Valerio Fioravanti
As a child actor, Fioravanti starred in a popular series of the 1960s, "La famiglia Benvenuti", with Enrico Maria Salerno and Valeria Valeri playing his parents.
Fioravanti's younger brother Cristiano had joined a far right youth section aged 13; he acquired a reputation for relishing violent confrontations with leftists.
After a crate of hand grenades was stolen while he was on guard duty, Fioravanti was court-martialed for leaving his post and sentenced to several months in a military prison.
Some of her friends died, including a young Social Movement protester who Mambro saw being shot dead by a Carabinieri captain during disturbances that followed the Acca Larentia killings.
Mambro later said the experience made her decide to carry a gun, although her personal involvement with Fioravanti played a major part in her taking up terrorism.
Influenced by leftist movements, a large group of far right youths, including Fioravanti and his close associates, moved from street-fighting to terrorism.
Fioravanti was doing military service when the first killing occurred, it is believed to have been committed by either Cristiano or Alibrandi in September 1977; a leftist militant was shot dead.
[7] In February 1981, police surprised members of Armed Revolutionary Nuclei as they were retrieving weapons cached in the Bacchiglione river on the outskirts of Padua.
[10] According to Mambro, accomplices had openly toyed with the idea of coup de grâce rather than letting the police capture and interrogate her, but it was eventually decided to leave her at a hospital, where she was arrested.
[11][12][13] An informer, later found to be unreliable, claimed that Delle Chiaie was involved in Bologna, and that the bombing had been commissioned by a Masonic lodge made up of Italy's government, media and security services elite.
[14] On 13 January 1981, fabricated evidence, implicating Terza Posizione, along with French and German right-wing extremists, was planted on a train;[14] General Pietro Musumeci of SISMI was later charged with ordering the deception.
[16] The prosecution at Fioravanti's trial alleged he obtained explosive material by scuba diving on a sunken WW2 Italian warship and taking recovered anti-aircraft shells apart to extract the propellant.
[17] A clandestine weapons store of the Banda della Magliana criminal organization was kept in the basement of a government building, the NAR had access to it, and ammunition thought likely to have come from the joint arms cache was used to kill Carmine Pecorelli in 1979.
[18] In 1993, contemporaneously with his trial for Mafia association in Palermo,[19] former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti, along with Fioravanti's mobster friend Massimo Carminati, were charged with the murder of Pecorelli by prosecutors in Perugia.
[27] The crucial evidence against Fioravanti and Mambro in the Bologna bombing was given by a witness some thought untrustworthy: small-time criminal and Banda della Magliana member Massimo Sparti.
[10] Fioravanti's alibi for the morning of 2 August was weakened by its lack of precision: he had initially said he was in Treviso, but subsequently asserted he had travelled with Mambro and Ciavardini to a meeting in Padova early that day.
Cristiano and another NAR member became prosecution witnesses: both recalled that, days after the bombing, Mambro had worried about being accused of the massacre, spoke of being in Padova at the time of the explosion, and expressed concern about them being believed.
[10][28] In July 1988, Fioravanti and Mambro were found guilty of responsibility for the Bologna train bombing, as well as for the crimes they admitted; they were sentenced to ten life terms, plus 250 years.
[2] Fioravanti is currently a contributing writer for Il Riformista focusing on human rights and criminal justice system in Iran and the United States.
