Adriano Sofri. The trial was long and complicated: the first instance ended with the conviction of all four defendants, which was confirmed on appeal but annulled with postponement by the Supreme Court. An acquittal was also achieved at the end of the second appeal, but again the Supreme Court annulled the sentence and a new trial was held, which ended with a conviction for everyone except Marino, for whom the statute of limitations had started. Despite numerous requests for review, the trial has not been reopened. Sofri served his sentence, Bompressi was granted pardon in the early 2000s while Pietrostefani took refuge in France. He was talked about again on 28 April 2021, when he was arrested as part of the “Red Shadows” operation together with other former terrorists