After they were caught, his father was executed in Siena’s Piazza del Campo, while Ghino managed to escape and sought refuge in Radicofani, a fortified city on the Via Cassia on the border between the Sienese Republic and the Papal States.
For this reason, aided by the Counts of Santa Fiora, Tacco and the others from the Banda dei Quattro were found guilty and condemned by the court of the Commune of Siena, which sought them for many years before capturing them in 1285.
In 1290, Ghino di Tacco returned to the “remunerative activities” started by his father, having been ordered to pay damages of 1000 soldi in recompense for a robbery he had carried out near San Quirico d'Orcia.
On account of this behaviour and because he allowed students and poor people to pass without harm, Ghino was considered a "Thief and a Gentleman," a sort of Robin Hood ante litteram.
Proud of his reputation, he decided to avenge his father and his brother, and went to Rome to seek out Benincasa da Laterina, who had become an influential and well-known judge at the court of the Papal States.
It was from this real example of punishment, having something from black chronicle fact, a golpe and a knightly feat, that Dante cited in the quoted verses of his Commedia, describing the Second Terrace of Purgatory, where the Negligent were seeking atonement.
He, while travelling back from Rome after giving Pope Boniface VIII the money coming from the taxes exacted by the French Church, decided to take a cure for his liver and stomach (which were suffering from the Roman banquets) at the thermal spa of San Casciano dei Bagni.
Ghino locked the abbot in his tower in the fortress of Radicofani, giving him only bread and dried beans to eat and Vernaccia di San Gimignano to drink.
Others, such as Benvenuto da Imola, have noted that after the Papal and Sienese pardons he had no need to hide, and have argued that as a fundamentally kind man he devoted himself to acts of altruism and was killed in the first half of the fourteenth century while trying to stop a fight among foot soldiers and peasants in Asinalonga, only two kilometers from his birthplace.