Author: Stefano Nazzi
Publisher: Mondadori
Release Date: 07-05-2024
“I liked the banks with the revolving door, one kick and the world would start turning. I’d go out first, take out a whole clip and start the Wild West. They called us ‘The Wild Bunch’.” This is the Milan of the 1970s. Dark, leaden, and unrecognisable compared to today’s. Gun shells are trodden on the streets, the average number of murders is 150 a year, delinquents, businessmen and show business personalities mingle in nightclubs, and gambling dens are hidden inside unsuspected buildings. It is here that the destinies of the three bandits who will change the fortunes of Milan’s criminal underworld intersect for the first time; their names are spoken in hushed voices because they carry a trail of gunpowder in their wake. They are three very different men: Francis Turatello, known as ‘Faccia d’angelo’, insatiable for power, Renato Vallanzasca, the ‘handsome René’, an anarchic robber who always likes to be the centre of attention, and Angelo Epaminonda, known as ‘il Tebano’, a ferocious and ruthless gangster. Born without possessing anything, they are ready to take everything, first by shooting at each other, then by allying, then by shooting back. Around them, meanwhile, move the gang’s affiliates, policemen and innocent victims.
It is a black story of blood, betrayals and deaths, but also of partnerships, power and love. Stefano Nazzi reconstructs it with his intense and pressing prose, recounting the men behind the criminals and the shadows that made them such, because although more than thirty years have passed since the last gunshot, their echoes of war still risonate today.