Fugitive’s Case Is Dismissed by U.S. Magistrate : Court: Official refuses Italian government’s request for extradition, calling the proceeding ‘a mess.’

A U.S. magistrate in Los Angeles on Wednesday dismissed Italy’s extradition case against fugitive Pasquale Valitutti, a self-described anarchist who was convicted in absentia a decade ago in connection with an attempted terrorist kidnaping.

“This is just such a mess,” said Magistrate John Kronenberg in ruling that a complex package of extradition documents had not been presented correctly to the court by the Italian government. “We’re wasting just too much court time on it.”

Valitutti, 43, a lumbering man whose bear-like appearance is accented by a full beard, “started to cry” when Kronenberg threw out the extradition request, according to his court interpreter who was sitting beside him at the defense table.

Valitutti is considered more than just a fugitive in Italy.

On the evening of Dec. 15, 1969, another anarchist, Giuseppe Pinelli, fell to his death from a fourth-floor window at Milan police headquarters. Police later said he leaped to his death. But Valitutti, a Milan schoolteacher, was himself being interrogated across the hall. He later told journalists that he heard scuffling noises from the room where Pinelli was being questioned, suggesting that Pinelli’s fall may not have been by choice.

Pinelli’s death created a sensation and sparked Italian writer Dario Fo’s popular play, “Accidental Death of an Anarchist.”

Valitutti has been held at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles since last November, when he was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport after living for a decade undetected in France.

The government prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. Martin J. Murphy, indicated that he would have to await word from the U.S. Justice Department on whether Washington--conferring with the Italian government--wanted to refile the extradition case. There is no double jeopardy in extradition matters, meaning the extradition case can be brought more than once.

U.S. immigration officials have placed a hold on Valitutti so that he cannot walk out of prison a free man in the United States. Should the Justice Department decide to drop the case, he would be put on a plane and flown out of the country--but not to Italy, according to federal officials.

Valitutti’s life in exile, according to his his wife, Carla, was spent traveling the world buying “arts and crafts” and selling them through his business in France. What made the fugitive’s life style even more remarkable was that he lived and traveled under his own name, she said.

His luck ran out at Los Angeles International Airport last November when a computer check by an immigration inspector turned up the fact that he was wanted by Italian authorities and Interpol, the international police agency.

Valitutti’s criminal conviction stemmed from the attempted kidnaping in Florence of the son of an industrialist in October, 1977. It was botched after a police chase and shoot-out. Italian authorities contended that Valitutti was one of four terrorists who participated in the kidnaping conspiracy.

Valitutti was sentenced to four years in prison, and served eight months in a prison hospital where he almost died during a hunger strike. Then, in 1980, while out on bail, he fled the country. By 1981, an Italian presidential decree knocked three more years off his sentence--leaving only four months for him to serve.

On Wednesday, Valitutti’s Los Angeles attorney, David E. Wood, said in court that under the extradition treaty between Washington and Italy, a person facing less than six months prison time cannot be extradited. A second Valitutti conviction in Milan in 1977 for founding a criminal revolutionary organization was never an extradition issue, Wood argued.

Valitutti, who was returned to his cell Wednesday afternoon, told Wood that he was sure he could return to Italy without fear of being thrown back in prison for earlier criminal convictions if he renounced his anarchist convictions. But Wood said his client stood firm on his political principles.

“I refuse to do that because it’s more important to have a conscience than a body,” Valitutti told Wood.