Mario Moretti (born 16 January 1946) is an Italian terrorist and convicted murderer. [1] A leading member of the Red Brigades in the late 1970s, he was one of the kidnappers of Aldo Moro, the president of Italy's largest political party Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), and several times premier. In 1978, Moretti confessed to killing Moro.
Moretti was born in Porto San Giorgio, Marche region of Italy, into a middle-class, right-wing, family. Later Moretti tried to fabricate for himself a leftist and proletarian family environment, but the documents collected by the Italian Parliament's commission into the assassination of Aldo Moro later denied this reconstruction. [2] [ need quotation to verify ]
Recommended by an Italian noblewoman, Anna Casati Stampa, [3] he moved to Milan in 1968 to work and to study at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore . Moretti did not take part in the upheaval of 1968. [4] In Milan, Moretti worked at Sit-Siemens, where he met Corrado Alunni , Giorgio Semeria and Paola Besuschio , future members of the Red Brigades (BR). He also became a member of CISL, the largest Catholic-oriented trade union in Italy. Together with others, he adhered to the Collettivo Politico Metropolitano founded by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, which formed the historical nucleus of the Red Brigades at their constitution (August 1970). Moretti became a member of BR in the Spring of 1971. His first action was a mugging in June 1971, together with Renato Curcio. [5]
In 1974, when Curcio and Alberto Franceschini were arrested, he became the organization's only leading member still at large, together with Cagol and Semeria, who were, however, respectively killed and arrested in the following year. Some sources suggested that Moretti, despite being informed by an anonymous phone call of the imminent arrest of Curcio and Franceschini, did nothing to warn them. [5] Moretti pushed BR towards a more military attitude, and introduced a thorough separation between the members in order to reduce the consequences should any one of them be arrested. In 1975 he moved to Rome. In the spring of 1978 he organized the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. The circumstances of this assassination are still not clear. It is known, however, that Mario Moretti was the only person to talk to Moro during the 55 days of Moro's imprisonment. [6] Moretti also confessed to assassinating Moro after it became clear that the demand made by BR for the release of thirteen jailed terrorists in return for freeing the politician would not be met by the Italian government. [7]
He was sentenced to six life sentences for his crime, but, after serving 15 years in jail, he was paroled in 1998. In terms of his parole, he is allowed to work outside prison, but must return to prison at night and over weekends.
In 1999 Franceschini claimed that he suspected that two leading Red Brigades members, Mario Moretti and Giovanni Senzani, were spies who had infiltrated the Red Brigades. These claims were made before an Italian parliamentary commission on terrorism in March 1999 and were published in L'Espresso . "From my knowledge of the people involved, I am convinced that that [i.e. the Moro operation] was an extremely complex operation that could not have been accomplished by the individuals identified as having participated in the official accounts", he informed the commission. [8]
Aldo Moro was an Italian statesman and prominent member of Christian Democracy (DC) and its centre-left wing. He served as prime minister of Italy in five terms from December 1963 to June 1968 and from November 1974 to July 1976.
Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa was an Italian Carabinieri general, notable for campaigning against terrorism during the Years of Lead. He was assassinated in the Via Carini massacre by the Sicilian Mafia in Palermo.
Renato Curcio is a former terrorist, and the former leader of the Italian far-left terrorist organization, the Red Brigades.
Carmine "Mino" Pecorelli was an Italian journalist, shot dead in Rome a year after former prime minister Aldo Moro's 1978 kidnapping and subsequent killing. He was described as a "maverick journalist with excellent secret service contacts". According to Pecorelli, Aldo Moro's kidnapping had been organized by a "lucid superpower" and was inspired by the "logic of Yalta". Pecorelli's name was on Licio Gelli's list of Propaganda Due (P2) masonic members, discovered in 1980 by the Italian police.
In Italy, the phrase Years of Lead refers to a period of political violence and social upheaval that lasted from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, marked by a wave of both far-left and far-right incidents of political terrorism and violent clashes.
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Ciro Cirillo was an Italian politician and member of the Christian Democracy (DC) political party. He served as the president of the province of Naples from 1969 to 1975 and the president of Campania from 1979 until 1980. Cirillo oversaw reconstruction efforts in the aftermath of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, which struck the region on 23 November 1980.
On 27 April 1981, the Red Brigades (BR) kidnapped the 60-year-old Christian Democrat (DC) politician Ciro Cirillo and killed his two-man escort in the garage of his Naples apartment building. At the time, Cirillo directed reconstruction efforts in Campania devastated by the earthquake in the Irpinia region on 23 November 1980. He was released after a controversial deal with the Camorra; they did not negotiate with the BR and only asked them to release him. This happened several years after the Italian state had refused to negotiate with the BR in their kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, leading observers and critics to wonder what changed and the reasons behind the state's negotiation. Cirillo died in 2017.
Fulvio Croce was an Italian lawyer. The president of the Turin Bar Association, he was killed by a terrorist group, the Red Brigades.
Margherita Cagol, also known by the war name Mara, was a terrorist and a leader of the Italian far-left urban guerrilla and terrorist organisation the Red Brigades. She was married to Renato Curcio, another leader of this terrorist group.
Alberto Franceschini is a founder and former leading member of the Italian far-left terrorist organization, the Red Brigades, along with Renato Curcio, Margherita Cagol and Mario Moretti.
The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, also referred to in Italy as the Moro case, was a seminal event in Italian political history. On the morning of 16 March 1978, the day on which a new cabinet led by Giulio Andreotti was to have undergone a confidence vote in the Italian Parliament, the car of Aldo Moro, former prime minister and then president of the Christian Democracy party, was assaulted by a group of far-left terrorists known as the Red Brigades in via Fani in Rome. Firing automatic weapons, the terrorists killed Moro's bodyguards — two Carabinieri in Moro's car and three policemen in the following car — and kidnapped him. The events remain a national trauma. Ezio Mauro of La Repubblica described the events as Italy's 9/11. While Italy was not the sole European country to experience extremist terrorism, which also occurred in France, Germany, Ireland, and Spain, the murder of Moro was the apogee of Italy's Years of Lead.
Valerio Morucci is an Italian terrorist, who was a member of the Red Brigades and who took part in the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro in 1978.
Sergio Flamigni is an Italian politician and writer. A member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he took part in the Italian Parliament's investigative commissions on the murder of Aldo Moro, the Propaganda Due scandal, and on the Italian Mafia.
Adriana Faranda is an Italian former terrorist, who was a member of the Red Brigades during the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.
Prospero Gallinari, also known as "Gallo", was an Italian terrorist, a member of the Red Brigades (BR) in the 1970s and 1980s.
Barbara Balzerani was an Italian terrorist as member of Red Brigades.
The Red Brigades was an Italian Marxist–Leninist armed terrorist guerilla group. It was responsible for numerous violent incidents during Italy's Years of Lead, including the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978. A former prime minister of Italy through the Organic centre-left, the murder of Aldo Moro was widely condemned, as was the murder of left-wing trade unionist Guido Rossa in January 1979. Sandro Pertini, the then left-wing president of Italy, said at Rossa's funeral: "It is not the President of the Republic speaking, but comrade Pertini. I knew [the real] red brigades: they fought with me against the fascists, not against democrats. For shame!"
Exterior Night is a 2022 Italian-language drama film co-written and directed by Marco Bellocchio based on the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. The film is the second feature by Bellocchio based on the Moro case after Good Morning, Night, shot in 2003.
In May 1978, Aldo Moro, a Christian Democracy (DC) statesman who advocated for a Historic Compromise with the Italian Communist Party, (PCI), was murdered after 55 days of captivity by the Red Brigades (BR), a far-left terrorist organization. Although the courts established that the BR had acted alone, conspiracy theories related to the Moro case persist. Much of the conspiracy theories allege additional involvement, from the Italian government itself, its secret services being involved with the BR, and the Propaganda Due (P2) to the CIA and Henry Kissinger, and Mossad and the KGB.
Media related to Mario Moretti at Wikimedia Commons