Palermo, 1975.
Among the candidates of the Italian Social Movement for the City Council was a name destined to become one of the most notorious of Italy’s “black subversion”: Pierluigi Concutelli. He received almost a thousand votes but was not elected. In reality, however, his political agenda was focused elsewhere. While his name appeared on electoral posters, Concutelli was operating in an environment where propaganda, political violence and illegality were rapidly giving way to something else: armed struggle.
Weapons, robberies, kidnappings, self-financing. After the dissolution of the political movement Ordine Nuovo in November 1973, many radical nationalist activists faced a choice: to abandon political activity, to reintegrate into the MSI, or to continue in illegality.
Concutelli gradually chose the third path. He moved from Sicily to Rome, from Spain to Corsica and finally to the civil war in Angola. He frequented the circles of Stefano Delle Chiaie, met Clemente Graziani, broke off contacts with a section of the illegal far right and finally returned to Italy with an unshakeable conviction: not simply to rebuild a political organisation, but to create a structure capable of military action.
On 10 July 1976, this choice reached the point of no return.
In Rome, the judge Vittorio Occorsio, who had investigated Ordine Nuovo, was murdered on his way to work. Concutelli was waiting for him, armed with a silencer on an Ingram submachine gun. After killing him, he left leaflets in the car, presenting the murder as the execution of a sentence imposed by a fictional revolutionary “special court.”
A few days later, the militant led a robbery at the Ministry of Labour that yielded almost half a billion lire. Political murder and self-financing became the two sides of the same strategy.
Yet he remained in hiding for only a few more months. In February 1977 he was located in a Roman hideout. Investigators found weapons, explosives, money and, most importantly, an Ingram MAC-10: the same one used to kill Occorsio. In court, Concutelli described himself as a “political soldier and therefore a political prisoner.”
Not even prison completely interrupted this logic. In 1981, together with Mario Tuti, Concutelli killed Ermanno Buzzi, who was considered an informer. The following year he strangled Carmine Palladino, a militant of the National Vanguard who was accused — although the case was never definitively concluded — of having contributed to the discovery of Giorgio Vale’s hideout (a neo-fascist activist who was murdered). The mechanism was always the same: first the enemy was the state, then its representatives, and finally one’s own comrades when they were considered traitors.
Concutelli was not the leader of the generation of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, and there was no direct organisational line linking the two experiences. Nevertheless, for some of the younger activists he would become a symbolic point of reference: one of those who had already crossed the boundary between political extremism and armed struggle.
