Marco Furlan and Wolfgang Abel were two young men from comfortable families in Verona who were arrested in March 1984 inside a disco near Mantua, where petrol had just been poured across the floor during a carnival party. Investigators soon tied them to "Ludwig," a name that had been signing leaflets in Nazi imagery since 1980 and claiming killings across the Veneto, Trentino, Lombardy and Munich. The victims named in those leaflets were a homeless man, a gay waiter, a young drug user, a sex worker, a student, two friars, a priest, the patrons of a pornographic cinema and a young woman working in a Munich disco.
Italian courts convicted both men and found them partly mentally impaired, which spared them life sentences. The final sentence, 27 years each, was confirmed in 1991. The record shows that they were convicted of ten deaths, all caused between July 1982 and January 1984, and that the first five deaths claimed by Ludwig, from 1977 to 1981, were never proven against them. Furlan fled before the final ruling and lived abroad for four years until he was found on Crete in 1995. He completed his sentence in 2009 and was freed from all supervision in 2010. Questions about whether others took part have never gone away, and in 2024 Milan prosecutors reopened the investigation into the cinema fire against persons unknown.
Furlan was born in Padua on January 16, 1960, and grew up in Verona, according to il Giornale. His father was the head of plastic surgery and of the burns unit at Verona's main hospital in Borgo Trento. Wolfgang Abel was born in Germany in 1959 (ANSA gives Munich) and moved to Verona as a child; UPI described him in 1984 as a native of Negrar, just outside the city. His father represented a large German insurance group in Italy.
The two met as pupils at the Liceo Fracastoro, Verona's classical high school, and university later took them in different directions. Abel graduated in mathematics with top marks and went to work for the Munich insurer Arag, keeping a flat in Munich. Furlan studied physics at the University of Padua and was close to graduating when he was arrested. In 1987 Werner Raith, reporting from Verona for the Berlin daily taz, found a neighbor who remembered both as polite, helpful and calm.
The writer Valerio Evangelisti, in a 2009 essay for the historical journal Venetica, described their lives as austere: they avoided parties and fashionable places, held far-right views close to Nazism and had no known record of militancy. Later research, set out in Alessandra Coppola's 2025 book Il fuoco nero and in reviews of it, places them in Verona's far-right milieu, which Coppola traces back to the neo-fascist movement Ordine Nuovo.
In November 1980 a letter posted in Bologna arrived at Il Gazzettino, the Venice daily. It was signed "Ludwig" beneath a carefully drawn Nazi eagle, with the motto "Gott mit uns" ("God with us"). It claimed three killings going back to 1977 and gave details only the killers could have known. It was the first time anyone linked the three deaths. Michele Sartori, writing in l'Unità in 1985, noted that Ludwig often claimed attacks long after they happened; one Verona fire was claimed about two years later.
Those three deaths, and the two that followed in 1980 and 1981, are part of Ludwig's story. They are not part of Furlan's criminal record. They are set out below because the leaflets claimed them and the prosecution charged them, and because the courts in the end did not find them proven against Furlan or Abel.
Guerrino Spinelli, described in l'Unità as a Roma man and elsewhere as a nomad or homeless man, slept in his Fiat 126 in Verona. On August 25, 1977, the car was set on fire with him inside. He died about eight days later. Evangelisti wrote that before he died he said there had been three attackers.
Luciano Stefanato, 44, was a waiter and sommelier in Padua who was gay. He was stabbed to death in December 1978; most sources give December 19. According to Evangelisti, witnesses spoke of four people.
Claudio Costa, 22, was a young man in Venice who was described in the press as a drug user. He was stabbed to death on December 12, 1979.
Alice Maria Baretta, 52, was a sex worker in Vicenza. She was killed with an axe on December 20, 1980; some sources spell her surname Beretta.
On the night of May 24 to 25, 1981, a fire was set in a shelter at Porta San Giorgio in Verona, used by homeless people and drug users. Three young people were inside. Two survived; Luca Martinotti, a student from Turin given as 18 in most accounts, died. A Ludwig letter sent to La Repubblica claimed the fire with the words "Our faith is Nazism, our justice is death, our democracy is extermination."
On July 20, 1982, two elderly friars of the Servite community at the sanctuary of Monte Berico in Vicenza, Gabriele Pigato and Giuseppe Lovato, both about 70, were attacked with hammers in via Cialdini, near the sanctuary. Pigato died at the scene and Lovato soon after reaching San Bortolo hospital. The Ludwig claim that followed called its authors "the last heirs of Nazism"; according to UPI's report of the 1987 verdict, the leaflets accused the friars of spying on courting couples. This was the first of the killings for which Furlan and Abel were finally convicted.
On the evening of February 26, 1983, Father Armando Bison, a 71-year-old priest, was attacked in Trento with a hammer and a pointed tool topped with a small crucifix. He did not survive. The Ludwig claim said that one who betrays the true God had been punished. The 1987 court convicted both men of his killing, although UPI reported that the motive for it was never established.
Before the next attack, police arrested a physics researcher from Brescia, S. R., who had collected material on the case. He was held for about eight days and released with apologies, and in 1986 the investigating judge formally cleared him. He had no part in the crimes.
The Eros Sexy Center was a cinema showing adult films in a converted hall at viale Monza 101, in northern Milan. On the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, 1983, about thirty people were watching a film. At about 5:40 p.m., as the second half began, petrol from two containers, about 25 liters in all, was spread in the back rows and by the curtains at the doors and set alight. Most of the audience escaped. Five spectators, aged 25 to 37, died. So did Livio Ceresoli, a 46-year-old doctor who was passing by and went into the building to help; he was later awarded Italy's gold medal for civil valor. Il Fatto Quotidiano and other reports give 32 people injured.
About ten days later ANSA's Milan office received a Ludwig leaflet. It said that a "death squad" had executed "men without honor," and described the containers used, details not yet public. In 2023, on the fortieth anniversary, the City of Milan placed a memorial at the site, now a church, describing the fire as the gravest attack in Milan after the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969 and stating that the accomplices and backers of the two convicted men remain unknown. All six deaths came from this single event. Of the six, only Livio Ceresoli is named in the reporting on the fire.
The owner of the cinema, Cosimo Cecero, testified at the 1987 trial that he recognized Furlan as a young man who had bought tickets for himself and two others about two weeks before the fire, according to the former Milan judge Guido Salvini.
In December 1983 a fire at the Casa Rosso sex club in Amsterdam killed 13 people, and Ludwig claimed it. Dutch police ruled the group out and blamed a dismissed employee, who was later sentenced to 12 years, and the Amsterdam fire was never charged against Furlan or Abel.
On January 7, 1984, at about 11:26 p.m., two men threw containers of petrol into the entrance of the Liverpool, a basement disco at Schillerstrasse 11a in central Munich. About 30 guests and staff were cut off by flames and smoke. Seven people were seriously injured, according to taz and the Abendzeitung; the city of Munich gives eight injured. Corinna Tartarotti, a 20-year-old cloakroom attendant of Italian origin, died of her injuries in hospital on April 27, 1984. About ten days after the fire ANSA received a Ludwig letter claiming it under a crude, mocking headline about the club. Munich police at first looked for a motive in the red-light milieu.
Like the cinema fire, the Liverpool fire was a single event within the longer series. Corinna Tartarotti's aunt, Nicoletta Tartarotti, told taz in 2024 that murder has no statute of limitations and that if there are new leads the case must be investigated again. The city of Munich held its first official commemoration on the fortieth anniversary in January 2024 and set up a memorial stele at the site in January 2025.
On the night of March 3 to 4, 1984, the Melamara disco at Castiglione delle Stiviere, in the province of Mantua, was holding a carnival party. Most of the roughly 400 young people inside were in costume. According to Il Fatto Quotidiano and other accounts, one man dressed as a Pierrot opened an emergency door to let in another carrying two containers of petrol. The petrol was poured across the carpet and lit.
The fire did not spread. The carpet was made of fire-retardant material, a requirement introduced after a cinema fire in Turin the year before, and a security guard put out the flames. The two men tried to fight their way past a doorman, were surrounded by the crowd, and were arrested by the Carabinieri, who had to protect them from being beaten. They gave their names as Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan. In 1985 l'Unità reported that Furlan had called the attempt a "carnival prank."
West German federal police came to Mantua within days. UPI reported on March 14, 1984, that a search of Abel's Munich apartment had found material linking him to the Liverpool fire. Both men refused to answer questions. The case was handled in Verona by the prosecutor Francesco Pavone and the investigating judge Mario Sannite.
The central evidence came from paper. In the two men's homes, Furlan's in Verona and Abel's in Munich, police seized notepads and blank sheets. German examiners, using an electrostatic method that reads indentations left by writing on the sheet above, recovered text matching the Ludwig claim letters. Evangelisti listed further pointers: bags at Castiglione like those used in Munich, Abel's clothing found in Munich, witnesses who recognized one or both men, and a pair of sunglasses left at the Venice killing whose lenses matched Abel's prescription but whose fit did not. A German copy of Ignazio Silone's novel The Story of a Humble Christian, found at Abel's home with the name of its character Brother Ludovico underlined, led the investigating judge to suggest a literary origin for the name Ludwig. Neither man ever explained it.
Psychiatric experts appointed by the court, Augusto Balloni and Roberto Reggiani, examined Abel and found reduced capacity. Furlan refused to be examined. Abel attempted suicide several times in custody, and Furlan reportedly took barbiturates.
In July 1986 Sannite sent both men to trial for mass killing and other offenses covering 15 deaths, from Guerrino Spinelli to Corinna Tartarotti, and for the attempted fire at the Melamara.
The trial before the Verona assize court opened in late 1986 and ran to about 20 hearings. Furlan and Abel did not testify and used their right to stay away from most of the sessions, including the last. Their lawyers were Piero Longo and Tiburzio De Zuani. According to taz, the defendants admitted only the Melamara attempt, and the prosecutor himself asked for acquittal on two counts because the evidence was weak.
The verdict came on February 10, 1987. Each man received 30 years in prison, followed by three years in a judicial psychiatric hospital. The prosecution had asked for life; the court found both men partly mentally impaired at the time of the crimes. Accounts of exactly what the court convicted them of differ. UPI reported from Verona that both were convicted of the killings of the two friars and the priest and of the Milan and Munich fires, that Furlan alone was also convicted of the 1977 Verona car fire and Abel alone of the 1979 Venice killing, and that the court acquitted them of the remaining deaths. Raith in taz and Sartori in l'Unità both put the conviction at ten murders, with the other counts acquitted for lack of evidence. Raith found Verona divided and confused by the outcome.
The appeal opened in Venice in January 1988, before a court presided over by Corrado Ambrogi. With both sides in agreement it ordered new psychiatric examinations; the deputy prosecutor general, Stefano Dragone, said he believed Abel was wholly insane. Furlan, who had refused to cooperate until then, told the court he would answer questions from the next hearing, but asked that there be no television or photographers; he waited on a Carabinieri launch until they were removed. His parents attended and spoke with him for an hour.
In June 1988 the Court of Cassation accepted a defense challenge to the extension of Furlan's pretrial custody, and on June 15 the Venice appeal court released both men because the time limits had run out. Furlan was sent to live under compulsory residence at Casale di Scodosia, a village in the province of Padua, and both had to sign in regularly with the Carabinieri.
On April 10, 1990, the Venice assize appeal court, presided over by Nicola Lercario, cut the sentences to 27 years. According to il Giornale, the aggravating factor of premeditation was set aside in the final judgment as incompatible with the finding of partial mental infirmity. Several later sources say Furlan was tried in his absence at this stage.
The outcome that later reporting treats as final is that Furlan and Abel were convicted of ten killings committed between 1982 and 1984 and acquitted of five other charges. Il Giornale reported this in 2010, as did Vorrei in 2016, Il Giorno in 2023, Sky TG24 in 2024 and the publisher Einaudi in 2025, and Guido Salvini wrote in 2024 that the conviction for ten of the 15 claimed killings is final. The ten are the two friars, Father Bison, the six people who died in the Eros fire and Corinna Tartarotti. La Cronaca di Verona wrote in 2020 that the authors of the first five deaths remain unknown. Salvini also notes that the courts found the two men fully responsible for the Melamara attempt but partly impaired for the earlier crimes.
In early February 1991, shortly before the Court of Cassation sat, Furlan rode away by bicycle from Casale di Scodosia, just after signing the Carabinieri register, according to il manifesto. On February 11, 1991, the Court of Cassation confirmed the 27-year sentences for both men. Abel, unlike Furlan, went back to prison.
Furlan said later, according to il manifesto, that he fled "so as not to end up unjustly in jail." He lived in Austria, then in Belgrade and Zagreb, then for about three years in Thessaloniki. His parents, who had separated, were reported to have stayed close to him and not to believe he was guilty. In the summer of 1993 two young tourists from Verona filmed him in a street in Thessaloniki and gave the video to police; Carabinieri went to Greece, but he slipped away, apparently after a warning.
He moved to Crete. Evangelisti wrote that he worked there as an interpreter, a pharmacy assistant, a waiter and a car-rental clerk, using an altered identity document; il manifesto said he had just taken a job with a small transport company. In May 1995 officers of the Veneto Criminalpol, led by Francesco Zonno, working with Greek police, arrested him at Heraklion airport. He wore a mustache and showed false papers and denied who he was to the end. A local court sentenced him to seven months in prison for the forged documents, which Greek law required him to serve before extradition; he answered the judges in fluent Greek. In June 1995 il manifesto reported that Furlan had admitted to Greek investigators the crimes he committed with Abel and had told them that the two had not acted alone. This was never tested in court. He was later returned to Italy and held at Opera prison in Milan. Il manifesto also reported that he had attempted suicide before he fled in 1991.
Furlan came to hold degrees in physics and engineering; the second, in computer engineering, he received with honors on April 24, 2008, while still serving his sentence. That April the Milan supervision court placed him on probation under the supervision of social services, outside prison, and he went to work as a consultant for an IT company in Milan. His lawyer, Corrado Limentani, said that Furlan had paid his debt and asked only to be forgotten.
He was notified of the end of his sentence on January 3, 2009, at Opera. With reductions for time served before trial, pardons and good conduct, reports put his time in custody at 18 to 19 years. Leaving prison, he was quoted as saying: "I have paid, now leave me in peace, people change." The columnist Stefano Lorenzetto noted in il Giornale that Limentani had told the Corriere di Verona that Furlan wanted to pursue his real project, a device to remove evil from the brain, and that Furlan had not denied it. Don Guido Todeschini, a Verona priest who had visited him at Opera, said he had changed.
Because of the finding of partial mental infirmity he remained under a security measure. In 2009 the order assigning him to a care facility was replaced by supervised liberty, and on November 12, 2010, Milan supervision judge Cristina Ceffa revoked that too, on a social services report that he had completed his psychological path and was no longer socially dangerous. He told the judge he would keep working and stay in touch with the professionals who had followed him.
Abel's legal path ran alongside Furlan's. He received the same sentences at each stage: 30 years in 1987 and 27 on appeal, confirmed in 1991, for the same ten killings. He was held for a time in the judicial psychiatric hospital at Reggio Emilia, and over the years his lawyers sought his release on psychiatric grounds. In 2009 the rest of his sentence became house arrest at his family's home in Valpolicella, followed by supervised liberty and a duty to sign in. A Verona supervision judge lifted that last measure on November 24, 2016, and he became wholly free. He always said he was innocent. After his release he said he was ready to say more about the case, and both men said they had not seen or spoken to each other since they were freed.
On September 10, 2021, Abel was found injured after a fall at his home at Monte Rico di Arbizzano, in the municipality of Negrar, and fell into a coma. He died on October 25, 2024, at the Sacro Cuore Don Calabria hospital in Negrar without regaining consciousness. ANSA gave his age as 64 and Il Fatto Quotidiano as 65. His funeral was held privately in Valpolicella.
In February 2022 L'Arena of Verona, followed by ANSA, reported that Furlan had met Pope Francis on December 13, 2018, in the Clementine Hall of the Vatican, when the Pope received a delegation from the Catholic broadcaster Telepace led by Don Guido Todeschini, Furlan's spiritual adviser. According to the priest's account, the Pope knew who Furlan was, including that three of the victims in his case were men of the Church; Furlan asked for forgiveness, and the Pope put his hands on Furlan's head while he wept. Il Mattino di Padova reported at the time that Furlan, then 61, had long lived away from public attention.
Doubts that two men did all of this alone were raised from the start. The defense argued at trial that a third person was responsible. Witnesses had described three hooded men at Spinelli's car, three young men near Monte Berico, and three young men in the Eros cinema, and the cinema's owner recalled Furlan buying three tickets. Ludwig leaflets went on appearing after the arrests: in February 1990 a masked group beat street vendors in Florence and left a leaflet signed "Gott mit uns, Ludwig," and in the early 1990s toy bombs left near Roma camps around Pisa maimed children. Investigators treated those as the work of imitators.
In 1996 Giampaolo Stimamiglio, a former member of Ordine Nuovo, told Carabinieri investigators that Ludwig had probably emerged from a Verona circle around the Ananda Marga movement. In September 1997 the Verona prosecutor Aldo Celentano closed the inquiry into a possible third man, concluding that Furlan and Abel had acted alone.
The question returned with new research. Saverio Ferrari's book on the Eros fire appeared in 2021. Alessandra Coppola of the Corriere della Sera made a podcast, Cinema Eros, and in November 2024 Milan prosecutors Leonardo Lesti and Francesca Crupi reopened the investigation into the cinema fire against persons unknown. The cinema's manager had said Furlan and Abel came twice with a third young man, short and stocky, who has never been identified. Prosecutors said the file covered only the Eros fire and would draw on evidence from the new trial over the 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia, whose defendants included Verona neo-fascists. In Munich, prosecutors began reviewing the Liverpool case in October 2023, taz reported. No charges against any other person had been reported as of October 2026.
Augusto Caneva published Il caso Ludwig in 1986, before the first trial ended. Monica Zornetta's Ludwig: storie di fuoco, sangue e follia followed in 2011. Saverio Ferrari's I nazisti di Ludwig e il rogo del cinema Eros (2021), Roberto Fagiolo's Ferro, fuoco e ombre: il caso Ludwig (2024) and Alessandra Coppola's Il fuoco nero: storia della banda neonazi Ludwig (2025) all argue that the "two madmen" account leaves too much unexplained. Coppola told Sky TG24 in December 2025 that it was not just a matter of two disturbed young men bound by an unhealthy friendship; Paolo Morando, reviewing her book in Domani, noted that the link to Ordine Nuovo she proposes still lacks any finding at trial. In 2026 Roberto Taddeo, in a 562-page study published by Mimesis, called Ludwig a many-sided band of killers rather than a pair. Il Post's Indagini podcast covered the case in 2023, and Sky Crime scheduled a documentary, Ludwig: gli angeli neri, for October 27, 2026.
Proven by final judgment: Furlan and Abel were convicted of ten killings, those of the two friars in 1982, Father Bison in 1983, the six people who died in the Eros cinema fire and Corinna Tartarotti, and of the attempted fire at the Melamara.
Claimed by Ludwig but not proven against Furlan: the deaths of Guerrino Spinelli, Luciano Stefanato, Claudio Costa, Alice Maria Baretta and Luca Martinotti between 1977 and 1981. Contemporary reports of the 1987 verdict disagree on whether the first court convicted Furlan of Spinelli's death; later sources agree that by the final judgment these five deaths were not attributed to the two men. Furlan was still a minor at the time of the 1977 fire.
Excluded: the Casa Rosso fire in Amsterdam, which Ludwig claimed but for which a former employee was convicted.
Figures that vary: many reports, including ANSA's, describe the two men as convicted of 15 murders; that is the number of deaths claimed by Ludwig, not the number in the final conviction. Some reports give 28 deaths and 39 injuries, which adds the 13 Amsterdam deaths. Victims' ages and some dates differ by a day or a year between sources, as do the name spellings Baretta and Beretta.
Never tested: Furlan's reported statement in Greece in 1995 that he and Abel did not act alone; the identity of the third young man seen at the Eros cinema; and claims that Ludwig was tied to Ordine Nuovo or esoteric groups. The Milan inquiry reopened in 2024 is against persons unknown.
January 16, 1960: Marco Furlan is born in Padua; he grows up in Verona.
August 25, 1977: Guerrino Spinelli is set on fire in his car in Verona (claimed, not proven).
December 1978: Luciano Stefanato is killed in Padua (claimed, not proven).
December 12, 1979: Claudio Costa is killed in Venice (claimed, not proven).
November 1980: first "Ludwig" letter reaches Il Gazzettino.
December 20, 1980: Alice Maria Baretta is killed in Vicenza (claimed, not proven).
May 24 to 25, 1981: fire at Porta San Giorgio, Verona; Luca Martinotti dies (claimed, not proven).
July 20, 1982: friars Gabriele Pigato and Giuseppe Lovato are killed in Vicenza (convicted).
February 26, 1983: Father Armando Bison is attacked and killed in Trento (convicted).
May 14, 1983: Eros cinema fire in Milan; six die (convicted).
December 1983: Casa Rosso fire, Amsterdam (claimed by Ludwig; excluded).
January 7, 1984: Liverpool disco fire, Munich; Corinna Tartarotti dies April 27 (convicted).
March 4, 1984: Furlan and Abel are arrested at the Melamara disco, Castiglione delle Stiviere.
July 1986: committed for trial in Verona.
Late 1986: Verona assize trial opens.
February 10, 1987: 30 years each, with partial mental infirmity.
January 1988: appeal opens in Venice.
June 15, 1988: both freed on custody time limits; compulsory residence.
April 10, 1990: Venice appeal court reduces sentences to 27 years.
February 1991: Furlan flees Casale di Scodosia.
February 11, 1991: Court of Cassation confirms 27 years.
Summer 1993: Furlan is filmed by tourists in Thessaloniki.
May 1995: arrested at Heraklion, Crete; sentenced in Greece to seven months for false papers.
June 1995: reported to have told Greek investigators that he and Abel did not act alone.
September 1997: Verona inquiry into a "third man" is closed.
April 2008: degree in computer engineering; probation with social services.
January 3, 2009: end of Furlan's sentence.
November 12, 2010: all supervision lifted.
November 24, 2016: Abel's last measure lifted.
December 13, 2018: Furlan meets Pope Francis at the Vatican.
May 15, 2023: Milan unveils a memorial at the Eros cinema site.
January 2024: Munich's first official commemoration of the Liverpool fire.
October 25, 2024: Wolfgang Abel dies at Negrar.
November 2024: Milan prosecutors reopen the Eros fire inquiry against persons unknown.
October 19, 2026: no new proceedings against Furlan found.