After the war he joined the nascent Fascist movement, and was among the founders of the Senigallia section of the Italian Fasces of Combat in July 1920 and of that of Pesaro a few months later, where he founded and directed the weekly magazine L'Ora.

[1] In order to escape the subsequent arrest warrant for voluntary murder, he temporarily moved under a false identity to Sicily, where he assisted the Mafia in placing workers of the sulfur mines in the Fascist trade unions; he was sentenced to four months and fifteen days in prison for the murder of Valenti, but the sentence was cancelled by an amnesty proclaimed by the newly established Fascist regime on 22 December 1922 (in the meantime, Riccardi had participated in the March on Rome).

[2][3][4] In the early 1920s he was provincial trustee of the National Fascist Party and private secretary of deputy Silvio Gai, and in 1924 he was elected to the Italian Parliament, and re-elected in 1929.

[9][10][11] After the fall of the Fascist regime on 25 July 1943, Riccardi was arrested by order of Marshal Pietro Badoglio and imprisoned in the Regina Coeli prison, from which he was freed by the Germans after their occupation of Italy in September 1943.

After the end of the war, in July 1947 he was tried for the 1922 murder of Valenti, but was acquitted due to insufficient evidence, and declared that the episodes narrated in Pagine Squadriste were fictional.