Luciano Leggio - Fugitive On The Italian Mainland

Fugitive On The Italian Mainland

Immediately after the trial, which ended in July 1969, a determined Italian magistrate named Cesare Terranova appealed against Leggio's acquittal for the Navarra slaying. In December 1970 Leggio was finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for this murder, but it was in absentia because, once more, he had gone underground. In July 1969, after hearing of his indictment to stand trial once more, Leggio checked in to a private health clinic in Rome to have treatment for Pott's disease, which he had suffered from most of his life and for which he had to wear a brace. When the police finally came to arrest him in January 1970 he had checked out and vanished. The fact that he had not been arrested during his seven-month stay in the clinic was a scandal in Italy, as were his repeated acquittals.

There were many suspicions that corrupt figures in authority had helped Leggio avoid justice, with plenty of suspicion falling on the General Attorney of Sicily, Pietro Scaglione; he was shot dead in 1971. Pentiti Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno later said Leggio personally shot Scaglione dead because he either did not want him to help deliver an acquittal for one of the Corleonesi boss's rivals or he did not want to leave someone who knew a lot of his secrets alive. Leggio would later be tried twice for killing Scaglione but was acquitted for insufficient evidence.

He eventually hid out in Milan where he ran a profitable kidnapping ring. In early 1973 he ran into a mobster named Damiano Caruso whom he blamed for killing one of his friends years before. Caruso vanished, as did his girlfriend and her fifteen-year-old daughter not long afterwards. According to numerous informants, Leggio killed Caruso then, when his girlfriend and her daughter came round asking questions, he raped and strangled them both.