The Fugitive

By Massimo Carlotto

An extraordinary tale of life on the run from the author of the Alligator mysteries, the acclaimed crime writer with “a history as riveting as any novel” (Chicago Tribune).

Massimo Carlotto’s odyssey began in 1976 when, as a member of a militant leftwing organization that had fallen awry of the ruling powers, he was arrested and falsely accused of murder. Unwilling to play the role of fall guy in a political power struggle, he chose to flee the country rather than wait for a verdict that the whole country knew was a foregone conclusion. He first went into hiding in the French underworld and then made his way to a Mexico embroiled in bloody class conflict. Betrayed by a Mexican lawyer, he returned to Italy in 1985 and spent six years in prison, during which time the “Carlotto case” became Italy’s most famous legal fiasco.

Carlotto was finally freed with a presidential pardon in 1993. Subsequently, his case helped bring about significant changes to the Italian criminal code to ensure that similar judicial travesties would never happen again.

The Fugitive is the first book that Carlotto wrote as a free man. It tells his story with verve and humor. Virtually a handbook on how to live life on the run, The Fugitive is also a vibrant novel full of vivid underworld characters and breathtaking moments that Carlotto recounts in the cool, lucid prose that has become his trademark.

“A gripping tale, whether read as a novel or as a memoir . . . As exciting as that other Fugitive, this roman a clef combines compelling crime drama with a searing portrait of a justice system gone horribly wrong.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781609451738

Massimo Carlotto

Massimo Carlotto was born in Padua, Italy. In addition to the many titles in his extremely popular “Alligator” series, he is also the author of The Fugitive, Death’s Dark Abyss, Poisonville, Bandit Love, and At the End of a Dull Day. He is one of Italy’s most popular authors and a major exponent of the Mediterranean Noir novel.

Book preview

NOTE

The verses at the beginning of the first chapter are taken from the drama Nessuno (No One), by Luciano Nattino and Antonio Catalano, of the Alfieri Theater Company in Asti. The verses at the beginning of each of the other chapters are taken from songs by Stefano Maria Ricatti (from the CD Blu—Rossodisera Records), a Venetian singer and songwriter, and a long-time friend of mine. I am especially fond of his recordings, which kept me company through countless sleepless nights. More generally, I would like to express my appreciation to the many artists who, over the years, gave me their support, friendship, and solidarity.

INTRODUCTION

I have an awkward past. It took me five large wooden crates to set my past aside and finally think of the future. In a full week of painstaking work, I filed away two hundred and twelve pounds of documents—court records, thousands of letters and telegrams, hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, dozens of videotapes of Italian TV programs—from Telefono giallo and Portobello to Mixer and Il coraggio di vivere. Those five crates are now stored in my cellar. They are an archive of the last eighteen years of my life. Nearly half of my life.

I am a notorious legal case, the Carlotto case. When someone happens to recognize me on the street, on a train, on a plane, they exclaim: Hey, you’re the Carlotto case! I hold the dubious distinction of being the longest and most drawn-out case in the history of Italian justice, as well as the most controversial. Moreover, I am studied in universities as a worst case. A unique case, never to be repeated. No Italian citizen will ever be able to wend his or her way through the same judicial labyrinth. It is now technically impossible.

And that makes me a human interest story. An extremely rare instance of systematic and relentless persecution by fate itself. Fate, in all its swindling cynicism. Though I doubt jinxes are contagious, I felt it was only fair to the reader to offer complete disclosure concerning this crucial aspect of my story, so you can make an impartial and fully informed decision whether or not to go on reading.

Everything imaginable happened to me between January 20, 1976, when I walked into a Carabinieri station to report a murder, and April 7, 1993, the day the President of the Italian Republic decided to put an end to my case with an official pardon.

I spent six years in prison, I was put through eleven different trials in the highest and lowest courts of the Italian judicial system (all the way up to Italy’s supreme Constitutional Court, and at every level along the way), with the involvement of eighty-six magistrates and fifty court-appointed experts. I came very close to dying of a disease I contracted in prison.

The various courts that tried me expressed a remarkably varied array of opinions concerning my innocence or guilt, and while they were at it, those opinions lavished vitriol on the other judges. The last court to try me had the last word, and in its view I was very, but very guilty. In their written opinion, the judges stated that with this judgment of conviction, the Court wishes to make the ‘Carlotto case’ a worthy episode in Italian judicial history. A bizarre assessment of my case, shared by only a few others who see my story as a shining example of judicial protection of my civil rights, given the astonishing number of verdicts. The more trials, the greater the sheer quantity of justice.

Not so. I differ with the court, of course, since I have always considered myself very, but very innocent, but I also believe there is an unbridgeable gap between reality and the way justice is administered. That argument remains relevant and is frequently and vigorously debated, while I wait for the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to decide who is ultimately right.

This autobiographical account is not, in any case, about the trial; it tells the story of how the undersigned experienced for a number of years the direct consequence of that trial—life on the run—and the role that it played in the last few months of his battle with the law. I wrote this book without taking myself too seriously, much as I have always tried to do over the years. It has been my self-defense against the sleep of reason and the distractability of providence. For eighteen long years, I refrained from talking about myself, lest I add elements of confusion to the battle being waged in court. I stuck to a strategy that emphasized the judicial sphere over the human dimension, in order to preserve my case as part of the heritage of all those who believe in a just justice (as people used to say).

I believe this was the right choice, and ultimately a successful one. Leaving aside my personal defeat in judicial terms, my case forced the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeals court, and the supreme Constitutional Court, to hand down two important and enlightened verdicts that finally make trials subject to review. In more general terms, my case contributed to the larger debate about the miscarriage of justice but also about sentencing, prisons as an institution, and the health issue of diseases caused by incarceration.

Very little has been written about life on the run, and what little has been written focuses chiefly on the world of organized crime. Organized, of course, among other things, to arrange for the escape of its criminal acolytes. This book, in contrast, intends to describe the daily life, the behavior, and the routine of someone who is on the run due to a convergence of random factors. A very specific type of fugitive, who poses no danger to others; who wants only to survive and avoid capture, day after day.

What were you dreaming

when you left your home

head down

legs in the air

falling into the void

open-mouthed?

My life on the run from the law came to an end one day in January of 1985, when Melvin Cervera Sanchez, a young, well-born lawyer with great expectations, decided to put an end to our professional relationship by selling me to the Federales.

He was my coyote. In Mexico, if you want to obtain any kind of official document (even documents that you have every right to request, say, for instance, because you are Mexican), it is necessary to use the services of one of these gentlemen, called coyotes for their widely acknowledged human decency and professional rectitude; in exchange for money, a coyote will solve whatever problems you may be having with the state bureaucracy. You should not confuse the coyote with the pollero, another figure of great national stature. The pollero arranges for illegal entry into the Estados Unidos. The pollero charges more than the coyote; he demands all of his clients’ possessions in exchange for his services, and then packs them into broken-down trucks. Nine times out of ten, he then abandons them in the middle of the desert (on the Mexican side of the border, of course), or else near border crossings patrolled by American border agents, who have been warned in advance, because the pollero loves to be paid in dollars.

I decided to turn to a coyote because I was fed up with traveling around the world on tourist visas. I wanted to settle in one place and achieve the dream of every fugitive from the law: to be reborn, with a different identity, and start a new life.

Love had brought me to Mexico. That is, my girlfriend at the time, Alessandra, disliked all the countries I had lived in prior to Mexico. Alessandra lived in Italy and from time to time she would visit me, staying just long enough to decide that she didn’t like the place and that she would never—never!—live there. Ours was a great and passionate love. It ended the day I was arrested, and I never saw her again after that. I recently learned that she married a salesman and now lives in a small village named Mattarello, in the region of Trentino. Maybe that explains why she never wanted to live in cities like Paris, Barcelona, and Lisbon.

I decided to try Mexico after reading Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Serge had been a militant anarchist in France before living through the October Revolution as a Bolshevik. He was subsequently swept up in Stalin’s purges and, after a lengthy stay in Siberia, he finally made his way to the land of the unfinished revolution.

Alessandra really loved the book. I wasn’t as enthusiastic, but I was still fascinated by the description of this country, a place filled with sunshine, tequila, tortillas, and revolución. I will confess that winding up in Mexico City, with its population of twenty-one million, its pollution, constantly threatening immediate evacuation of the city, and the total careening lunacy of an out-of-control megalopolis—it is in fact roundly considered to be one of the most unlivable cities on earth—slightly dampened my initial enthusiasm.

Melvin Cervera Sanchez seemed like the right person for the job. He was the brother-in-law of a prominent left-wing intellectual who had taken my case to heart. He had all the social and professional attributes to help me become a Mexican. My intellectual friend introduced us at a party. The following day, in his law office, Melvin outlined his plan of action to me and presented me with a bill for his services. A staggering sum. I assumed that paying in advance was just a quaint local custom. I also considered for a moment the possibility that he might be planning to screw me, but I immediately ruled it out because, in Italy, if someone is caught helping you in any way, shape, or form to acquire Italian citizenship illegally, the consequences can be quite serious. Relatives included. Anyway, I assumed he would never cause me problems because of my friendship with his brother-in-law. That was my clinching argument for relying on Melvin. But things in Mexico seem to work differently.

Melvin’s plan was brilliant. He was going to bring back to life the son—who had died an untimely death—of an Italian emigrant couple. The certificate of civil status of this latter-day Lazarus would make its way from one bureaucratic agency to another, progressively acquiring the trappings of an honorable discharge from military service and other such documents, until the reborn son was finally registered to vote. I was so excited about the various details of the plan that when Melvin insisted on accompanying me back to my apartment, I wasn’t suspicious in the least. That night, I dropped off to sleep for the first time without any worries about what the next day would bring. But my awakening couldn’t have been ruder. Strange men with gassed-back hair and dark sunglasses swarmed into my bedroom, armed and short-tempered.

What astonished me, more than the simple fact of the betrayal, was their belief that I was a terrorist and a member of the Red Brigades. To inflate the price for turning me over, that well-known kidder, Melvin Cervera Sanchez, had warned the Federales that I was a dangerous fugitive and Red Brigades militant. When it dawned on me what a horrible turn matters could take, I was so frightened that I told the police my real name. In a nightmarish twist of fate, my name was practically the same as that of an Italian Red Brigades terrorist who was wanted in Mexico for the murder of two policemen.

Things went from bad to worse. They took me to Calle de Soto, the notorious headquarters of the Mexican political police. They held me there for ten days, and beat me black and blue. I have never been very good at dealing with the police. I always come off as a smart-ass, and whenever I claim to be innocent, not only am I generally not believed, but it tends to make my questioner lose his patience. I also have a special gift for creating misunderstandings in the dialogue. This tends to stoke the already simmering anger of the police, whose sole aim is to pry loose a nice solid confession and go home, happy to have earned their salary.

The first thing that made me unpopular with the Federales was my surname.

"What is your name, cabrón?"

Massimo Carlotto.

"Your whole name, hijo de puta!"

Massimo Carlotto, like I just told you.

Is Carlotto your father’s surname or your mother’s?

My father’s.

What’s your mother’s surname?

Villani.

"In that case, cabrón y hijo de puta, your name is Massimo Carlotto Villani."

No, Señor Detective, my name is Massimo Carlotto, and if my name was Massimo Carlotto Villani, I would be somebody else.

What do you mean somebody else?

That’s right. Massimo Carlotto is my name. If you say Massimo Carlotto Villani, it’s not me anymore.

"Take him away! This pendejo wants to be a wise-ass. He needs a little more of our special treatment," the detective roared, turning purple in the face.

While his subordinates worked diligently and with consummate skill to give my face a new appearance, it dawned on me where the misunderstanding had arisen: in Mexico, in contrast with the way things are done in Italy, everyone has a double surname. I tried to interrupt the special treatment to explain, but it was too late. Say what you want about the Mexican police, but you can’t deny that they obey orders to the letter. When I was finally able to speak to the detective, though I was slurring my words by then, I managed to clear up the misunderstanding.

The second question was about my age. There too an unfortunate misunderstanding arose, and the policemen had to start their work all over again. In ten days’ time, the police only managed to set down two pages of legal transcripts. In brief, it was an unpleasant experience. I only think back on it when I piss and I notice the whitish scars that the electrodes left on my dick.

And so, for a long time, I hated Melvin and his entire family. No longer.

Reviews for The Fugitive

[danhammang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is classified as fiction but it reads a lot more like a documentary of life on the run from the scary Italian judicial system, particularly since the factual account on which it is based is that of the author himself, Massimo Carlotto. Carlotto has been nominated and awarded a number of prizes for his mysteries. If this indeed can be called a novel it can be called a crime novel but not a mystery. It was pretty clear on that score from the first pages.Carlotto has laid out in these pages, with compelling detail, the insidious damage that life on the run can do to a person. I imagine much of it can be applied to the many people who were not involved in any way with crime but who simply had to flee some event that threatened their lives. There are many examples.The sad, lonely, debilitating details of his time in exile are set against a worldweary and heartwarming support of exile communities in Paris and Mexico City. In particular, his description of life in Mexico City was poignant, heartbreaking and punctuated by displays of the goodness of human beings with a true zinger at the end of this chapter of his life.It's an interesting read and a worthy entry into the venerable halls of Europa Publishing.

[murdermysterymayhem · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In 1976 at the age of 19 Massimo Carlotto, a member of Lotta Continua a far left leaning political group, found the body of a murdered acquaintance which he dutifully reported to the authorities who immediately accused him of committing the crime. Carlotto was arrested, tried, and imprisoned beginning a very complicated legal battle where he was acquitted, retried, and reconvicted. In the course of all these legal troubles Carlotto decided to flee the country to live in exile as a fugitive from the law. The fight with Italy's legal system was to eventually cover 11 trials and lasted 18 years until his Presidential pardon in 1993.The Fugitive, Carlotto's first novel (really a memoir), is about his flight abroad to avoid further imprisonment. In short chapters that jump around in chronology, Carlotto relates stories about his life on the run. These stories are told in short bursts like the fleeting memories of a bad dream with just the strongest impressions passed on to the reader. The disorientation of being an "accidental fugitive" is palpable as Carlotto is usually in the company of other exiles in Paris and South America and in constant dread of being discovered. Carlotto’s obsession with food, his health problems, fragile relationships, and the characters he builds to hide his identity all figure prominently. The book reads like a work of fiction and it is this life in the underworld that has given Carlotto a solid understanding of the people who inhabit it and probably provided much of the background material for his crime novels. The Fugitive is a very good place to start to understand this Italian writer.

[shawnd_72 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was first written in 1994. It has only just been translated into English in 2006 and released in 2007. It was the first of three books written by this author -- the second two were released earlier in English and to more acclaim. As such, The Fugitive is a bit of an odd duck after the first two. However, if imagined to be first, it makes sense. The book is a true memoir by the author, not a fiction book as the second two were. The memoir is the author's first stab at writing an original work -- he was a translator in some of his jobs through his life -- basically an attempt to 'tell his story': an amazing story of legal and illegal acts as he tried to avoid prison and participate in the longest legal saga/trial in Italian history. I suspect this got him a footing as an author where, to his credit, he went on to write two substantial fiction works.The story on its face is amazing. Convicted for a crime he didn't commit, he goes through a series of trials and appeals. But before they can imprison him for a murder he didn't commit, he goes on the run. His time on the run makes up a good portion of the book. From places as diverse as the Mexican-Guatemalan border, Sardinia, Paris and more, Carlotto spends his time between wining and dining himself into a very obese man, having deep intellectual discussions with left-wing revolutionaries, and practicing a studious exercise of leaving no traces, avoiding any run-ins with police, and often up and disappearing leaving whole households behind. The fact that this was all funded by his apparently well-to-do parents makes the story a little less desperate, but definitely more humorous.Overall, I would recommend this book in most cases. To say this is a fast read is an understatement. It's more like this is a transcript of a 4 hour coffee conversation with the author. It reads like a diary or literally like a transcript of the guy telling his life story. In places it is laugh out loud funny; and in that way the humor reminded me a bit of Gogol's humor. However, the value is in the story, wit, humor, and sheer amazingness, as the writing itself is conversational.