Anarchist Agrees to Return to Italy and Serve Jail Term

An Italian anarchist being held in Los Angeles after a decade on the run has agreed to return to Italy to serve a sentence for a botched 1977 kidnaping by a radical group, his attorney and U.S. government lawyers said Thursday.

Pasquale Valitutti, 43, gave up his fight to avoid extradition to Italy after the Italian Ministry of Grace and Justice signed a letter guaranteeing “all kinds of good things for Mr. Valitutti,” said attorney David E. Wood.

Valitutti was wanted in connection with the attempted kidnaping in October, 1977, of the son of Tito Neri, a Florence industrialist. Several years earlier, Valitutti also played a small role in one of the most sensational cases in modern Italian political history, the death of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli.

“He’s intellectually brilliant, philosophically very honest,” Wood said. “He’s an avowed anarchist and he’s viewed as one of the leaders of the anarchist movement in Italy. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people welcoming him back to Italy.”

Under terms of the letter disclosed Thursday, the Italian government will not pursue prosecution of other cases pending against Valitutti. Italy will also grant Valitutti a passport that will allow him to leave the country and return to his adopted home in France after he completes the remainder of his sentence.

Valitutti was convicted of the crime in absentia by an Italian court in 1981 and sentenced to four years in prison. He was also wanted by Italian authorities for a bombing and a second kidnaping in Milan, also in 1977. An Italian court accused him in 1983, along with several other anarchists, of founding a criminal organization called “Revolutionary Action.”

After Valitutti agreed to the terms of his return to Italy, U.S. Magistrate John Kronenberg ordered his extradition Thursday morning. He was being held Thursday at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. He is expected to return to Italy sometime next week, Wood said.

It remained unclear, however, how much of the four-year sentence Valitutti would serve once he returned to Italy.

Wood said that with credit for time served in the United States--Valitutti has been held in the United States since Nov. 22--Valitutti could go free within days of returning to Italy.

But an assistant U.S. attorney familiar with the case said the fugitive anarchist may serve as many as four years in Italian jails.

Valitutti fled Italy in 1981 while on bail in the kidnaping case. According to his wife, he later set up a cottage industry in France, traveling the world buying “arts and crafts” and reselling them in Europe.

After nearly 10 years as a fugitive, Valitutti was detained at Los Angeles International Airport in November when he arrived on a flight from Sri Lanka with his wife and two children.

In 1969, Valitutti was a key witness in the case of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist who fell to his death from a fourth-floor window while being interrogated at Milan police headquarters.

Pinelli was suspected in the terrorist bombing of a Milan bank that killed 16 people. Valitutti, then a Milan schoolteacher, was himself being interrogated across the hall. He later told journalists he heard scuffling noises from the room where Pinelli was being questioned, suggesting that Pinelli may have been killed by Milan police.

The case became the subject of a satirical play by Dario Fo, “The Accidental Death of an Anarchist.”