• Leader of Brigate Rosse Alberto Franceschini, 1947
• Leader of Brigate Rosse Mario Moretti, 1946

Franceschini was born in in Reggio Emilia into a communist family. His father had been arrested for anti - fascist activities in the 1930s, and his grandfather was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. At a young age he became a member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation.

The Red Brigades were formed in the second half of 1970 as a result of the merger of Renato Curcio's Proletarian Left and a radical student and worker group. They went completely underground and organized the Red Brigades and spent the next three years, from 1972 to 1975, engaging in a series of bombings and kidnappings of prominent figures. Franceschini was captured and imprisoned in 1974. He was released in 1992.

Moretti was born in Porto San Giorgio, Marche region of Italy, into a middle class, right wing, family. Later Moretti tried to fabricate for himself a leftist and proletarian family environment, but the documents collected by the Italian Parliament's commission into the assassination of Aldo Moro later denied this reconstruction.

Recommended by an Italian noblewoman, Anna Casati Stampa, he moved to Milan in 1968 to work and to study at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Moretti did not take part in the upheaval of 1968. In Milan, Moretti worked at Sit - Siemens, where he met Corrado Alunni, Giorgio Semeria and Paola Besuschio, future members of the Red Brigades (BR). He also became a member of CISL, the largest Catholic oriented trade union in Italy. Together with others, he adhered to the Collettivo Politico Metropolitano founded by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, which formed the historical nucleus of the Red Brigades at their constitution (August 1970). Moretti became a member of BR in the Spring of 1971. His first action was a mugging in June 1971, together with Renato Curcio.

In 1974, when Curcio and Alberto Franceschini were arrested, he became the organization's only leading member still at large, together with Cagol and Semeria who were however killed and, respectively, arrested in the following year. Some sources suggested that Moretti, despite being informed by an anonymous phone call of the imminent arrest of Curcio and Franceschini, did nothing to warn them. Moretti pushed BR towards a more military attitude, and introduced a thorough separation between the members in order to reduce the consequences should any one of them be arrested. In 1975 he moved to Rome. In the spring of 1978 he organized the kidnapping and the execution of Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro. The circumstances of this assassination are still not clear. It is known, however, that Mario Moretti was the only person to talk to Moro during the 55 days of Moro's imprisonment. Moretti also confessed to having personally assassinated Moro after it became clear that the demand made by BR to free the politician (the liberation of thirteen jailed terrorists) would not be met by the Italian government.

He was sentenced to six life sentences for his crime, but, after serving 15 years in jail, he was paroled in 1998. In terms of his parole, he is allowed to work outside of prison, but must return to prison at night and over weekends. Moretti was suspected of being a spy by Red Brigade founders Alberto Franceschini and Renato Curcio.