Letter from Rome: Marco Mezzasalma was your classic "sleeper". Forty five-years-old, unmarried and blessed with a pot-belly that was the object of much teasing from colleagues at US-owned electronics company Lital, near Rome, he hardly looked like a dangerous urban terrorist.
Always on time for work, never in a hurry and never seen to run anywhere by anyone, he also seemed like a reasonable voice on the shop floor. Colleagues recall that when the company did some painful "downsizing" in the mid-'90s, Mezzasalma, in his role of Fiom-Cgil trade union delegate, chose the line of compromise and negotiation. Better to meet the company halfway and protect the 180 jobs at Lital, he told union members.
Such a model employee was Mezzasalma that his company put him in charge of the firm's computer security while he was also one of 100 employees granted access to secret files and classified documents. The point about Lital, you see, is that the firm supplies technology to the Pentagon, reportedly for use in US Black Hawk helicopters.
Mezzasalma's colleagues received a nasty surprise two weeks ago when he was one of nine people picked up in a series of police raids in Rome, Florence, Pisa, and Porto Cervo, Sardinia. All nine people arrested were held on charges relative to the Red Brigade murders of two economists, Massimo D'Antona and Marco Biagi, in May 1999 and March 2002 respectively.
Both men had worked as government advisers and both were shot dead, close to their homes. D'Antona was on his usual walk to work in Rome and Biagi was cycling home from Bologna train station after a day's teaching.
To widespread consternation, both killings were "claimed" by the "Red Brigades-Fighting Communist Party" which accused them of having "betrayed the proletariat" because of their respective roles in drafting legislation aimed at achieving greater labour market flexibility.
To understand those killings and the arrests of two weeks ago, you have to go back 30 years. That was a time when Italy was ravaged by a sort of second civil war in which right and left wing terrorist groups threatened to tear the country's social fabric apart (between 1969 and 1983, more than 14,000 terrorist "acts" were committed).
If the right's most infamous crime was the August 1980 Bologna train station bombing, costing the lives of 85 people, then the left's most heinous crime was the 1978 kidnapping and subsequent murder of Christian Democrat party president and former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Moro was killed by the so-called Red Brigades, which took its roots partly in the post-1968 climate of student protest and partly in the extreme fringes of both the Italian Communist Party (the PCI) and the trade union movement. In five years alone, at the height of their "activity" between 1976 and 1980, the Red Brigades killed 55 people including industrialists, politicians, journalists, trade unionists and policemen. All of this killing, too, was done in the name of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and intended to bring about "the people's revolution". Deprived of widespread consensus, however, and with the "people" clearly more interested in buying their latest Armani suit or Lancia car, the Red Brigades were a spent force by the early-'80s, seemingly consigned to the dustbin of urban guerrilla history.
Or so we thought until the D'Antona and Biagi killings which came as a traumatic flashback for many Italians. Worse still, those killings came out of the blue for Italian investigators who, with the exception of two isolated killings in the late '80s, had lost track of the Red Brigades.
For three years, the investigators seemed to make little headway and it was only this March, following a shoot-out on a Rome-Florence train, that they got their lucky break. Activist Nadio Lioce was arrested after that shoot-out, in which another Red Brigade militant Mario Galesi and policeman Emanuele Petri both lost their lives.
Subsequent analysis of a palm-top computer and a pre-paid phone card found on Lioce allowed investigators to "rebuild" the Red Brigade network of contacts, including Marco Mezzasalma. Obsessively detailed documents subsequently found in both Mezzasalma's apartment and that of another of those arrested, Roberto Morandi, in Florence, indicate that both killings were planned well in advance.
At the time of the initial arrests, Rome investigating magistrates, Franco Ionta and Pietro Savietti, told reporters that today's Red Brigades amount to perhaps less than 20 people. Further documentation since discovered suggests that initial assessment may be optimistic and that the "movement" can count on logistical support in at least four major cities, Rome, Florence, Bologna and Milan.
What is for sure, however, is that today's Red Brigades are no longer "angry young men" of the post-'68 era. Those arrested this week include a 35-year-old mother with a two-year-old child, a 40-year-old woman, two months pregnant, two radiologists in their early 40s, a 44-year old local authority maintenance worker and a 30-year-old hotel maid.
Lacking in even the most minimal social consensus, today's Red Brigade do not appear to represent any long term threat. Few in number, nostalgic in worldview and locked into a 1968 time warp, they might even seem like a latter-day Dad's Army were it not for the painfully tragic impact of their isolated actions.