Il Solista del Mitra

First edition.

Original ochre publisher's boards, black title label to spine. Complete with the original illustrated dust jacket, featuring a photograph of a submachine gun on the front panel, with a small tear at the head of the spine.

A fine, full-page autograph inscription signed by Luciano Lutring, dated 9 February 1968: « Ai fratelli Pierrot e Jean-Pierre Noël per ricordarsi anche nella lontananza, che un futuro migliore ci attende... La mia stima, amicizia e riconoscenza ; non vi sarà mai di troppo ! Luciano Lutring. » (To the brothers Pierrot and Jean-Pierre Noël, so that they may remember, even when far apart, that a better future awaits us... My esteem, friendship and gratitude; there can never be too much of them for you! Luciano Lutring.) The recipients were probably Pierre and Jean-Pierre Noël, tried in Milan in 1966 alongside members of the Marseille underworld for the robbery of the Colombo jewellery shop on Via Montenapoleone.

Born in Milan in 1937 into a family that intended him for a career as a violinist, Luciano Lutring acquired his nickname, « solista del mitra », from Franco Di Bella, a journalist at the Corriere della Sera: he concealed his submachine gun in a violin case. A leading figure in the Milanese underworld of the 1960s, reputed to have carried out some five hundred armed robberies across Italy and France, he cultivated the image of a gentleman bandit. Several accounts also link him to the most sensational heist of the period: on 15 April 1964, the Colombo jewellery shop on Via Montenapoleone was raided in broad daylight by a Marseille gang led by Giuseppe Rossi, known as Jo le Maire, who escaped with a haul worth several hundred million lire. The recipients of the inscription in this copy, the brothers Pierre and Jean-Pierre Noël, are believed to have taken part in the operation under Rossi's orders, with Bernard Madeleine, a prominent figure in French organised crime during the 1960s, exercising overall control.

On 1 September 1965, Lutring was seriously wounded in a shootout with the police in Paris and subsequently arrested. Sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, he began writing and painting while incarcerated. Il Solista del Mitra recounts his remarkable life, written behind bars, as the dust jacket announces: « narra dal carcere le sue vicende ».

His exploits had already inspired Carlo Lizzani's film Svegliati e uccidi (Wake Up and Die, 1966), in which Robert Hoffmann portrayed Lutring alongside Gian Maria Volonté. Pardoned by Georges Pompidou and subsequently, following a spell in Brescia prison, by Giovanni Leone in 1977, Lutring spent his final years on the shores of Lake Maggiore, working as a painter and writer. He died in Verbania in 2013.

An exceptional association copy of the prison memoirs of Milan's most notorious armed robber, bearing a full-page inscription written in captivity to two brothers from the Franco-Italian underworld, probably his former associates from the days of the Marseille gang.