Fugitive Anarchist States His Case After Decade of Secrecy

For 10 years, Pascuale Valitutti kept his political convictions a secret as he traveled the world. To the tourists and artisans he met in Europe, Asia and Latin America, he was a simple trader of arts and crafts, a quiet and unassuming man with a wife and two children.

Now, in a Los Angeles prison after being detained by U.S. immigration authorities, the fugitive anarchist has decided to speak his mind.

Valitutti, 43, is an unrepentant revolutionary. Charged by an Italian court in the failed 1977 kidnaping of the son of a wealthy Florence industrialist, he fled Italy in 1981, living mostly in France and Mexico.

“In these months here, I’ve recuperated a little bit of my identity,” Valitutti said last week in an interview at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center. “I spent 20 years of my youth and adult life struggling for political rights. But in these last 10 years, when people ask me what I do, I can only tell them I sell these trinkets.”

Valitutti was later convicted in absentia of the kidnaping. After agreeing last week to allow his extradition, Valitutti might return to Italy as soon as this week, according to his attorney, David E. Wood.

In the interview, which was conducted in Spanish--one of three languages he speaks fluently--Valitutti denied participating in the violent acts for which the Italian government sought to have him extradited. He said the Italian authorities are persecuting him for his political beliefs.

“According to Italian law, these charges would be dropped if I renounced my political beliefs,” Valitutti said. “But I don’t want to sell my conscience. . . . I don’t understand why the Italian government insists on doing this. To force someone to renounce their political convictions by threatening them is not a victory. It is like a rape, a violation.”

To speak to Valitutti is to be transported to a tumultuous period in Italian history--the late 1960s and early ‘70s, a time of labor unrest, bombings, politically motivated kidnapings, and shoot-outs between carabinieri (police) and armed bands of “terrorists.”

Idealistic young student radicals such as Valitutti felt that the collapse of the “fascistic” Italian establishment was imminent. “It was a wonderful time, a wonderful struggle,” Valitutti said. “They were very difficult years, but very beautiful. People fought for what they believed in.”

Valitutti became a nationally known figure in Italy when he played a small but important role in one of the most sensational cases in modern Italian political history, the death of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. The case was later dramatized in “Accidental Death of an Anarchist,” a play by Dario Fo.

Pinelli was suspected in the terrorist bombing of a Milan bank that killed 16 people. He was being interrogated at Milan police headquarters when he fell from a fourth-floor window. Milan police said Pinelli had committed suicide in a moment of despair, yelling “Anarchy is dead!” as he fell to the street below.

But Valitutti, who was being held by police in an adjacent room, contradicted the police version of events. “Before the interrogation, (Pinelli) was talking to me about his wife and family,” Valitutti said. “He didn’t sound like a man who would kill himself. He was completely calm and serene.”

Valitutti said he heard scuffling sounds from the room, suggesting Pinelli was pushed from the window.

In the early 1970s, Valitutti’s testimony placed a key police official in the interrogation room, initiating a major political scandal that embarrassed the Italian government. The police official was later assassinated.

After he was arrested for the 1977 kidnaping, Valitutti’s health declined. While in prison, he temporarily lapsed into a coma and eventually was released on bail in 1981. He fled to Nice in southern France, where he and his wife, Carmen, set up a cottage industry importing arts and crafts from Asia and Latin America.

For the Italian government, Valitutti was a fugitive “terrorist.” In 1983, an Italian court named him as one of the founders of Anzione Rivoluzionaria (Revolutionary Action), a terrorist criminal organization.

Valitutti, however, said he and his wife spent most of their time as fugitives raising two children, who are now 10 and 12 years old. For a decade, Valitutti said, they were a family on the run, renting homes in Nice and in the Mexican cities of Cuernavaca and Toluca.

Carla Valitutti, 34, said her children were aware their father could be arrested at any time. They watched, in fact, as he was detained last November by U.S. immigration officials when the family arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from Sri Lanka.

“(The children) knew he was persecuted by the Italian government, so the shock was not too hard,” Carla Valitutti said.

Dressed in a prison-issue red jumpsuit, Pascuale Valitutti, a large, lumbering man whose beard is tinged with gray, spoke without bitterness about his latest run-in with the authorities.

“At first, I felt like something very important had been taken from me,” Valitutti said of his incarceration. “My wife and children were left here alone in a city they didn’t know.” Later, he said, “I realized I was in a country with a judicial system where I could defend myself.”

Valitutti resisted the Italian government’s attempts to extradite him. But he relented after the Italian Ministry of Grace and Justice signed a letter in April promising he would not be incarcerated for crimes other that the 1977 kidnaping.

Valitutti’s attorney said he expects his client will be released soon after his return to Italy.

But Valitutti said he is concerned that the Italian government might not honor the agreement.

“There are certain elements in Italy that want revenge” for the events of the 1970s, he said. “The memories of that time are still very fresh.”