Giuseppe Musolino - brigand

Vengeful killer who became an unlikely folk hero

Giuseppe Musolino spent 
most of his life in jail

Giuseppe Musolini, the Calabrian bandit whose fight for justice after a wrongful conviction turned him into a folk hero despite the multiple murders he committed in a quest for vengeance, died on this day in 1956 in a psychiatric hospital in Reggio Calabria.

He was 79 years old when he passed away, having been just 22 when he was sentenced to 21 years in prison for an attempted murder he swore he did not commit, with the evidence against him no better than circumstantial.

He escaped after just three months and embarked upon a killing spree in which he may have murdered as many as nine individuals and attempted the murder of several others, most of whom had played a part in what he saw as a corrupt trial.

The revenge killings took place during his two years and nine months on the run, during which Calabrians took to him as a symbolic figure, representing the people of an impoverished region against a state system rigged against them.

His story captured the imagination of not only Italians - southern Italians in particular - but of the wider world, with readers of newspapers in Europe and the United States eagerly awaiting the next update.

It all began with a brawl in Santo Stefano, the village in the Aspromonte mountains, a short distance from the city of Reggio Calabria, where Musolino had been born in 1876.  Musolino, a carpenter and woodcutter by trade, was drinking in his father’s tavern when he and his friend, Antonio Filastò, became involved in an argument with Vincenzo and Stefano Zoccali, two brothers from one of the village’s more powerful families, reputed to be part of a picciotteria, a criminal gang of the type that would later evolve into the region’s fearsome mafia, known as the ‘Ndrangheta.

An artist's imagined scene of the
moment Musolino was captured 

The dispute was ostensibly over a delivery of hazelnuts, although it was also mooted that Musolino and Vincenzo Zoccali were rivals for the affections of a local girl. The fight spilled into the street, where others became involved and knives were drawn until one side produced guns and fired shots in the air to send the participants scattering for cover.  Musolino left the scene with stab wounds in his hand and arm, apparently inflicted by Zoccali.

The attempted murder charge came from what happened a day or two later when Zoccali’s family claimed a shot was fired at him at the stable where he kept horses. The assailant remained out of view behind a wall but witnesses testified to having heard Musolino shout and also to have found a hat belonging to him at the scene. They also said he had sworn a vendetta against the Zoccalis, which at the time was seen as a criminal offence.

A complaint was lodged with the police, although by the time they had decided to arrest Musolino he had long disappeared, having been tipped off that he was a wanted man. It took police six months to find him.

When his trial took place in Reggio Calabria, it was before a judge whose political associations gave him every encouragement to find against Musolino, while witnesses were thought to have either been bribed or intimidated by the Zoccali family to commit perjury. The judge, meanwhile, denied Musolino’s own lawyers the chance to call any witnesses who would testify for his innocence and sentenced him to 21 years in jail with hard labour, handing his friend, Antonio Filastò, a seven-year term.

Musolino was led away in a fury, shouting that if he had not sworn a vendetta against the Zoccalis, he would do so now. He also vowed revenge against all those who had given evidence against him, promising to kill them all as well as the prosecutor and the judge.

King of the Mountains is one of
several books about Musolino

He and Filastò were locked up at the prison fortress of Gerace Marina, located in present-day Locri on the Ionian coast, but within three months had escaped, taking advantage of the deteriorating condition of the fortress, which allowed them to hack away at the cement in the stone walls and create a hole to climb through, sliding down the outside with the aid of a ladder made from sheets and bed slats.  Musolino claimed that San Giuseppe, patron saint of carpenters and protector of the poor, had visited him in a dream to point out which part of the stone walls they should target.

Musolino hid in the Aspromonte mountains, one by one working through his list of targets, committing five murders in his first eight months out of captivity and continuing to pursue his goal of revenge for almost three years.  He found local people only too willing to help him, giving him food and hiding places despite a bounty of 5,000 lire being offered to anyone who caught him and turned him over to the police.

Many felt his trial had simply been a representation of the attitudes towards the south held by many northern Italians, who had led the fight to unify the country on behalf of the wealthy Kingdom of Sardinia but had subsequently disparaged southern Italians as backward and ignorant. There was a particular sense of betrayal in Santo Stefano, home of the Romeo family, who were patriots and major supporters of unification in Calabria, helping Garibaldi conquer the region and even joining him on his march north to Naples.

During his time on the run, Musolino, who claimed to be descended from French nobility on the side of his mother, wrote to Italy’s new king, Victor Emmanuel III, appealing for help for the people of Calabria. Eventually, he decided to leave Calabria and head north, hoping at some point to be able to meet Victor Emmanuel in person and ask to be pardoned.

Musolino hoped to ask Victor
Emmanuel III for a pardon

Despite the local police having been joined by the carabinieri corps and the army in searching for Musolino in the Aspromonte mountains, he left the area unnoticed. When he was captured, by accident, he was more than 800km - almost 500 miles - away in Acqualenga, just south of Urbino in Marche.

Walking along a country lane in October 1901, he caught sight of three carabinieri officers, whom he assumed were looking for him, and ran away. They saw him and pursued him, catching up with him when he tripped over a wire supporting a grapevine and fell.

Musolino was transferred by train to a prison in Catanzaro in Calabria on October 24, 1901 to await a second trial, which took place many hundred of miles away from his homeland in Lucca, Tuscany. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and taken to Portolongone prison near Livorno on the Tuscan coast, where he remained until 1946.

In that year, he was declared to be mentally ill and transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Reggio Calabria, where he died on January 22, 1956.

Giuseppe Musolino’s story had a huge impact worldwide, with mass circulation newspapers such as Corriere della Sera and Il Mattino at home giving it extensive coverage, along with international journals including The Times in London, Le Figaro in Paris and the New York Times.  Their reporting, which included tales of stealing from the rich to give money to the poor, convinced some readers that he was a romantic figure akin to the heroic outlaw of English folklore, Robin Hood.

A film, Il Brigante Musolino (1950), directed by Mario Camerini and starring Amedeo Nazzari, told the story to cinema audiences. The celebrated poet Giovanni Pascoli wrote an ode to him and the English writer Norman Douglas devoted a whole chapter of his book, Old Calabria, to his tale, which also inspired recording artists in many genres to write wrote songs about him.  Other books include King of the Mountains: The Remarkable Story of Giuseppe Musolino, Italy's Most Famous Outlaw, by Dan Possumato.

Santo Stefano in Aspromonte attracts winter
visitors to its nearby ski slopes

Travel tip:

Santo Stefano in Aspromonte, birthplace of Giuseppe Musolino, is a village perched on a rocky spur in a mountainous area of the province of Reggio Calabria. The area, which falls within the area of the beautiful Aspromonte National Park, has attractions for summer and winter stays, the mountain areas dotted with pathways and stairways for trekking and the ski slopes of Gambarie nearby. The village itself boasts an historic centre of nooks and crannies, steep staircases, pretty palaces and fountains, as well as the remains of the ancient Abbey of San Giovanni a Castaneto. The area is renowned for its production of oil, cereals and fruit, while wild mushrooms and chestnuts trees abound in the nearby woodlands. 

The remains of an ancient Greek theatre in the
vicinity of the Calabrian resport of Locri

Travel tip:

The coastal city of Locri, on Calabria’s Ionian Sea coast, was originally a Greek colony founded at the end of the eighth century BC by Greek refugees who settled on the coast. It became a major centre in the political and artistic life of Magna Graecia, the name the Romans gave to the Greek-speaking areas of southern Italy. The modern Locri has attractions that include a museum and archaeological park that is home to ancient Greek ruins and artifacts, the scenic Lungomare di Locri and the Monument to the Five Martyrs of Gerace, dedicated to five Locride citizens who were executed in the Risorgimento for having fought for freedom. Locri has more than 12,000 inhabitants, is an important administrative and cultural centre on the Ionian Coast and is only 90 minutes away from the International Airport of Lamezia Terme.

Also on this day:

1506: The founding of the Papal Swiss Guard

1889: The birth of supercentenarian Antonio Todde

1893: The birth of mobster Frankie Yale

2005: The death of veteran soldier Carlo Orelli

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John Paul Getty III released

Heir to world’s biggest fortune held by kidnappers for 158 days

John Paul Getty III was left severely disabled
after a stroke in 1981

A story that dominated the Italian press and newspapers around the world ended on this day in 1973 when police responding to a tip-off found a shivering, malnourished and deeply traumatised American teenager inside a disused motorway service area in a remote part of southern Italy.

John Paul Getty III, grandson of the richest man in the world, the oil tycoon John Paul Getty, had been held in captivity for more than five months by a kidnap gang who had demanded $17 million for his safe return.

The boy’s 80-year-old grandfather, whose personal fortune would equate today to almost $9 billion but who was notoriously mean, at first refused to pay a penny and stuck to that position until late November, when a letter containing a lock of hair and a human ear arrived at the offices of a daily newspaper in Rome.

After a further letter arrived containing a photograph of John Paul Getty III minus one ear, the octogenarian’s representatives made contact with the kidnappers and negotiated his release for $3 million.

Even then, John Paul Getty Senior refused to pay more than $2.2 million, which his lawyers allegedly told him was the maximum he could claim as a tax-deductible expense. The other $800,000 was paid by the boy’s father, John Paul Getty II, then usually known as John Paul Getty Junior but later as Sir Paul Getty.

The 17-year-old John Paul Getty III speaks to members
of the press following his release

The story not only shocked Italy but exposed many rather unsavoury secrets about the world’s richest family.

The early life of John Paul Getty III had been fairly unremarkable, as far as is possible for one born into wealth and privilege.  He was one of four children to emerge from John Paul Getty Jnr’s marriage to Gail Harris, a water polo champion.

Although born in Minneapolis, he spent much of his childhood in Rome, where his father was head of Getty Oil Italiana. Life began to unravel for him when his parents divorced and his father took up with a beautiful Dutch actress and model, Talitha Pol, and rejected his former life.

The couple, famously photographed in Marrakesh by the society snapper Patrick Lichfield, led a dissolute lifestyle, flitting from Rome to London to Morocco until Pol died of a heroin overdose in 1971 and her husband, an Anglophile, returned to London.

John Paul Getty Snr at first refused to
consider meeting the ransom demand

His son was left alone in Rome and his own lifestyle began to follow a similarly Bohemian path. With no senior male figure to guide him, he fell into a life of excess, partying hard and taking drugs. He was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a left-wing demonstration and reportedly expelled from no fewer than seven schools. By 1971 he had given up on the prospect of an education and decided he would make a living as an artist. He began selling his paintings to local trattorie, and made extra cash by modelling nude for life classes.

It was when his was 16 and sharing an apartment with a couple of other artists that he was seized by a gang led by members of the notorious Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta. They had clearly noted his nocturnal lifestyle and were able to snatch him fairly easily in the Piazza Farnese in central Rome at three o’clock in the morning on July 10, 1973.

He was blindfolded and chained up in a mountain hideout while the gang issued their ransom demands. At first, even his mother and father had doubts about the authenticity of the kidnap, remembering that their son had joked about faking a kidnap to extract money from his miserly grandfather.

Eventually it became clear it was not a hoax, however. When Gail Harris, the gang’s first point of contact after they had made her son write her a desperate letter, told them she had no money, they demanded that she “get it from London”, implying that her ex-husband or his father should be made to pay.

John Paul Getty III died at his father's estate, Wormsley Park,
in Buckinghamshire, which has its own cricket field

Although John Paul Getty Jnr would in time inherit a substantial share of the family’s wealth, at that moment he was still relatively poor and it fell to John Paul Getty Snr to decide his grandson’s fate.  Having first reasoned that to settle one ransom demand would simply turn his 13 other grandchildren into kidnap targets, he was finally persuaded to pay up, albeit at a much-reduced figure.  He gave John Paul Getty Jnr a loan to pay his share, charging him interest at four per cent.

Once the money was paid the teenager, who had turned 17 during his captivity, was dumped by his abductors at a motorway service area near Lauria, in the province of Potenza, more than 400km (250 miles) south of Rome.  He was in a poor state of health but while he recovered physically, with his missing ear rebuilt, he was left with deep psychological scars that never healed.

He married a German photographer, Gisela Zacher, and had a son – now an actor, Balthazar Getty - when he was only 18. They moved to New York, where he became part of Andy Warhol’s hedonistic set in Greenwich Village.

In 1981, addicted to Valium and methadone and drinking heavily, he suffered liver failure and a stroke, which left him quadriplegic, almost blind and unable to speak.  His father, who had by then become a philanthropist while battling his own drug addiction, at first refused to pay his son’s medical bills but eventually relented.

John Paul Getty III managed to survive for another 30 years, living in what were effectively his own private hospitals in California, Ireland and at Wormsley in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a building in the grounds of his mansion converted so that his son could live there.  It was at Wormsley in 2011 that he died at the age of 54, having survived his father by eight years.

The Palazzo Farnese houses the French embassy in Rome

Travel tip:

The Piazza Farnese is the square in front of the Palazzo Farnese, one of the most important High Renaissance palaces in Rome. Owned by the Italian Republic, it was given to the French government in 1936 for a period of 99 years, and currently houses the French embassy.  Built in the 16^th century for the Farnese family by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, it was extensively redesigned by Michelangelo when Alessandro Farnese became Pope Pius III. In 1900, the composer Puccini chose the Palazzo Farnese as the setting for a major scene in his opera, Tosca.

The tumbledown ruins of the Saracen castle in Lauria

Travel tip:

Lauria is a picturesque medieval walled town built on the side of a steep hill in Basilicata, about 110km (68 miles) southwest of the large city of Potenza. The main sights include the remains of a Saracen castle, once the home of a famous 13^th century admiral, Roger of Lauria. The actor and film director, Rocco Papaleo, was born in Lauria in 1958.

Also on this day:

1966: 'Spaghetti western' The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is released

1970: Birth of champion jockey Frankie Dettori

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