Fugitive Seized in L.A. Goes on Hunger Strike

Pasquale Valitutti, the fugitive and self-described anarchist who last week beat back Italy’s efforts to extradite him for an aborted terrorist kidnaping more than a decade ago, was a man without a country Tuesday.

Released from a federal prison in downtown Los Angeles last Friday, he was immediately shackled by immigration officials and locked in an alien detention facility in the basement of the nearby Federal Building.

Depressed and complaining bitterly to his attorney, David E. Wood, of detention conditions which “violate the most basic human rights,” the burly 43-year-old Italian began a hunger strike Tuesday. And, according to Wood, another 18 imprisoned aliens immediately joined the action.

Valitutti told Wood, in one of several phone calls to the attorney, that in retaliation Tuesday, several Immigration and Naturalization Service detention officers shoved him and the other hunger strikers against a wall of one of the big holding pens, “told the inmates they didn’t know who they were dealing with, and really roughed them up.”

The acting INS district director for Los Angeles, Robert Moschorak, adamantly denied any wrongdoing by INS officers.

“Our officers are highly trained professional people,” Moschorak said. “They know how to handle prisoners. I don’t see them becoming involved in any kind of activity that would be totally improper.”

In 1977, Valitutti was charged with helping to orchestrate an attempted terrorist kidnaping in Florence. He skipped bail and fled Italy in 1980, settling in France with his wife, Carla. He was subsequently convicted in absentia.

According to his wife, he set up a cottage industry in France under his real name, traveling the world buying “arts and crafts” and reselling them in Europe. He was apprehended at Los Angeles International Airport last November after arriving on a flight from Sri Lanka, when his name turned up on an international police warrant for his arrest.

But last Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate John Kronenberg said Italy had botched its extradition case and threw it out.

But U.S. immigration officials placed a hold on Valitutti because he had entered the country illegally. On Tuesday, they were still scrambling to find a country that would take him back--presumably Sri Lanka, the nation from which he flew to Los Angeles, or France, where he had settled, according to officials.

Valitutti told Wood that his hunger strike is “irreversible” until he is allowed to leave the United States.