A clerk by trade, he rose through the secret police as the Romanian Communist Party consolidated its hold on power between 1944 and 1947, while from 1948 through 1952, he played an important role as an officer in the new Securitate.
[5] While at Târgu Jiu, Dulgheru became a protégé of Soviet agent Vania Didenko (alias Ion Vidrașcu),[3][6] who belonged to a group of about forty NKVD operatives that had been sent to Romania in the interwar period and had been caught.
[7] He joined the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) in August 1944, after it became legal as a result of the Royal coup d'état against the country's pro-Axis dictator, Ion Antonescu.
In essence, in the view of historian Marius Oprea, he supervised the entire series of tortures and abuses that took place in its investigation chambers during the secret police's first four years.
Moreover, together with Alexandru Nicolschi, he undertook the deportation of tens of thousands of individuals into labor camps,[3] During that time, Dulgheru was one of the Securitate officers who supervised the re-education of hundreds of minors at Târgșor Prison.
[8] Unlike his more brutish colleagues, he was cultivated, attractive and well-dressed, perceived as spontaneous and elegant, rarely resorting to physical abuse during interrogations.
Dulgheru was a perfect victim: an intellectual who had good relations with the purged officials, as well as a Jew, which facilitated charges of Zionism.
[10] He was accused of having protected Emil Calmanovici (a businessman known for the financial support he had given to the Communist Party), and he was charged with sabotaging the prosecution of arrested Zionists.
[6] In 2009, the High Court of Cassation and Justice ruled that military prosecutors should open proceedings against Dulgheru for his involvement in the 1948 death under torture of Alcibiades Diamandi; investigators began probing the case in 2013.