Bartolomeo Gagliano spent most of his adult life moving between Italian prisons and judicial psychiatric hospitals. The courts found that he had killed a woman near Savona in 1981 and two people near Genoa in 1989, but each time judged him incapable of understanding and willing his acts. He was acquitted on that ground and committed to secure psychiatric hospitals, so he served no prison sentence for the three deaths, according to Il Giornale. He escaped from those hospitals several times. In December 2013, at 55, he failed to return from a good-conduct leave from Marassi prison in Genoa, took a delivery driver's vehicle at gunpoint, and was caught three days later across the French border at Menton. The escape became a national political story. He was sentenced in Genoa in January 2015 for the escape and the hijacking, and days later his death by suicide in prison was announced.
Gagliano was of Sicilian origin and lived in Savona, on the Ligurian coast west of Genoa, according to Libero and Affaritaliani. Affaritaliani described his family as ordinary. His date and place of birth are uncertain; ANSA and Il Post gave his age as 55 in December 2013.
In January 1981, when he was 22, he killed a woman with whom, according to Affaritaliani, he had been having a secret relationship. The paper said she had threatened to tell his fiancée about the affair. Libero gave her age as 29. She was beaten to death. Gagliano turned himself in to police a few hours later, Affaritaliani reported. LiveSicilia wrote in 2013 that his fiancée, who had been about to marry him, was spared by what happened to the other woman. Her name was not published when the case resurfaced in 2013.
The court found him mentally ill. Libero wrote that he was judged "totalmente infermo di mente", totally insane, and Affaritaliani said he was ordered to spend ten years in a judicial psychiatric hospital, then called a manicomio giudiziario, a criminal asylum. From 1981, Libero wrote, he moved between prisons and criminal asylums. Affaritaliani placed his first commitment at Montelupo Fiorentino, near Florence, and said it was there that he met another patient, Francesco Sedda, described as a robber.
In 1983, during a short leave granted by his doctors, Gagliano took a family hostage. The accounts of what followed differ. Libero reported that a 17-year-old was wounded; Affaritaliani said that no one was hurt. Libero reported that he was ordered to spend eight years in a criminal asylum for the episode.
In 1989 Gagliano escaped from the criminal psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, ANSA reported, and Libero counted it as his second escape. La Notizia and Affaritaliani reported that he got out together with Sedda.
Within about a week of the escape, two people were shot dead in the Genoa area and a woman was seriously wounded. Il Post reported that in 1989 Gagliano was charged with the two killings in Genoa, and that they earned him the press nickname "il mostro di San Valentino". Later accounts describe the 1989 victims inconsistently and name only one of them.
Investigators linked the deaths to Gagliano through ballistic evidence, and he was arrested, at about 31, Affaritaliani reported.
How far Sedda took part is not clear. La Notizia wrote in 2013 that the 1989 killings happened during one of Gagliano's escapes "with an accomplice", Sedda. Affaritaliani, citing a criminology book, said the two men together killed two people and wounded a third during their week of freedom. Other reports, including ANSA and Il Giornale, attribute the three killings to Gagliano alone.
As with the 1981 death, the 1989 killings did not lead to a prison sentence. Il Giornale wrote in December 2013 that Gagliano had "three murders behind him" but had been declared "incapace di intendere e di volere", incapable of understanding and willing, and so had served no sentence for them. L'Unità called him a man declared incapable of understanding and willing who had spent half his life in criminal asylums. He was committed again to a judicial psychiatric hospital. The date of the 1989 ruling and the court that issued it are uncertain.
Commitment did not hold him. Libero reported that on a leave in 1990 he wounded a young woman, who survived, and that he later gave himself up. Libero's other report said that between 1990 and 1994 he escaped three more times. In 1994, according to Libero, he escaped from the judicial psychiatric hospital at Reggio Emilia. Libero counted five escapes in all.
His criminal record grew alongside the hospital years. ANSA listed convictions for robbery, drug and weapons possession, assault ("aggression") and extortion, and The Associated Press, in a report by Nicole Winfield, said his record from 1981 included kidnapping and sexual violence as well as the killings, and that he had served time for some of these crimes in psychiatric hospitals.
By 2002 he was considered cured, Libero reported, and in the years that followed he was arrested several times for lesser crimes. In 2006 he went back to prison. Accounts of the case that sent him there differ: Il Post said he was jailed in 2006 for extortion, ANSA in 2014 spoke of a 2006 extortion sentence that he still had to finish, and the AP said he was serving nine years for theft, known to the prison as a thief convicted of a 2006 robbery. He was held at Marassi prison in Genoa. LiveSicilia reported that he would have been released in April 2015, and the AP that he was due out in 2015.
In prison he was, by the official accounts, a quiet inmate. ANSA reported that prison authorities spoke of three years of good conduct. Il Giornale wrote that a health report of June 2013 described him as calm and cooperative and that he had no disciplinary record. The AP said recent psychiatric evaluations had found him lucid, calm and collaborative. His lawyer from 2011 was Mario Iavicoli, according to Libero.
As his release date came closer, he was allowed out on short leaves, known in Italy as permessi premio, reward permits. Il Giornale reported that earlier requests had been turned down and that his first leave, in August 2013, was spent in the company of the prison chaplain; he came back on time. The supervisory judge, Daniela Verrina of Genoa's Tribunale di sorveglianza, then granted a second leave so that he could visit his elderly mother in Savona. The justice minister later said the leaves were meant to prepare him for his final release, Il Giornale wrote.
Judge Verrina defended the decision after the escape. "The permit was issued on legitimate foundations, after a long study of reports," she said, according to ANSA, and Libero reported that she cited years of reports describing his psychiatric condition as stable, with lucidity, cooperation, calm and no signs of illness.
Gagliano was due back at Marassi by 9 a.m. Accounts disagree on the day: ANSA's Rome desk and Libero placed the next events on the dawn of Tuesday, December 17, 2013, while ANSA's Genoa desk said Wednesday, and the AP said he had been due back on December 17. At about 6 a.m. in Savona, he stopped a man making deliveries for a local bakery, threatened him with a pistol and made him drive toward Genoa, loading three bags into the vehicle. In Genoa he put the driver out and drove off, according to ANSA, La Notizia and Affaritaliani. The driver later told reporters, as quoted by ANSA, "With me he was a gentleman. He behaved well. During the trip he always kept his pistol in his pocket." He could not pick Gagliano out from police photographs.
Police called him "very dangerous". The Genoa prosecutor's office, with prosecutor Alberto Landolfi, began an inquiry for kidnapping, robbery, illegal possession of a firearm and escape, Affaritaliani reported, and the search spread across Italy and to the borders. Libero described checkpoints, checks at railway and bus stations, automatic plate readers and a stream of false sightings. One sighting, at the emergency room of the hospital in Lavagna on the evening of December 18, was checked against surveillance video and ruled out, ANSA and Libero reported. ANSA said sex workers in the region were on alert. Gagliano's lawyer publicly urged him to turn himself in.
The escape turned into a political story within hours. The director of Marassi, Salvatore Mazzeo, told reporters that staff had not known whom they were dealing with. "The paperwork says he's a robber," he said, according to ANSA, and Libero quoted him as saying, "We thought he was a simple robber." Mazzeo said Gagliano had changed his mind at the last moment, according to Affaritaliani.
Justice Minister Annamaria Cancellieri called the episode very serious and promised an inquiry. On December 20 she briefed the Chamber of Deputies. Il Giornale reported that she said the officials who decided on the leave had all the information they needed, and that Mazzeo's claim not to know Gagliano's record was contradicted by the correspondence between the prison and the supervisory judge. The AP reported that she disputed the director's account, said prison officials had Gagliano's full record, did not question the release decision and defended reward permits, which she said were breached in about one percent of cases. Luigi Pagano, deputy head of the prison administration, acknowledged a failure in the case but noted that some 20,000 other prisoners returned from their leaves, Il Giornale reported.
The timing was difficult for the government. The AP noted that Senate President Pietro Grasso warned the escape could hurt proposals to reduce prison overcrowding, which followed a European Court of Human Rights ruling in January against Italy's prison conditions. In La Voce di New York, the commentator Fabio Cammalleri argued that responsibility for the permit lay with the judge who issued it rather than with the prison, and wrote that the judge had received a note on Gagliano's record about five months before the permit was granted.
Mazzeo was moved. Il Giornale reported that he was to be transferred to the regional prison administration office for Liguria, and that the minister said the move was due to his "reckless" statements after the escape, not to the permit itself. L'Unità called it the first head to fall.
Gagliano had crossed into France. L'Unità reported that motorway toll records placed his vehicle at the Albisola toll booth late on the Tuesday night and at Ventimiglia, on the border, just after midnight, and that he was seen in Nice and Menton, where staff at a bar recognized him on the second day. On December 20, 2013, at 1:50 p.m., he was arrested in Menton by French special units from Nice with Interpol, without resistance, L'Unità wrote. He was carrying a 7.65 pistol, and ammunition and pills were found in his hotel room.
His lawyer said Gagliano had telephoned him at noon that day to say he wanted to surrender, but that police caught him first, RSI and Libero reported. L'Unità quoted Gagliano as saying, "Scusate, un colpo di testa", roughly "Sorry, I lost my head." In Rome the minister greeted the news, with a second fugitive caught the same day, with "Evviva, evviva! Li hanno catturati entrambi" ("Hooray! They have caught them both"), according to Libero.
He stayed in France for four months. On December 24, 2013, a court in Nice sentenced him to ten months in jail for carrying a gun and holding false identity papers, ANSA reported, and he spent about four months in a specialist medical center. On April 23, 2014, the appeal court at Aix-en-Provence granted Italy's extradition request. ANSA reported that he had by then been declared mentally ill, that he still had to serve the rest of his 2006 extortion sentence, and that when he was brought back across the border at Ventimiglia he spat at reporters as he was taken into a police barracks.
On January 14, 2015, judges in Genoa sentenced him to six years and ten months for the December 2013 escape, the kidnapping of the delivery driver and armed car theft, ANSA reported.
On Thursday, January 22, 2015, the authorities announced that Gagliano had died by suicide in his prison cell, according to ANSA.
The courts did not convict Gagliano of murder. For the 1981 and 1989 killings he was acquitted as totally insane and committed to judicial psychiatric hospitals, as Libero, Il Giornale and L'Unità reported. Several outlets, including ANSA's English service, nonetheless described him as "convicted" of three murders and an attempted murder; the Italian reports that describe the legal outcome show findings of insanity, not convictions.
Many details of the early killings are uncertain. Accounts differ on how to describe the 1989 victims, on whether anyone was hurt in 1983, and on how Sedda was involved. The names of the 1981 victim and of the second 1989 victim, and the dates and courts of the insanity rulings, remain uncertain.
January 1981: In the Savona area, aged 22, kills a woman; gives himself up hours later; found totally insane and committed to a judicial psychiatric hospital for ten years.
1983: On a short leave, takes a family hostage and fires shots in Savona; ordered to spend eight years in a criminal asylum.
1989: Escapes from the judicial psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, reportedly with Francesco Sedda; within about a week two people are shot dead and a woman is wounded near Genoa; arrested and again found incapable of understanding and willing.
1990: On a leave, shoots and wounds a girlfriend; later gives himself up.
1990 to 1994: Three more escapes, the last from the judicial psychiatric hospital at Reggio Emilia in 1994.
2002: Considered cured.
2006: Returns to prison on robbery and extortion convictions; later held at Marassi, Genoa.
August 2013: First reward permit, accompanied by the prison chaplain.
December 17, 2013: Fails to return from a second permit; takes a delivery vehicle in Savona.
December 20, 2013: Minister Cancellieri briefs the Chamber of Deputies; Gagliano is arrested in Menton, France.
December 24, 2013: Sentenced in Nice to ten months for carrying a gun and false identity papers.
April 23, 2014: Aix-en-Provence appeal court grants extradition; returned to Italy.
January 14, 2015: Sentenced in Genoa to six years and ten months for escape, kidnapping and armed car theft.
January 22, 2015: His death by suicide in prison is announced.