Franco Giuseppucci

On 13 September 1980, Giuseppucci was about to return home after a meeting with other members of the Banda della Magliana. As he parted with them and entered his car, he was approached by a motorbike and the passenger fired a single bullet that struck Giuseppucci. Er Negro was wounded fatally but immediately set the car in motion and drove to the nearest hospital, but once he arrived he died in the arms of the doctors just as they were about to intervene. Giuseppucci has become a legendary figure in the Roman underworld, sometimes being even referred to as the "Eighth King of Rome". Ironically it was through his own death that his dream of unifying the batterie became a reality, as their union became even stronger precisely in order to hunt down and kill those responsible for his murder. His death sparked Rome's first major gang war, which led to the Proietti clan being destroyed with several of its members killed.

Not wanting to limit themselves to the drug trade however, Giuseppucci ordered the assassination of Franco Nicolini, a notorious bookmaker who had an effective monopoly on the betting shops in the city. On 25 July 1978, Nicolini was gunned down as he exited the Tor di Valle Racecourse. Following this Giuseppucci assumed total control of the city's betting shops. The Banda became more and more powerful, soon taking control of virtually the entire city's drug trade and gambling operations, by either employing or killing anybody who competed, as well as establishing close links with neo-fascist terrorist groups such as Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari and Ordine Nuovo (mostly thanks to Giuseppucci who was a fascist himself), allying themselves with Cosa Nostra's main contact in Rome Pippo Calò, with Michele Zaza and other Nuova Famiglia camorristi through Claudio Sicilia, with 'Ndrangheta families through Gianfranco Urbani, and finally, enlisting the help of several criminals of the "old guard" who were active under the Marsigliesi, most importantly the powerful boss Danilo Abbruciati who entered the gang as soon as he exited jail in 1979.

Giuseppucci's power and influence was not recognized in the underworld alone. Besides making friends with personalities involved in cinema and music (frequent visitors of the gambling houses he operated), he eventually was approached by the state itself. On the morning of 16 March 1978, the car of Aldo Moro, former prime minister and then president of Christian Democracy (DC, Italy's relative majority party at the time), was assaulted by a group of Brigate Rosse terrorists in Via Fani in Rome and Moro was kidnapped. The authorities immediately began seeking for where Aldo Moro was being kept, and asked for the assistance of several criminal organizations in finding the location of Moro's hideout: they asked Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta and the Banda della Magliana. Giuseppucci was summoned for a meeting with DC politician Flaminio Piccoli in the outskirts of Rome, who requested Er Negro's help in finding Moro as he and his group had an extensive knowledge on the city's underworld. In return, Giuseppucci and his friends would receive "adjustments" in any trials that involved their crimes. Giuseppucci, with the help of Selis, was able to locate the hideout of Moro but when he delivered the news, he was instead told that those who wanted to help Moro were no longer interested in his rescue. Moro's corpse was found in the trunk of a car in Rome on 9 May 1978.

Giuseppucci's interest in finding ways to "fix their trials" did not end with Moro, however. One of their first contact with the Italian neofascist movement Ordine Nuovo was in summer 1978 — a few months after Aldo Moro's murder — in a villa of Rieti owned by criminologist, psychiatrist and neofascist professor Aldo Semerari. Semerari originally wanted to employ the Banda della Magliana to carry out terrorist acts in Rome to help bring about a coup d'etat. The Banda della Magliana strongly refused taking part in terrorist activities, but a deal was worked out nonetheless: in exchange of financing his political activities, Aldo Semerari proposed psychiatric expertise to arrested gang members in order to help them be released. It was the first in a series of such cooperations between psychiatrists which allowed several gang members to effectively avoid any jailtime by being declared "completely unsound of mind".

The first major criminal act of the Banda della Magliana was the kidnapping of duke Massimiliano Grazioli Lante della Rovere on 7 November 1977, against a ransom. Once again it was Er Negro who set up the kidnapping by getting in touch with a friend of the duke's son, who acted as the mole inside Grazioli's family. Due to the inexperience in the kidnapping for most of the members and the difficulty in finding a safe location to keep the hostage, they asked for the help of a small gang from the Montespaccato area, who then hid the duke in the campanian countryside. The Banda della Magliana first requested 10 billions in cash to release the hostage, but over time and through negotiations the request was lowered to about 1.5 billion. On 14 February 1978, the duke's son, after following a complicated set of instructions, delivered the money to Abbatino's henchmen, but the duke was nowhere to be found. There had been in fact a setback: one of the members of the Montespaccato group had been seen unmasked by the duke, which meant the duke had to be killed to prevent them from being identified: Giuseppucci and his men did not take part in the execution but did not oppose it, and so the duke was murdered and buried somewhere in Campania. His body was never found.

As Giuseppucci owned a mobile home, it became often used by the various batterie, as well as by his NAR friends, as a hiding place for their weapons, with Giuseppucci, who by now had been given a new nickname, Er Negro, due to his dark skin, keeping an eye on them. Though in 1976 this hiding place was eventually discovered by the Carabinieri who arrested Er Negro, he was released from jail after only a few months. This was only a minor setback for Giuseppucci who simply chose to store the weapons of his associates elsewhere, while continuing to expand his criminal ventures in new activities and ideas. In the same year, he participated, along with several neapolitan associates of Casillo, in the kidnapping of jeweler Roberto Giansanti: the role of Er Negro was to study the victim's habits so that the Camorristi could then carry out the kidnapping. After 52 days, during which Giansanti had become sick, the hostage was freed but the ransom obtained was only 350 million lire, a far lower amount than the originally requested 5 billions, which had to be split in multiple parts due to the number of people involved in the kidnapping.

Giuseppucci in 1974 joined one of these batterie operating in the Trullo district, and since the beginning became respected for his charisma, organizational skills and resourcefulness, which soon allowed him not only to lead the group, but also to befriend several other members of other batterie and make a name for himself in the Roman underworld. Giuseppucci was also an avid gambler himself who regularly spent time at betting shops for horse racing, and used to lend the money acquired from robberies on usury, with interests ranging up to 20%/25%. This not only allowed him to "clean" the money, but also guaranteed safe and regular profits. It is in one of these betting shops that Giuseppucci met and befriended Vincenzo Casillo, lieutenant of NCO boss Raffaele Cutolo, whose group also had interests in Roman betting shops.

Franco Giuseppucci (Italian pronunciation: [ˈfraŋko dʒuzepˈputtʃi]; 3 March 1947 – 13 September 1980) was an Italian criminal, and one of the founders and bosses of the Banda della Magliana, an Italian criminal organization based in the city of Rome that was particularly active throughout the late 1970s until the early 1990s.