Long-Sought Italian Fugitive Held in L.A. : Crime: Extradition hearing will decide whether he’s sent back to face prison. He was convicted in a 1977 terrorist kidnaping plot.

An Italian fugitive wanted for more than a decade in connection with the aborted terrorist kidnaping of the son of a wealthy Florence businessman lived undetected in France and traveled the world buying “arts and crafts” before being arrested last November at Los Angeles International Airport, it was disclosed Friday after an extradition hearing in federal court.

The proceedings, which were continued to March 7, will determine whether Pasquale Valitutti, a self-described anarchist, should be deported to Italy, where he was convicted in absentia of conspiring in the kidnaping. His case grows out of a bloody chapter in that country’s recent history, and he was a witness to events depicted in a popular political play of the era, “Accidental Death of an Anarchist.”

Few details of Valitutti’s life on the run emerged in court Friday, but afterward his wife, Carla, told reporters through an interpreter that he lived under his real name in France. He supported himself as a small-scale importer of arts and crafts, which he purchased in travels to Third World countries and resold in Europe.

She accused the Italian government of “playing a dirty game” of politics with her husband.

“My husband,” she said, “is a very honest person with a sense of justice. He always has expressed his own ideas. He has always wanted to condemn the hypocrisy of the system.”

What was left unexplained was how Valitutti was able to travel widely in a number of countries without being detected by immigration officials when an international police warrant for his arrest was outstanding.

He was arrested on Nov. 22, when Valitutti, his wife and their two children, aged 10 and 12, arrived at Los Angeles International Airport. The fugitive was traveling on an authentic Italian passport using his real name, according to an affidavit filed by a federal immigration inspector at LAX.

Valitutti had flown into Los Angeles on China Airlines from Taipei on a ticket routing him back to Taipei, to Bangkok and, finally, Colombo, Sri Lanka, according to the affidavit.

A computer check by an immigration inspector revealed that Valitutti, 43, was wanted by Italian authorities and Interpol, the international police agency. The computer actually turned up a different case than the one that prompted Friday’s hearing: a kidnaping and bombing in Milan, also in 1977.

Valitutti remains incarcerated at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center near downtown Los Angeles.

A federal source, who requested anonymity, acknowledged that it was odd that Valitutti, a fugitive for so many years, was audacious enough to use his real name on a real passport. “He probably didn’t realize we had an Interpol notice,” the source said. “And maybe he’s been a fugitive for so long, he was careless.”

Valitutti played a small and unwitting role in one of the most sensational incidents in modern Italian political history. On the evening of Dec. 15, 1969, while being interrogated at Milan police headquarters, an anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli fell to his death from a fourth-floor window.

The police official in charge of the questioning said Pinelli, suspected in the terrorist bombing of a Milan bank that killed 16 people, leaped from the window in an act of despair after yelling, “Anarchy is dead.” But some in Italy accused the police of killing him.

Pinelli’s death--which sparked Italian writer Dario Fo’s play, “Accidental Death of an Anarchist”--caused an uproar in Italy. It came during a tumultuous and violent time in that country, punctuated by bombings and kidnapings orchestrated by groups such as the Red Brigades. One of the era’s most sensational crimes was the 1978 terrorist kidnaping and murder of former Italian Premier Aldo Moro. Even the police official who questioned anarchist Pinelli was himself subsequently assassinated.

Valitutti, then a Milan school teacher, was sitting in a police interrogation room across the hall from the room where Pinelli was being questioned.

Italian authorities want Valitutti in connection with an October, 1977, botched kidnaping in Florence of the son of an industrialist, Tito Neri. After a chase and shoot-out, police halted the kidnaping plot by four reputed terrorists, including--according to charges by the Italian government--Valitutti.

Three of the would-be kidnapers were tried in Italy and convicted. Valitutti, also arrested and charged, was allowed bail after a long hunger strike in prison during which his health declined, causing him to go into a coma and be hospitalized.

In 1980, Valitutti, still out on bail, fled Italy and was subsequently tried and convicted in absentia of being a co-conspirator in the kidnaping plot.

In a 1983 decision by a Milan court of appeals, Valitutti was accused, along with several others, of founding a criminal organization, “Anzione Rivoluzionaria” (Revolutionary Action), according to a U.S. government extradition paper filed in the case.

In all, Valitutti faces about 14 years in prison for his Italian convictions if he is returned to that country, according to his attorney, David E. Wood of Los Angeles.

Valitutti said nothing during Friday’s extradition hearing before U.S. Magistrate John Kronenberg. Wood suggested that when the proceeding resumes, he will argue that Italy has a political vendetta against his client, and that the extradition treaty between the two countries prohibits Valitutti from being returned to Italy for political offenses.

“It’s a fraud,” Wood said of the extradition effort. “It’s an attempt to extradite him on a political conviction.”

The government prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. Martin J. Murphy, declined to comment on the extradition effort.