Ortiz gang

The Ortiz Gang or the Ortiz Band was an illegalist anarchist group active in Western Europe in the early 1890s. The gang is known for its series of burglaries, its influence on the emergence and development of illegalism, following Vittorio Pini's Intransigents of London and Paris, and its central role in the Trial of the Thirty.

Composed of French and Italian anarchist militants, often in pairs, the gang formed around Léon Ortiz in the first half of the 1890s. Its members included Annette Soubrier-Paolo Chiericotti, Antoinette Cazal, Orsini Bertani-Maria Zanini, and Victorina Trucano and her son, Luigi, among others. In late 1892 and early 1893, Ortiz and Émile Henry, at least, participated in burglaries together in Northern France. In October 1893, several gang members moved into 1st Avenue Brune together, where they stored stolen goods from their burglaries.

Shortly after Henry's Café Terminus bombing, the police raided the gang's hideouts, arresting the members found there. They were subsequently tried during the Trial of the Thirty, a political trial targeting the anarchist movement in France, which implicated the Ortiz gang alongside theorists and "major figures" of the anarchist movement. During the trial, the prosecution primarily focused on the gang. While the jurors acquitted most of the accused, Ortiz (15 years of penal servitude), Chiericotti (8 years of penal servitude), and Bertani (6 months in prison) were the only ones convicted.