In December he will be back in court again, this time before the judges of the Court of Assizes of Appeal. Fifty years after the dramatic kidnapping of the eighteen-year-old Lombard student Cristina Mazzotti, the first woman to die in the terrible period of kidnappings for extortion carried out in Northern Italy by the Calabrian gangs of the Anonima Sequestri, the story, despite the two life sentences inflicted on two people from Reggio, did not end with the sentence in the first instance trial, issued on 4 February by the Court of Assizes of Como.
The defense of the self-confessed Reggino Demetrio Latella, 71 years old, known as Luciano, resident for decades in the province of Novara, has in fact challenged the life sentence imposed for the death of Cristina Mazzotti, kidnapped in Eupilio (Como) on 30 June 1975 and found dead in a landfill on 1 September in Galliate after a few weeks of imprisonment in a small hole dug in a farmhouse Castelletto Ticino.
Latella and the co-defendant Giuseppe Calabrò, known as ‘u duttiricchiu, 74 years old, originally from San Luca but domiciled in Lombardy where he is still imprisoned, will return to the courtroom on 16 December for the second degree trial, before the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Milan.
According to the defense, Latella could not have foreseen the death of the hostage, having nothing to do with the gang of organizers, and therefore he can only be charged with kidnapping, a now prescribed crime.
In the appeal, the defense claims that it was not proven at first instance that Latella was part of the organization that kidnapped Cristina Mazzotti. Therefore, according to his defender, the reasons for the life sentence need to be reviewed.
At the time of the kidnapping of the young student from Como, the kidnapped girl’s father, a Lombard industrialist, paid the ransom (one billion and fifty million lire at the time) after selling everything he owned, but Cristina Mazzotta was already dead and her body, without clothes, thrown into a landfill.