Word: moranino
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...state," first offenders serving no more than two years, pornographers, and-most controversially-Communists and Fascists convicted of political crimes during the chaotic years between 1943 and 1946 in Italy. Although political criminals make up no more than 2% of the amnestied, they include the "Red Devil" Moranino (TIME, April 30, 1956), who had taken refuge behind the Iron Curtain, and two of the men involved in the Communist wartime theft of the fabled gold of Dongo...
Supplying a guide and safe-conduct passes, Moranino sent Strasserra and four other non-Communist partisan leaders off into the mountains for Switzerland. At the trial, the ex-partisan guide admitted that on Moranino's orders, he led the five men along an Alpine road to a brush-covered hillock, where six Moranino men waited. Spotting them, Strasserra cried: "We're friends. We are going to Switzerland." He was still waving his safe-conduct pass and talking when bullets cut him short. Destroying the evidence, the Reds buried their victims hastily beside the road, took their money...
...murdered men had left their wives and children in a hut in a nearby village. When weeks passed without word from their husbands, they went to Moranino's headquarters and asked for news. A few nights later, two Moranino partisans called at the hut, told them Moranino wanted to see them. As they were passing the local cemetery, the partisans pulled out revolvers and shot the women dead. They roused the cemetery keeper and ordered him to bury the bodies. The cemetery keeper testified: "The partisans were pleased because snow was falling and it covered the bloodstains...
Other ex-partisans testified to Moranino's calculated treachery to supposed allies. A rival Socialist group was wiped out when Moranino's Reds deliberately retreated on either side of them without warning. A leader of an Allied mission charged with arranging for arms drops testified that, late in the war, a Moranino aide confided to him drunkenly: "Now that we have the arms, we don't need you any more." A few weeks later Moranino's Reds again retreated abruptly in the midst of a German assault. The Allied mission was annihilated...
...year sentence would scarcely affect Moranino in his Prague sanctuary, where he lives with a Communist mistress and runs the Communist radio program beamed at Italy. But it was a verdict long overdue on the crimes of many another Communist who put his party above his country even in wartime...