He was 83 years old and was in the San Paolo penitentiary medicine department. Identikit of the bandit, king of evasions and kidnappings that has become boss and drug trafficker.
The news of his death unlocks a series of memories in many boomers who at the time of his businesses were kids. From the mists of time his face marked by a time in many black and white photos. Graziano Mesina Today it almost makes sadness. Start Banned, Boss ends. But after all, the bandit is such, banished good or social bandit according to mythology that belongs to all latitudes and all time, even when it loses the authenticity of its popular roots and in the judicial chronicles it acquires the discounted face of ordinary furfants.
Born in Orgosolo in 1942, he had started his teenage ‘career’, with the first arrest at 14 years of age. In 2004 he obtained grace from the President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi then revoked after a new sentence at 30 years. Since December 2021 he was in prison to serve 24 years recalculated on the 30 -year sentence for criminal association aimed at drug trafficking. Before being captured in Desulo (Nuoro), he had spent a year and a half in hiding. He had been arrested and conducted first in the Nuorese prison of Badu ‘and Carros, then for two years he had been locked up in the Milanese one of Opera.
Mesina In the end he had returned behind the bars due to the traffic of that drug that as a bandit good he said he hated. He was in jail for more than 45 of his 83 years, 9 under house arrest or in freedom, and 5 of hiding with the well -known journalistic brackets of the uncompite meetings of Sardinia with the champion of the writing machine, Indro Montanellicynically fascinated by brigands, dictators and guerrillas. Mesina Boss is no different from the Mesina Bandito, by the Mesina friend of the 007, by the Mesina Mediator in the kidnappings of person after being a kidnapper, by the Mesina who claims (also in this case in adherence to a consolidated bandit -friendly imagination) a sense of justice and injustice that makes him killed a murderer to avenge not only the victim but the innocent condemned to his place, The son of a kidnapped putting a thousand lire in his pocket to take an ice cream. The boss, the bad part, the disgusting face of the medal, is part of the man. The good bandit is bad. The bad bandit is good. Mesina is a veteran, it belongs to that world in which values are turned upside down but are values. To the farmer world. To the world of Sardinia which is a world apart.
The chronicle reserves these parenthesis of literature every now and then. Bandits who are the protagonists of the novel. Even if the squalor also puts him. That’s why not the easy way to tell the degeneration of the bandit in the boss. It was brilliant for his part inventing a second guidance life for tourists between Barbagia And Gennargentu.
Known as the red primula of Sardinia, its name is imprinted in the minds of the Italians for two things: the evasions, well 22 of which ten are carried out and the kidnapping of the little Farouk Kassam of which he played the role of mediator.
Mesina is the penultimate of eleven children of a shepherd. His nickname was Gratziandu. For Gratziandu the troubles already begin in adolescence. In the fourth grade took the teacher in Pietrate and had to leave the school to go to the countryside as a shepherd servant. His First arrest was in 1956 at the age of 14 For the port of abusive weapons, having been found in possession of a stolen 16 -caliber rifle.
In the May 1960 He was arrested again for shooting in a public place. In January 1961 Graziano Mesina was released. On December 24 of the same year, in a bar of Orgosolo, the shepherd Luigi Mereu, an uncle of one of the accusers of the Mesina in the Crasta affair, was hit by some pistol shots and seriously injured.
For the fact, Graziano Mesina was accused and arrested, then sentenced to sixteen years in prison. He was locked up in the Nuorese prison of Badu ‘and Carros. But from the prison of Nuoro he was sent to the Court of Sassari to respond to an attempted murder against a neighbor of pasture, a story that took place before the Ozieri countryside.
Here the neighbor had killed him Mertedda bitch, Guardian of the flock, at first he had justified himself saying that he had exchanged it for a fox, but later changed the version claiming that he had stolen him with the grapes. Mesina then squirted the dog to see if he had eaten grapes, but he did not find it, then beaten him. During the transfer for the consequent process, he managed to free himself from the handcuffs. At the station of Macomerjumped from the train and run away, but was caught shortly after by some railway workers
The September 6th He managed to escape after being hospitalized in the S. Francesco di Nuoro hospital by climbing over the windowsill of a window and falling along a water tube in which he was hidden for three days. He remained in the mountainous mountains for three months.
In the January 1963 attempts evasion from Nuoro prisonbut it is discovered. After a period in the Alghero prison, he is transferred to the Porto Azzurro prison. In the summer of 1964 Mesina was expected by a trial in Sardinia. He tried to escape from a toilet of the running train, but was caught shortly after.
According to what Mesina himself said, he actually spontaneously delivered himself in order not to create problems for the carabiniere who had it on delivery.
He was transferred to Volterra where he pretended to be crazy and managed to be hospitalized in the criminal asylum of Montelupo Fiorentino. Here too he designed the escape, but without luck. Towards the end of 1964 he was still transferred, this time to Viterbo, where he again tried to escape and from which he was transferred to Spoleto.
Even in Spoleto he tried to escape, but he was discovered. Transferred to Sassari for a trial, he tried to open a hole in the train floor, but he could not escape. THE’September 11, 1966, while serving the detention in the S. Sebastiano prison of Sassari he managed to perform one of his most famous evasions. Together with the imprisonment partner Miguel Alberto Asencio Prados Ponte, a young Spanish deserter of the Foreign legion Who, who fled Corsica, arrived in Sardinia and was arrested in Cagliari for the theft of car, managed to escape by climbing the wall of the prison 7 meters high and throwing himself under the central street of Sassari.
Once out of prison they had a taxi to Ozieri brought from a taxi, and a long criminal activity of the couple began. In the Golfo Aranci area they kidnapped the land owner Paolo Mossa. Subsequently moved it was freed after the promise that he would pay the redemption.
THE’May 11, 1967in Nuoro, disguised as policemenThey fought a road block and kidnapped Peppino Capelli, a large meat merchant. The hostage was released after the family poured as a ransom 18 million lire.
