The Puccio Clan Kidnappings

A respectable family in San Isidro

From outside, the Puccio household in San Isidro, north of Buenos Aires, looked conventional. The family lived at the corner of Martín y Omar, number 544, and ran a water-sports shop and a bar in the building next door. Arquímedes Puccio, the father, was a trained accountant who had reached the post of vice-consul. His son Alejandro played rugby for the CASI club and had worn the shirt of Los Pumas, the national team. Behind that image, between 1982 and 1985, the house served as a holding site for kidnap victims taken for ransom.

Arquímedes had a history that later drew attention. In 1973 he was accused of kidnapping an executive of the Bonafide company, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Página/12 has reported that he worked under José López Rega at the Ministry of Social Welfare between 1973 and 1976 and that he had ties to the former state intelligence service (SIDE) and to the far-right Triple A; those connections were never the subject of his conviction.

The victims

The first victim was Ricardo Manoukian, abducted on 22 July 1982. His relatives paid a ransom reported as US$250,000, yet he was shot and killed days later. Sources give his age as 23 or 24. On 5 May 1983 the gang seized Eduardo Aulet, an engineer who had also played rugby at CASI. His family paid a ransom, reported as US$150,000 by La Nación and US$100,000 by Página/12, but he too was murdered; his remains were found roughly four years later.

In June 1984 the group tried to abduct businessman Emilio Naum. He resisted when he stopped his car and was shot dead, never reaching the house. The final kidnapping targeted Nélida Bollini de Prado, a 59-year-old businesswoman, in 1985. She was kept for about 32 days in a small cell built into the basement of the San Isidro home.

The raid of August 1985

On the night of 23 August 1985, police forced their way into the property and found Bollini de Prado alive, making her the only one of the four victims to survive. Alejandro was at home with his girlfriend, watching a film in the kitchen, and was detained on the spot. The other suspects were arrested while attempting to collect her ransom. Months later, when he was due to testify, Alejandro threw himself from the fifth floor of the Buenos Aires courthouse and survived.

Alongside Arquímedes and his sons Alejandro and Daniel, known as "Maguila," investigators identified several accomplices outside the family: retired military officer Rodolfo Victoriano Franco, Guillermo Fernández Laborde, Roberto Oscar Díaz and a bricklayer, Herculiano Vilca. According to Página/12, Fernández Laborde admitted during the trial to firing the shot that killed Naum.

Trials and sentences

In December 1995 Arquímedes Puccio was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Alejandro also received a life term. Arquímedes never admitted the crimes. Because of his age he was granted house arrest, but that benefit was later revoked and he was moved to a prison in La Pampa province. After a sentence-reduction rule known as the two-for-one law was applied, he obtained conditional release in 2008. He settled in General Pico, La Pampa, where he died in May 2013 at 84 after complications from a stroke. Outlets give the date as 3 or 4 May; no relative claimed his body. Alejandro was released in 2007 and died in 2008, about eight months later.

Daniel Puccio, who had returned from New Zealand in 1985, was held from August 1985 until February 1988, when he was freed because no final sentence had been handed down within a reasonable time. He was later sentenced to 13 years for the Bollini de Prado kidnapping only (sources disagree on whether this came in 1998 or 1999), but by then he had left Argentina. The sentence was never served and lapsed under the statute of limitations in 2011. In September 2019 he was briefly arrested in Brazil carrying a false identity document. A La Nación retrospective marking the raid's 40th anniversary in August 2025 reported nothing more recent.

The rest of the family

Epifanía Ángeles Calvo, the mother, and daughter Silvia were held for about two years on suspicion of involvement and then released for lack of evidence; Silvia was acquitted and died of cancer in 2011. Both are legally innocent. The younger children, Adriana and Guillermo, were never part of the investigation, and both later stopped using the Puccio surname. Manoukian's brother has publicly doubted that the mother was unaware, but no court found her responsible.

Why the case still matters

The Puccio kidnappings straddled the last months of military rule and the first years of restored democracy, and commentators such as Página/12 have read them against Arquímedes's reported ties to the security apparatus of earlier years. The case returned to mass attention in 2015 with Pablo Trapero's film El Clan, starring Guillermo Francella as Arquímedes and Peter Lanzani as Alejandro, and with the television miniseries Historia de un clan, directed by Luis Ortega. Four decades on, it remains one of Argentina's best-known crime stories, largely because the violence was run from inside an apparently ordinary family home.