Prima Linea
Prima Linea was an Italian Marxist–Leninist terrorist group, active in the country from the late 1970s until the early 1980s.
Context
Following the 1969-70 large-scale series of industrial action in Northern Italy, the acts of civil disobedience and mass demonstrations often turned to violent confrontations between leftist militants and the law enforcement authorities of the Italian state. A period of unprecedented social conflict began in the urban centers of Italy began, with acts of violence carried out almost daily by both right- and left-wing organizations. Many militants from both extremes turned to urban guerrilla warfare, officially designated as terrorism.Background and creation
A movement of autonomist ideology was formulating among leftist youth in 1974, the same year that the organization Comitati comunisti per il potere operaio moved to establish a "military network". During the period between the spring and autumn of 1974, there was intense internal discourse among the ranks of the extra-parliamentary left organization Lotta Continua about its future course. Some militants, mostly members of the group's security service, and particularly those based in Milan, Turin, Naples, and Brianza, criticized the "too intellectual line" ostensibly followed by Lotta. They proposed instead a "more interventionist, insurrectionist initiative". The proposal was essentially equivalent to Lotta joining the "armed struggle" and, as such, was rejected by the leadership, a development that led to a split in the ranks. During approximately the same time, some former members of Potere Operaio, which had dissolved itself the previous year, came together with two groups of Milanese militants who had left Lotta Continua. By 1975, some of those who'd left Lotta had established connection and co-operation with militants from other formations of the extra-parliamentary left, besides Potere Operaio. They'd also began contacts with the people publishing the magazine of political discourse Senza Tregua, which was promoting "militant anti-fascism". In the autumn of 1976, and after numerous meetings, three formations of organized "military and insurrectionist combat" emerged: Comitati comunisti rivoluzionari, Unità comuniste combattenti, and ''Prima Linea.''Ideology and structure
According to analysis by the Italian state's internal security services, Prima Linea, instead of the "state-centric" approach, based on the "class-against-state" worldview of other militant groups, and particularly of the Red Brigades, supported a "social concept of the class war" shaped as a "historical conjunction between a fighting organization and the armed spontaneism of the masses". Therefore, rather than being the "vanguard of the working-class party", the Front Line aspired to "represent the vanguard component" of the masses, in "direct contact" with them.Hence, the name itself of the organization, representing a "semi-militarized force", dedicated to fight against ideological opponents and "defend communist comrades". Defining itself as a "pluralist and flat formation", Linea aimed to be less sectarian than the "military verticalism" of the Red Brigades and, in fact, far from the "elitist logic" of Leninists. Linea co-founder Enrico "Chicco" Galmozzi, wrote in a 2019 book that they attached "importance" to have workers inside the organization and "roots" in the factories.
Linea's leaders were Roberto Sandalo, Marco Donat-Cattin, Sergio D'Elia, Michele Viscardi, Enrico Galmozzi, Fabrizio Giai, Sergio Segio, Susanna Ronconi, Diego Forastieri, Roberto Rosso, Maurice Bignami, Bruno La Ronga, Giulia Borelli, and Silviera Russo. The organization, depending on the operation, sometimes used other names, such as Comitati Comunisti Combattenti, Brigate Comuniste Combattenti, and Ronde Proletarie, the latter name denoting the organization Ronde armate proletarie that had temporarily disbanded after assassinating lawyer and MSI supporter Enrico Pedenovi.
Major actions
The first time the organization acted militarily was in 1976, a year when other armed formations also appeared, such as Nuovi partigiani, Formazioni comuniste armate, and Potere comunista. On 29 November 1976, a group of five Linea members in Turin attacked the headquarters of the Fiat group. Three men and two women, all armed with pistols and assault rifles, stormed the Fiat offices, chained the employees present there, "expropriated" all the company money they found on the premises, and left, after writing with spray paint the name Prima Linea on the walls. The leaflet they left behind read in part as follows:We are not an emanation of other armed organizations, such as the Red Brigades or Nuclei Armati Proletari|the NAPs , but a union of guerrilla groups that have until today operated under different acronyms, our aim being to create and organize armed proletarian power.
Previous to that attack, the Linea grouping had committed its first assassination. On 29 April 1976, Bruno La Ronga, Giovanni Stefan, Pietro Del Giudice, and Enrico Galmozzi, at the time militants in Lotta Continua who, as was subsequently revealed, had also moved on to the armed struggle, in Prima Linea, ambushed in a gas station and killed Enrico Pedenovi, lawyer and member of the Italian Social Movement party. The attack took place on the first anniversary of the assassination of neofascist student Sergio Ramelli by members of Avanguardia Operaia. Pedenovi's assassination was possibly in retaliation to the fatal stabbing of communist activist Gaetano Amoroso by neofascists two days before. The next year, on 12 March 1977, a Linea unit assassinated 29-year old policeman Giuseppe Ciotta, in Turin.
In the spring of 1977, Enrico Galmozzi and six workers in the Magneti Marelli and Falck factories were arrested in Val Grande, above Verbania, while training and exercising in the use of arms. The episode, according to Sergio Segio, demonstrated that "arming the workers was not some abstract political propaganda but a reality concretely in place." In April, a number of Linea members met at San Michele a Torri, near Florence, to debate the organization's statutes and its internal structure.
In July of the same year, a Milanese unit robbed an armory shop in Tradate, in the province of Varese, and took forty pistols and some rifles. When they were getting into a car, the shop owner, Luigi Speroni, having freed himself from his bonds, came out of the store and started firing at the car with a shotgun. One member of the unit, Romano "Valerio" Tognini was killed instantly while another was seriously injured. The unit abandoned the lifeless body of Tognini in the woods. In a phone call to an Ansa journalist, the attackers identified themselves as "the communist fighting organization Prima Linea." They also gave the name of their fallen comrade, who was unrecognizable from the shooting. Tognini, the first member of Linea to be killed, was described in the media as a "quiet person," a Banco di Roma employee always "conservatively dressed" who did not seem to have any interest in politics.
On 20 January 1978, a group led by Sergio D'Elia, while attempting to liberate fellow members held at the Murate prison, faced a police patrol. In the firefight that followed, officer Dario Atzeni was hit by four bullets but subsequently survived after surgery. Another policeman managed to return fire at the terrorists, who then threw a grenade and ran away. The third member of the patrol, 23-year old policeman Fausto Dionisi, was killed. The Italian state honored Dionisi posthumously with the Award for Civil Valor. An elementary school in the city in which the policeman was killed and a street in Rome were given his name.
On 15 May 1978, in the Quarto Inferiore frazione of Bologna, Antonio Mazzotti, personnel director of the Menarini plant, a factory that had just come out of prolonged and "tough" dispute with the workers' union, was shot and injured by three armed individuals. Initially, the attack was attributed to the Red Brigades but eventually the signature name left behind on flyers pointed to Linea. The episode marked the end of the media's characterization of Bologna as a city immune from terrorism.
On 11 October 1978, four assailants, three men and one woman, shot and killed University of Naples criminology professor Alfredo Paolella in the garage of his Naples home, an act for which Linea for the first time directly assumed the responsibility. In 2020, in a commemoration ceremony, the president of the Benevento province described Paolella as someone among "those who were dedicated to the implementation of a prison system in line with the fundamental principles of a democratic state". At the time of his assassination, Paolella, as reported at the time, was working, along with magistrate Girolamo Tartaglione, assassinated the previous day by the Red Brigades, on a project whose aim was "to improve the living conditions of the prisoners." The executioners were subsequently identified to have been Susanna Ronconi, Nicola Solimano, Sonia Benedetti, Bruno La Ronga, and Felice Maresca. On 1 December 1978, outside a Milanese bar, Linea members Maurizio Baldasseroni and Oscar Tagliaferri, after an "evening of heavy drinking," killed three people with whom they had been arguing inside the bar about the merits of armed struggle in Italy. The pair of killers were refused endorsement of their act by the Linea leadership and left the country to disappear in South America.
Deputy prosecutor Emilio Alessandrini had become known since 1972 for leading the state's case against terrorists of the extreme right, such as the perpetrators of the Piazza Fontana massacre, as well as the extreme left. During his investigative work, Alessandrini had claimed the discovery of various "anomalies" in the work of the Italian intelligence services. On 29 January 1979, while driving to his workplace, he was shot dead by Sergio Segio and Marco Donat Cattin, who fired at the prosecutor, while Michele Viscardi and Umberto Mazzola acted as protective cover; Bruno Russo Palombi was the getaway driver. Hours after the attack, a call was made to Milanese newspapers, claiming the assassination by the "fire unit Romano Tognini 'Valerio' of the communist organization Prima Linea." The callers, in justifying the act, stated the following:
Alessandrini was one of the central figures that the capitalist command uses to re-establish itself as an efficient military and judicial machine and as a controller of social and proletarian behavior, on which intervenes when the proletarian struggle becomes antagonistic and subversive to the state's authority.
Beginning from 1979, the organization initiated also a campaign of wounding targets with gun shots, in actions such as the wounding of prison guard Raffaela Napolitano on 5 February, the shooting of Stanislao Salemme, a retired employee of the Social Security authority, on 22 June, the October crippling of Piercarlo Andreoletti, Praxis managing director, in Turin, the November raid of a youth detention center during which guard Sulvatore Castaldo was shot in the knees, and many others.
On 13 March 1979, a group of two men and one woman stormed the offices of the Emilia-Romagna Journalists Association in Bologna, forced an employee and a reporter's widow who happened to be there in a room and set fire to the premises. The group then left the building without any further action. The two persons who had been locked up managed to call for help and were rescued by the fire brigade. In the apartment upstairs, an old woman who lived there and her daughter escaped through the roof from the fire that engulfed the building. Graziella Fava, care taker of the old lady, fell unconscious from the smoke and was later found dead in the stairwell. The attack was claimed by "The Wild Cats," a name used by Prima Linea in honor of their fallen comrades.
On 11 December 1979, a Linea unit of "certainly more than ten persons," raided a corporate management school in Turin. They kneecapped five instructors and ten students, and left, leaving behind a message honoring two organization members, Matteo Caggegi and Barbara Azzaroni, who had been killed in a firefight with the police in March. Most of the injured instructors were Fiat managers. Student Giuseppe Dall'Occhio, 28 years old, was asked by a terrorist if he aims to become a manager. When the student answered affirmatively, the terrorist shot him in the leg, telling him "It's a bad job." Another student exclaimed that he came from the south of Italy to study so he could find a job, to which one of the armed women responded, "Go and steal."
On 5 February 1980, a year that has been described as annus horribilis in Italy, Giulia Borelli, Michele Viscardi, and Diego Forastieri, commanded by Bruno La Ronga, assassinated in Meda, Lombardy, Paolo Paoletti, head of Industrie Chimiche Meda Società Azionaria S.A., owners of the plant that had caused the 1976 serious industrial accident in Seveso. On 7 February 1980, William Waccher, a 26-year old surveyor from Battipaglia who used to be part of Linea's support & logistics network, was executed in a Milan street by his former comrades for treason. Wachher, in July of the same year, had turned himself in after his cousin, Linea member Claudio, was arrested. During his interrogation, Waccher had revealed the involvement in the organization of his cousin Claudio and given the names of Marco Fagiano and Bruno Russo Palombi, "figures of the first rank." He'd also provided information about a certain "Alberto," without knowing that it was the nom de guerre of Marco Donat Cattin.
On 19 March 1980, magistrate and academic Guido Galli was assassinated by a group in which were Sergio Segio, Maurice Bignami, and Michele Viscardi, among others. He was shot in the back and then finished off with two bullets in the head. The reason proclaimed by the organization, in a phone call to Ansa, was that Galli had been the lead investigator on Linea starting from September 1978, after the arrest of Corrado Alunni and the discovery of a safe house's contents in via Negroli, in Milan. The other reason given for the "death sentence" was that the magistrate had "engaged in the effort to restructure the educational bureau of the Milan judiciary and make it efficient and suited to the needs of ."
On 11 August 1980, Brigadiere Pietro Cuzzoli and Appuntato Ippolito Cortellessa of the Viterbo carabinieria, were killed in Ponte di Cetti, a few kilometers outside Rome. Their patrol had stopped a bus that was carrying among the other passengers six Linea members who had just robbed a bank in Viterbo and who engaged the officers in a firefight, during which terrorist Michele Viscardi was wounded and arrested. The two fallen officers were posthumously awarded the gold medal for Military Valor.
On 28 November 1980, two Linea members ambushed Giuseppe Filippo, chief of the Polizia di Stato, while he was returning home and shot him. Before leaving, they took his service pistol. The policeman died shortly after he was taken to the hospital.
Following the revelations of Sandalo to the investigators, several Linea militants were arrested, in October 1980, including Michele Viscardi, known as Miki dagli occhi di ghiaccio who was captured in Sorrento, "immediately repented," and began to collaborate with the police. On the basis of Viscardi's testimony, the police, in their words, "decapitated" Linea, arresting Susanna Ronconi and Roberto Rosso, and raiding five "safe houses" in Florence, Taranto, and Naples inside which the group kept documents and weapons. The police subsequently became aware of internal appeals circulated at the time within the organization in which the first proposals to "abandon the armed struggle" were made.
On 18 September 1981, Francesco Rucci, Brigadiere of the Corpo degli agenti di custodia prison police, while driving to work was executed by a group that identified itself in the flyers they left behind as "Communist Nuclei," a name that had been used for various operations by Linea. The text stated that Rucci had been "executed" for his work "at the first wing of the San Vittore Prison," because, there, the executioners claimed, he was "torturing communist prisoners." The crime was notable for the plethora of shots fired on the face of the human target, in an apparent intent to disfigure the body.
On 21 January 1982, at a carabinieri checkpoint on the Siena-Montalcino road, the carabinieri stopped for a "routine control" a bus on which seven terrorists were traveling, having just carried out a bank robbery on the outskirts of Siena. As two of them were deemed to act suspiciously and ordered out for a more detailed questioning, a third terrorist opened fire. In the ensuing firefight officers Giuseppe Savastano and Euro Tarsilli were killed while Maresciallo Augusto Barna was seriously injured. One of the terrorists, Lucio "Olmo" Di Giacomo, was killed. The other six, taking one woman from the bus as hostage, fled towards an uninhabited house in Civitella Paganico and then tried to reach Grosseto. On their way there, in Arlena di Castro, a group of carabinieri intercepted their car and opened fire. The terrorists again managed to escape, leaving behind the bank loot, the hostage, and some weapons. They were all subsequently captured, tried, and sentenced to prison terms. Among the group that took part in the checkpoint firefight were three fugitives from justice: Daniele Sacco-Lanzoni, Sonia Benedetti, and Susanna Ronconi.
In 1982, a group led by Segio, detonated a car bomb parked along the walls of the Rovigo prison, the explosion causing the death of Angelo Furlan, a 64-year old pensioner who happened to pass by, and allowing Ronconi to escape. She was recaptured a few months later and upon her return to prison she married Segio.