On June 29, 1948, Silvano Maistrello was born in Venice, the firstborn of nine brothers and sisters, probably all from different fathers, son of Rosina, a free and very poor woman who taught her children to proudly carry their mother’s surname and to remain united in any circumstance.
His sister Annamaria, after his death, will say: “I loved you Silvano, very much. Even though you were a thief and a bandit. But I never absolved you for what you did. And I don’t absolve you now either. What you did was wrong, all wrong. Even though you never killed anyone.”
Annamaria’s words are reported in «Kociss. Passion and death of the last Venetian bandit”, book by Roberto Bianchin, with an attached CD of ballads by Giovanni dell’Olivo (ed. Milieu). Her nickname is due to her high and pronounced cheekbones, her hollow face with long hair and a bandana, an Apache chief look. For the people who soon began to love him and build a legend around him, he was instead El Còcis, and he hated both names, as one who was a close friend of him, Giampaolo Manca, always remembered, “the Doge of the mala del Brenta”, today a free man and writer after thirty-six years in prison. One thing that Silvano, however, didn’t mind being considered a sort of Robin Hood, a romantic bandit who stole from the rich to give to the poor.
Poor he himself was. His mother usually had lunch at the San Martino soup kitchen, he had started stealing to feed himself and bring something to his little brothers. He stole from luxury apartments, pawnshops, banks. Part of the money was for himself and his family, the rest went to those in need.
His daring escapes, which had further fueled the legend. Many and in the most diverse situations: on boats, from moving trains, jumping from one roof to another, from the courthouse, from prison. And there are those who still remember when he scaled the facades of the buildings on the Grand Canal or the Lido.
Politics? He had joined the PCI and was arrested during a demonstration against the Vietnam War when he was nineteen, but it would be a stretch to recognize that he had a mature, formed “political conscience.” His sense of justice was very strong, yes. And his respect for life: Kociss not only never killed anyone, he never fired a shot.
It has been hypothesized that, shortly before dying, Silvano had become close to the Red Brigades, thanks to some meetings – Prospero Gallinari and Renato Curcio – in prison. It is here, as well as in the need to free themselves of a figure who had become a symbol, that according to Bianchin and also the Maistrello family, the real causes of his killing, which occurred on May 12, 1978, should be sought. When a new criminal world had just begun to enter the heroin business. When the world, not only that of crime, was becoming more cynical, ruthless. For this reason Bianchin defines Kociss as “the last bandit”. After him, no longer bandits but criminals.
Commissioner Arnaldo La Barbera’s men had been hunting him for some time. They stopped him forever after the last robbery, at the Banco di San Marco headquarters, while he fled on a small boat. The police had resorted to a ruse: they had filled the canal where the small boat would pass with plastic bags, so that the engine would block. So it was, and, according to one of the many versions, when Silvano was told to surrender he threw himself into the water but was hit by bullets before submerging.
The official version is instead that he increased the speed of the boat by taking out the P38, to which the policemen on the motorboat reacted by firing fourteen shots which were intended only to be “intimidating”.
Hit from behind, Silvano was taken to hospital dying. In unofficial reconstructions, it later turned out to be very unlikely, if not impossible, that he was brandishing a weapon (one hand on the rudder, the other clinging to the edge of the punt), and that the policemen had fired into the air as declared.
No one has forgotten him yet. Kociss, tall and handsome, full of energy, cheerful, courageous, friendly with everyone, generous. He tells of a flirt with Patty Pravo when she was still Nicoletta Strambelli. Of his refuge in a deconsecrated church together with some companions. Of his training on the walls, agile as a cat, while people from the street watched his climbs, impressed.
