1978

February 14th, Rome
Riccardo Palma, 62 years old, magistrate, Head of the penitentiary building office of the Directorate General of the Institutes of Prevention and Punishment of the Ministry of Justice

We are in Rome in via Forlì, a few steps from the Teatro delle Muse. It is February 14, 1978. Riccardo Palma left the house and reached his car. Suddenly a burst of light machine guns fall on him. She dies hit by seventeen bullets. Later, during the same day, the attack was claimed by the Red Brigades with a statement issued in various cities, in which the magistrate was attacked in his capacity as head of the Ministerial Office that dealt with prison construction, claiming that he was pursuing a ‘scientific design of the total destruction of communists and proletarians detained through the application in prisons of the most modern techniques tested by international imperialism’.

But who was Riccardo Palma?

Judge in Abruzzo first, then prosecutor in Rome, deputy attorney general in Milan, Palma was director of Office VIII of the Directorate General of the Institutes of Prevention and Punishment (the current Department of the Penitentiary Administration of the Ministry of Justice) in charge of penitentiary building practices. Dealing with penitentiary construction, costs, time, testing of the works became in the delirium of brigade to deal with ‘special prisons’, ‘being a servant of multinationals’.

Subsequent investigations brought back the planning and implementation of the attack on members of the “Roman column” of the BR. It was understood how to carry out the attack was initially planned by the then twenty-one-year-old terrorist Raimondo Etro, whose identity was hidden for many years under the name of ‘Carletto’. It was ascertained that in reality to kill Palma was Prospero Gallinari, who was replaced in Etro at the last moment. Terrorist Alvaro Lojacono was also suspected of having participated in the attack. Etro, arrested in June 1994, in the “Moro-quinquies” trial, which began in the bunker room of the Rebibbia prison on May 9, 1995, was charged not only with competition in the kidnapping, in the murder of the escort and in the murder of Mr. Aldo Moro, also of competition in the murder of Palma. On October 28, 1998, the first Court of Appeal in Rome sentenced Etro to 20 years and 6 months in prison. Prospero Gallinari, sentenced to various sentences, including three life sentences, for multiple murders over the years of lead, after being under house arrest for health reasons since 1996, died of natural causes in January 2013.