«My Antonio Leandri, perfect boy killed by mistake by terrorists. And they never apologized»- Corriere.it

We didn’t know each other, but we were born twenty days apart. Perhaps this is also why his name has remained in my head all this time. Antonio Leandri was one of the victims of terrorism. One of many. He was killed at point blank range, one evening as Christmas was approaching, in Rome, in Piazza Dalmazia. But the terrorists of the Nar they were looking for another person, George Archangelsa fascist lawyer who, according to them, had sold the terrorist to the police Concutellicreator and executor of the murder of the judge Occurrence. They wanted to eliminate the lawyer after having discussed at length whether to stick him to make him spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair or kill him directly. At the end of this winged debate they had decided that it was better, once again, punish one to educate a hundredas was graciously argued in that bastard time.

At six in the afternoon of December 17, 1979 four of the Nars take up positions in front of the door where the lawyer Arcangeli has his office, of whom they only know that he has balding hair and wears a loden. The commando is made up of four boys who are between sixteen and twenty years old. One of them, Bruno Marianihas the task of shooting, Fioravanti, the fifth, must cover his back. A car arrives, a man gets out, he’s wearing a loden and his balding hair.

You shoot him

It is precisely Fioravanti who tells in a book of Piero Corsini those moments: «This person looks around a bit, meets Bruno’s gaze, has a moment’s hesitation and starts walking away from Arcangeli’s office. Bruno is uncertain, then he goes after him, I guess he’s about to shoot him.’ Not sure, maybe. So they call him: “Lawyer!”; the person turns around and Mariani shoots him. Fioravanti: «Bruno emptied the drum but only grazed it, he practically didn’t hurt it. I had been told that Arcangeli always went around armed – he too with a 357 Magnum — and I thought he was wearing a bulletproof vest… I took out my pistol and fired a shot, aiming for the arm, so he couldn’t shoot Bruno.’

The man in the loden is lying on the ground. Three of the four flee in the car they had parked not far away, not the one with which they had arrived in Piazza Dalmazia. On that remains Fioravanti, more shrewd. The four neo-fascists are stopped by a police patrol which takes them to the police headquarters. There they will say that they have eliminated a traitor and will discover, instead, that they have killed a poor bastard.
Antonio Leandri, he was the poor Christ.

Antonio, that evening, had an appointment with his girlfriend, Fiorella Sanfilippo. I’ve been looking for it for a long time and now it’s in front of me. She is a blonde, shy and kind lady. She speaks with emotion and tenderness about that boy with whom she had been with for two years. She does it together with Renatohis partner, father of his childrenwho lovingly assists her in this journey in search of something she has never told anyone about.

The breakdown

«At the time I worked at Cisalfa, a sports goods department store in via La Spezia. That evening I had an appointment in front of the shop with Tonino, that’s what I called him, after closing. He came often, he was always on time. But that night it wasn’t there. I waited a long time for him, then called his home from a pay phone. My mother answered me, she was agitated, confused, she told me that her son had had an accident and had been taken to the Polyclinic. I thought she had crashed the car, the red 127 we’d driven so many times together. I went to the hospital and there a journalist approached me and said, also point-blank: “Why do you think they killed him?”

The world collapsed on me.

There I found the parents who didn’t want to accept, they screamed that it wasn’t possible. I no longer understood anything. They took me to the police station, they too tried to understand why. But what could I tell him except that he was a perfect boy? He worked at Contraves, on the Tiburtina, he studied in the evenings for the university, he wanted to graduate in Engineering. We had so many projects, we dreamed of a life together.
Why did he go to Piazza Dalmazia that evening? I haven’t stopped wondering ever since. He lived on Prenestina, worked on Tiburtina, we had an appointment near Piazza San Giovanni. Why did he take our 127 after work and drive to the other side of Rome?
Unfortunately, I’m afraid I have an answer. A month earlier he and I went to a shop nearby, I think it was called La Starìa, and I fell in love with some pottery to paint.
We were around Christmas, on that accursed day, and perhaps he had gone as far as to buy me a present. I can’t bring myself to peace with the thought. And he had also bought that green loden with me, right from Cisalfa.
But can you kill a person like that? Why was he balding, was he wearing the wrong coat, had he happened to be somewhere in the city where someone had to kill someone else?
I saw them go by, the assassins, that evening in the police station. At the trial I didn’t look them in the face, I despised them a little and they scared me a little. None of them ever felt the need to apologize.

Tonino’s father died in March of the following year, his mother was unable to find peace until the end of her days. They were workers, they had had Tonino when they were getting on in years. He was their only son. Now nothing is left of that family.
He questioned me Judge Amato, I remember him as a kind and very humane person. Shortly after, he too was killed by the Nar at the bus stop.
Tonino was a good boy. He was studious, reassuring, full of curiosity. Memories of trips to Florence, Spoleto, Rodi Garganico. Here, these are the photos of those happy days, an eternity ago.
We had met in a group and immediately hit it off. He made me feel important, he gave me security, he knew many things… We went to the Quirino to see Henry VIII and I fell asleep, the same thing I did to Caracalla with the Aida. Not that I didn’t like them, it’s just that I woke up early, worked all day and was tired in the evening. Tonino loved the films of Woody Allenthe songs of Lucio Dalla and telling jokes, only laughing before the end.
Politics was none. He joined the union but then changed his mind. If I had to say, she was more leftist than anything else, like so many time kids and like so many time workers.
While looking for this meeting of ours, I found a sheet that he had written to me with the instructions to follow in the event of a rear-end collision. There is all his precision and care for me.
I have often dreamed of him, always alive. One night he said to me: “Why don’t you have a mass celebrated for me?”».

Accidental victims

In those drooling years many human beings were killed by chance, an aberration of an aberration. I remember a printer of the Messenger, Maurice DiLeomistaken for a journalist, a friend of mine, who conducted courageous investigations into the Nar, or Alessandro Caravillania seventeen-year-old boy, shot in Circonvallazione Cornelia as he got off the bus, which he had taken because it was raining that day, during a shootout following a robbery in the Nar bank.
Or a cook, Louis Allegretti, killed by the “comrades for communism” who wanted to kill a member of the MSI and left a proletarian father of three young children on the asphalt. Because they had the wrong street number. And many others, names that are not remembered, such as those of the victims of the massacres.

The story of Antonio Leandri summarizes them all and brings them back to our memory. Fiorella gave me the poetry which a dear friend of Tonino wrote in those days. She is written by hand, on a lined sheet, she is titled, “Wingless Bastards”.
He says: «Poor boy/ the rain, the words, the amazement/ and all the rest/ the patiently sutured body/ precision has its importance / and then, as usual, everything is fed to time».

We use memory to feel, in life, trees, not leaves.

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