Massimo Savino Guerini, Max for friends and his colleagues, he was thirty-two years old. Five years ago he had obtained the transfer from None to the operational unit in Turin. He liked to be a man of action and his activity fighting crime on the street told a long story of success: gangs of robbers, swindlers, organized criminals, drug dealers. For that type of profession it is not enough to have within oneself the seed of the collective good and the protection of the community of citizens, what is needed is uncommon courage and the acceptance of an almost daily risk. On December 1, 2003, before dawn, Guerini left with his colleagues with a van and two cars for an anti-robbery operation: the command he had received a tip concerning Ceresole d’Alba.
It seemed that a gang of people already known to the police were about to carry out an inspection for a robbery, with aim either the post office or the nearby Savings Bank branch. Convinced that they only had to spy on criminals on patrol, Officer Guerini and his colleagues left from the Turin barracks in Via Valfrè towards the town, just beyond the border with the province of Cuneo. Except that, having arrived in front of the post office in via Martiri, the situation appeared very different than what had been anticipated.
Around ten in the morning no robbers arrived looking for information, but people armed and ready to raid in the office that same day. The office, at that moment, was crowded with customers – mostly pensioners but also women with pre-school children in tow. Two suspicious cars approached the entrance: one of the two, a Volvo, revealed from a quick license plate check to have been stolen shortly before. It was a clear symptom of an imminent assault. A decision had to be made on the spot carabinieri chose to foil the attack before the robbers got out of their cars.
A car called a halt to the stolen vehicle by showing the paddle; the driver swerved and accelerated to escape. At that point, the other carabinieri car rammed the vehicle, who was about to run over one of them, who got out of the van; Guerini, sitting in the passenger seat, came out with gun in hand to stop the escape and so did other of his colleagues, who shot at the engine and tires of the car. In an instant, all hell broke loose between via Artuffi and via Salasco: from the fleeing car, with the engine out of order, he got out Gian Marco Scalitti, fifty years old, professional robber and murderer. This man, resident in San Mauro Torinese, was part of “those from Liège”, a gang that had terrorized the Walloon region for years and, finally, robbed a van that was bringing wages to a factory in Farcienne in 1984, an action during of which a gendarme had been killed and for which he had received a life sentence in first degree and thirty years of imprisonment in cassation. He had been semi-free since 2002, with signature required.
Scalitti got out of the bullet-riddled Volvo and began to shoot at the police with a 357 Magnum; he was hit twice in the abdomen, once in the neck and died on the asphalt of the clearing. In a few seconds, around fifty shots were fired, while the robbers’ second car managed to lose track of him. All of this, just a few meters from an elementary school.
When the storm passed, there was another body lying on the ground: it was that of Massimo Guerini. Wounded in the head, they tried to transfer him by helicopter to the hospital in Cuneo for emergency surgery but he did not arrive alive in the operating room. At the funeral of the officer, gold medal for valor, there was half the world. Gian Carlo Caselli approached the widow, Mrs. Giorgia; the couple, married for about a year, had recently moved house and lived in Scalenghe. Massimo chased criminals «for twelve hours a day but he didn’t tell me anything, I read about the things he did in the newspaper the next day but we didn’t talk about it. He had passed on to me the passion for the garden.” «I’m here – Caselli told her – because I have known the value of her husband». The mayor gave up the Christmas decorations and collected the money saved to donate it to the victim’s family.
Eventually, all members of the group were captured. The driver of the second vehicle turned himself in at the same barracks from which Guerrini had left, a few hours after the events. The last to be captured was a blacksmith from Abruzzo who provided keys and other tools to the robbers. At the trial it was established, first of all, that the armed group was the same one that had planned and carried out a robbery in Mondovì the previous month. From an expert report, however, it emerged that the two fatal bullets that struck Guerini had not come from the gun of the robber who was later killed but, accidentally, by a colleague of the policeman. It therefore fell to a friend and companion of Guerini to move from the role of witness and injured party in the robbery trial to that of accused for having caused, albeit involuntarily, the death of the officer.
«My client – said his lawyer, explaining why he was opposed to getting out of the matter with the proposed plea bargain – was convinced that his colleague, to whom he was very close, was not in the line of fire, so much so that he had not made himself I realize that the fatal shot came from his gun.” A tragedy born from tragedy. The policeman on trial he fought to have the legitimate use of weapons recognized in a development that arouses conflicting and ferocious reactions in public opinion. In the United States there is a law, the felony murder doctrine, according to which the robber can also be held accountable for the death of his companion, if he is killed by the victim of the robbery or by the police, on the basis of the principle that those responsible involved in everything that happens from the moment the crime is committed onwards are, in fact, the criminals themselves.
But no compensation could repair the damage caused by such a disheartening death: a life wasted at thirty, a young wife left alone, families devastated by a pain that, at most, fades over time but does not go away. Every year, the Carabinieri and Massimo Guerini’s family remember him, in front of the sports facility named after him in Ceresole. There where, thinking of ending the morning after a routine chore, he lost everything.
