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Introduction
Ransom kidnapping was a crime that marked the history of the Italian Republic for almost thirty years (c.1969-1998). Nearly 700 people were abducted by the so-called anonime sequestri (criminal syndicates dedicated to kidnapping), whose roots were in Sardinian banditry, the Sicilian Mafia, and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. The targets of the abductions were predominantly upper middle-class men and, less frequently, women and children. Hostages were isolated in abandoned houses, forests, caves, and underground tunnels and subjected to traumatic treatment - sensory deprivation, mutilation, torture, and the threat of death. Their imprisonment was anything from a few weeks to several years. The media paid great attention to the capture and release of the victims and created a strong sense of empathy in public opinion, especially when the kidnapped were children or when the period of captivity reached two years. Demonstrations, torchlight processions, public meetings, and other forms of visible protest are just a few examples of the kind of public reaction to every abduction.
Though its extent far surpassed the number of political kidnappings perpetrated during the anni di piombo by the Red Brigades and other left-wing terrorist groups - such as the well known abduction of Aldo Moro - ransom kidnapping has gone relatively understudied. Moreover, because scholarship on the subject often adopts a regional focus, centres on one of the criminal organisations, does not consider the full historical period, or relegates kidnapping to the fields of criminology and the history of crime, a comprehensive picture of the phenomenon is still needed: one that takes into account not only the activities of the culprits during these three decades but also the role played by the Italian state and the insight that ransom kidnapping gives into modern Italy. This article offers a comparative study of Sardinian, Sicilian, and Calabrian kidnapping that underscores the relationship between local and national criminal contexts, and between regional communities and the state's economic, legal, and political reach (or, at times, lack thereof). It shows that ransom kidnapping was not merely an Italian crime but was rather a specific tool through which banditry and criminal organisations found access to the wealth produced by the national economic transformation and converted the country's less developed and isolated regions into areas of...