Lessons in escape from Bertulazzi, the former Red Brigade member who disappeared from Buenos Aires

Lessons from an escape. Take two pieces of pork fat a couple of centimetres thick, cut them into two rectangles the width of an ankle, and wrap them around an empty tube connected to the battery of the blood pressure monitor. Slip the greasy tube into the electronic ankle bracelet in place of your foot. The lard, kept warm from the inside, mimics body temperature and skin moisture. Slip this greasy contraption under the bed and lower yourself from the fifth floor in a makeshift harness fashioned from a kitchen carabiner and the ropes of a hammock. Provided that no one becomes suspicious of your lack of movement detected by the pedometer—getting two small rectangles of lard to “walk” is not easy—you have time to slide down the wall, crawling until you find a spot from which to jump the five metres separating you from the pavement. You brush the dust off your trousers and, provided you haven’t broken a leg, walk slowly, blending in with the tourists taking selfies next to the statue of Mafalda, the little girl from Quino’s comic strips. Then you hear the sirens of the Policia Federal and, at 74, you run through the cobbled streets of San Telmo and vanish into thin air.

Thus Leonardo Bertulazzi, a remnant of the crime news from the Genoa branch of the Red Brigades, managed to evade the four officers on guard at the door of his flat, as well as the cordon of police officers who, ever since his old electronic ankle bracelet had signalled a possible attempt to tamper with it, had been posted to guard the building where he lived (or used to live) at number 649 Calle Defensa. The San Telmo neighbourhood, bordering Monserrat. The neighbourhood with the highest literary density in Buenos Aires: Quino’s bench, Lezama Park from Sobre héroes y tumbas, the uneven pavements of Julio Cortázar, Mario Benedetti and Ernesto Sabato.

Police rumours from Buenos Aires had him far away by last night, perhaps in north-eastern Argentina, on the run through the dusty provinces of Corrientes and Entre Ríos. He was even spotted on a lorry, possibly heading for Brazil. It is remarkable that such a resourceful old gentleman might genuinely expect protection from the newly re-elected Lula da Silva. Mindful of the endless twists and turns in the Cesare Battisti case and the associated political and diplomatic headaches, Brazil’s (four-term) president doesn’t want to see the old Italian terrorists from the red-and-black era of the 1970s even in a painting.

A bounty of around 12,000 dollars hangs over Bertulazzi’s grey-haired head. The Argentine president, Javier Milei, wants a spectacular capture. It is a matter of honour: it was Milei himself, shortly after taking office at the Casa Rosada at the end of 2023, who revoked the refugee status granted to the former BR member by Nestor Kirchner’s Peronist administration.

Milei is obsessed with his image, and seeing the federal police made to look a fool by a 74-year-old man who has suffered three strokes is a stinging blow. Across Buenos Aires, footage captured by a CCTV camera on Calle Bolívar is circulating widely on social media, showing this tall, slender elderly man jumping, falling, getting back up, sitting down to catch his breath on a low wall, and then slowly walking away, limping slightly. He then disappears from view.

His wife, a German doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, has been named as an accomplice.

Bertulazzi slipped away whilst Buenos Aires was gathered on the other side of the city to listen to the Pope; 20,000 police officers were stationed in the area where the Pope was. At that moment, few were paying attention to the former Red Brigade member who was to be sent back to Italy. He, however, knew there was no time to lose because the Supreme Court had just rejected his latest appeal against extradition. At any moment, they would come to take him away and send him back to Rome. There, perhaps a bit of fanfare awaited him, but above all 27 years in prison – which, for a 74-year-old man, would mean a life sentence. He had been arrested in Buenos Aires in early 2024, but then in November he had been granted house arrest on grounds of age and health.

He suffered the three strokes while in prison. Bertulazzi had managed to obtain refugee status from Kirchner on the grounds that he had been tried in absentia in Italy. Bertulazzi is from Genoa and had joined ‘Lotta Continua’. He was an irregular member of the Red Brigades, a sympathiser. He did not play a significant role. However, he had been involved in organising the Costa kidnapping. It appears he had stolen one of the cars used in the kidnapping. Pietro Costa was a 41-year-old naval engineer, the son of the Costa Cruises family. He was abducted by a Red Brigade commando on the evening of 12 January 1977. Not for political reasons, but to raise funds. They captured him at Spianata Castelletto, one of Genoa’s most upmarket areas, as he was returning home. Up until that point, the Red Brigades had been active mainly there in Genoa. In 1974, they had kidnapped the magistrate Mario Sossi, whom they later released in exchange for a promise of a prisoner swap involving members of the ‘22 October’ gang – a promise that was never kept. And a few months before Costa’s kidnapping, they had carried out their first fatal attack, killing Judge Coco and his bodyguard.

The Costa kidnapping yielded an enormous sum: one and a half billion. This sum was divided amongst the various factions, and a portion went to the Roman faction, which was still in the process of being formed. The Roman Red Brigades used some of this money (50 million) to buy a flat in Via Montalcini, in the Portuense district. The following year, that flat was used as a prison for Aldo Moro (the Communist senator Giuseppe d’Alema, Massimo’s father, lived in the same block of flats). And Massimo himself, on the morning of the kidnapping, a few minutes before the car carrying Moro arrived, stopped in front of the garage to wait for his father and accompany him to Montecitorio, where the presentation of the Andreotti government – the first to be supported by the Communists – was due to take place).

However, Bortolazzi was not convicted of the Moro kidnapping. This was partly because he was ‘out of the picture’ at the time: he was in prison for street offences committed as a militant with Lotta Continua. He was subsequently convicted of the Costa kidnapping and of membership of an armed gang. He received a very heavy sentence: 15 years for the kidnapping and 19 for membership of an armed gang, later reduced to a total of 27 years due to the aggregation of sentences. There were no violent crimes involved, and there is no record in the court documents that Bortolazzi ever brandished a weapon.