Giuseppe “Pino” Pelosi died in 2017, in Rome, of a long-festering cancer at the age of 59. In the final decade of his life, he worked as a garbage collector in the capital, a job he was given by the Italian state when it had finally had enough of his lifelong habits of robbery, drug dealing, and various other petty crimes. Rather than lock him up yet again, the state bound Pelosi with invisible shackles—to a job, a service, he did not choose for himself. For someone like Pelosi, prison might have been preferable to the monotony of serving his fellow citizens: At a very young age, he had escaped the poverty-stricken villages of postwar Italy to live a life of banditry, spending his youth as one of the ragazzi di vita, or “boys of life,” street kids who plied their trade (thievery, sex work, or any other hustle they came across) in the country’s crumbling cities. It was a grim existence. But it wasn’t without romance: In a time defined by the stark contrast between the glitz of the then-ascendent consumer ideology and the destitution that still plagued much of Italian society, these street kids seemed the very image of freedom, even if it was the freedom of the outcast, anonymous and unwanted. Pelosi may have passed through life unnoticed had he not been stopped, late one night in November 1975, while driving at breakneck speed in a stolen gray Alfa Romeo.
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