Renato Vallanzasca

Renato Vallanzasca

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Thu 13 Jan 2011 1:00 AM

The recent release of director Michele Placido’s film Vallanzasca: Gli Angeli Del Male, based on
the 2009 autobiography by the same name, written by one of Italy’s most notorious criminals and longest-serving
prisoners, Renato Vallanzasca, with journalist Carlo Bonini, caused a frenzy of
protests.

 

This dissent came largely from the families of his
victims who saw the film as a sentimental portrayal of a murderer, kidnapper
and thief. Sensing the publicity value in the furor, Placido fed the
controversy with his response: in his opinion, he announced, the criticism was
unjustified because, although Vallanzasca was indeed a criminal, he was still
in jail for his crimes, yet ‘there are people in Parliament who have done far
worse things than him who are out on parole.’

 

What, exactly, did Vallanzasca do? Was he some kind of
romantic modern Robin Hood or quite the opposite, a calculating and brutal
gangster?

 

In the mid-1970s, with his gang, Comasina, named for
the area in Milan where he lived, Vallanzasca had to his dubious credit
seven homicides, four of which he was said to have executed himself; at least
70 armed robberies committed between July 1976 and February 1977; four
kidnappings; and several daring jail breaks. For this rampage, he was sentenced
to four life imprisonments plus 260 years of incarceration. He has already
spent almost four decades behind bars.

 

Vallanzasca’s delinquency began early. Although his
childhood was not underprivileged, it was not an easy one. Born in Milan on May
4, 1950, he took his mother’s surname as his father was already married and had
three other children. Rebellious at a young age, Vallanzasca was just eight
years old when he tried to free a tiger from its cage at a circus that was
performing near his home. For this bravado, he was sent to the Beccaria
detention centre for young offenders, where he soon formed a gang of petty
thieves and shoplifters.

 

A natural leader, Vallanzasca rapidly ‘graduated’ to a
role in the Milan underworld before being arrested, in 1972, by his
police-officer nemesis, Achille Serra, for a robbery in a supermarket.
Incarcerated in Milan’s San Vittore prison, he was transferred 36 times over
the next four years for continually attempting escape, fomenting unrest and
assaulting other prisoners. He finally managed his first successful escape by
eating rotten eggs and injecting himself with urine to mimic hepatitis,
resulting in transfer to a hospital, where there was less security and a
corrupt guard aided his getaway. While he was on the run, the gang killed four
police officers and a bank clerk during robberies and in February 1977, gunned
down another two policemen at a roadblock on the highway at Dalmine. Several
days later, he was arrested and sent back to San Vittore. In April 1980, having
taken a hostage, he and nine other prisoners escaped the prison. Wounded
following a shoot-out in the streets and the tunnel of the Milan subway, he was recaptured almost immediately and sent to Novara.

 

While there the following year, Vallanzasca committed
his most violent crime. During an organised prison disturbance, he
attacked 20-year-old fellow prisoner, Massimo Loi, a former member of the
Comasina gang, who had turned police informant, stabbing him to death, hacking
off his head and using it as a football. For this atrocity, Vallanzasca was
sent to Asinara, the high security prison in Sardinia; while in transport, he briefly escaped by squirming through a porthole
on the ferry taking him to the island.

 

Rakishly handsome, with clear blue eyes and innate
charisma, he inspired the press to dub him the ‘bel René.’ The media exalted in
his lifestyle and escapades, creating a myth that became difficult for even him
to equal. On the outside, flush with money from his criminal activities, he
lived the high life, indulging in fast cars, flashy clothes, expensive
restaurants and beautiful women.

 

His conquests were legion. While still an adolescent,
Vallanzasca had lived with Ripalta Pioggia, nicknamed Comasina, with whom he
had a son. Next was nightclub dancer Patrizia Cacace, called Musino. Then
Angela Corradini, known as ‘the swastika’ for the tattoo on her chest. In
December 1976, Vallanzasca, then a fugitive, kidnapped Manuela Trapani, the
teenage daughter of a cosmetics millionaire. During the 40 days she spent sequestered
with him awaiting the ransom her family paid, she became infatuated with him.
In prison, he would receive up to 800 letters a week from female admirers. In
1977, he married one of them, Giuliana Brusa, an 18-year-old student, at
Rebibbia jail. In 1995, another woman who believed she was in love with him
abetted his (unsuccessful) escape: she was his lawyer.

 

In May 2008, Vallanzasca had another prison wedding,
this time to Antonella D’Agostino. Since March 2010, he has worked during the
day at a social cooperative in Milan, returning to his cell at night. Recently
reflecting on his past, he describes himself as ‘a jerk who has wasted [his]
life.’

 

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