Moro's Slayer Cooks Up New Life As Nicaragua Restaurant Owner

MANAGUA, Nicaragua - Everybody called him Guido and called his Italian restaurant the best in town. Nicaragua's high and mighty filled the tables almost every night. But it turns out "Guido" was boiling more than pasta.

He'd cooked up a story to hide a sinister past: Back in 1978 he and other members of Italy's Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The killing sent shivers around the world.

"Guido's" real name is Alessio Casimirri. And while he has been tossing pizzas and schmoozing with customers at his bistro in central Managua, Rome courts have sentenced him in absentia to four life terms for his role in the Moro case.

News reports from Italy in recent weeks have alerted Nicaraguans to his past and generated new debate over allegations that the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which governed Nicaragua in the 1980s, gave refuge to foreign terrorists.

Many of the foreign radicals drawn to Sandinista Nicaragua - like Casimirri - worked for the Sandinista government's security agency and were given citizenship.

Armed with Nicaraguan passports, some left for safer surroundings after the Sandinista electoral loss in 1990. But others remained.

At issue immediately is whether President Violeta Chamorro can muster authority over a police force still dominated by Sandinistas to bring about Casimirri's arrest.

Casimirri disappeared from public view a month ago, leaving his Ristorante Magica Roma in the hands of his business partner, Manlio Grillo.

According to one knowledgeable source, Casimirri is now hiding on a ranch owned by former Sandinista police chief Rene Vivas and is guarded by at least a dozen gunmen.

Casimirri came to Nicaragua in 1983, five years after the Moro execution. He left his Italian wife, Rita Algranati, a Red Brigades fugitive now living in Libya, and adopted the name Guido Di Giambattista, a European source said.

Then he crafted a new life, opening a school for scuba divers and raising a family with a Nicaraguan woman.

Actually, many of his students were elite Interior Ministry troops under the control of Tomas Borge, a Sandinista founder. While cleaning boat hulls in Nicaraguan ports in the mid-1980s, he was also helping to protect them from CIA underwater mines, the Chamorro family newspaper La Prensa said.

Casimirri's presence in Nicaragua might not have attracted much notice except for the emergence in Italy of new reports on who was behind the Moro kidnapping.

Apparently rattled by the stories, Casimirri contacted Italian intelligence services through his brother Tomasso in Rome, the European source said. His intent was to guarantee his freedom in exchange for details about the Moro case, he said.