In 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti, a young Member of Parliament from Tuscany, travelled through Sicily to report on this strange island, which was soon to become the most unruly part of the new country of united Italy. He was impressed by the beauty of Palermo, its baroque palaces, the courtesy and hospitality of the people, the palm groves and the oranges. Nevertheless, he was also careful to report on other things: ‘If a traveller stays here a little longer, reads the newspapers and listens to people’s conversations, he may also hear that the orchard keeper has been shot because the owner has hired him rather than someone else. A young man who wanted to set up a kindergarten on the outskirts of Palermo was found stabbed to death because some people thought he might have gained too much influence with his parents. Rumours spread that the former priest had become a gang leader and was administering the last sacraments to his victims.”
Sicilians were generally a sceptical people. Centuries of foreign rule and violent and corrupt authorities have taught them that. Asked why he distrusted local politicians, a Sicilian replied: “Because he is still alive. If he had really taken action against the mafia, he would be dead.”
Death was thus the only certain truth. Judge Giovanni Falcone was killed in an explosion on 23 May 1992, along with his wife and three security guards. Just two months later, on 19 July 1992, his friend and prosecutor Paolo Borsellino had to say goodbye to his life, along with five security guards. Falcone and Borsellino became victims, celebrated as heroes and even spoken of as ‘honoured corpses’, a jargon used in Sicily to distinguish the murders of important civil servants from the hundreds of ordinary criminals or townspeople who lost their lives during the Mafia’s rule.
With the murder of the two chief prosecutors, the Mafia has apparently sent a clear message to the authorities that when “gentler” means of communication are not an option, it is ready to resort to spectacular murders. “Everything is a message, in the world of the mafia everything has its meaning and no detail should be overlooked”, Falcone wrote a year before his death. By killing him in Palermo and not in Rome, where he had actually lived for the last year, the Mafia showed where its territory lay.
The murder of two prosecutors has sent the Italian state into a frenzy of activity. It hastily passed legislation that the two prosecutors had been pushing for in vain for years. 7000 soldiers were sent to Sicily, checkpoints were set up on the roads, and judges and politicians were protected. Soon after these measures were adopted, the results began to show; several hundred Mafiosi were ready to testify against their own organisation, the police uncovered the entire Mafia organisation and arrested 300 Mafiosi who had been hiding from the authorities for a long time; among them was Salvatore Toto Riina, the ‘capo di tutti i capi’, who had been wanted by the police for 25 years.
But then something else happened that showed that the Mafia was losing ground. Salvatore Lima, one of the most powerful politicians of the Christian Democratic Party in Sicily, who was rumoured to be the biggest supporter of the Mafia in the government, was killed in Palermo. This severed the link between the mafia and part of the Christian Democratic Party.
The history of the Mafia and the modern Italian state go back to the same period. As soon as Garibaldi annexed Sicily to the Italian state in 1860, he encountered rampant crime. In the chaos that followed the unification of Italy, marauding gangs terrorised the countryside, killing government soldiers and taking control of land sales and rentals.
The Italians in northern Italy were very surprised by the Sicilians’ non-cooperation with the new authorities. Unlike robbers and thieves, who as a rule live outside the ordered society, the mafiosi did the mundane jobs. Many of them worked as armed guards on the estates of landlords living in Palermo or managed them for them; they made sure the harvest was in, collected rents from tenants and mediated in disputes.
In 1874, crime in Sicily took on almost epic proportions and the Italian government made every effort to take control of the island. The visit of the parliamentarian Leopoldo Franchetti to Sicily was also aimed at this end. Law and order was eventually achieved by a typical Italian compromise between the government and the Mafia, and this became the pattern of governance for later years. The Mafia helped the police to dismantle the thieving gangs that threatened public order, and in return the government allowed them to continue their cunning form of economic crime.
This pattern of rule continued for 130 years. It was Mussolini who took the first steps towards suppressing the Mafia. In 1924, he sent Cesare Mori to Sicily as prefect, and by making mass arrests, besieging entire villages and towns, seizing property and taking hostages, he at least partially curbed the veritable avalanche of Mafia murders. In 1928, the number of murders in Palermo was thus reduced from 278 to just 25 a year.
When the Allies liberated Italy, the Mafia flourished and breathed at the top of its lungs. In an effort to keep both communists and fascists out of power, the Allies put well-known mafiosi in charge of the mayors of major cities, and many mafiosi worked their way into the Allied administration. This gave them access to the Allied army’s warehouses and the black market flourished, often with the help of Allied soldiers of Italian origin.
In 1950, land reform broke up the last large feudal estates and many unemployed workers flocked to the cities, especially Palermo. Here, new jobs were created and given to those who had the Mafia’s blessing. Everywhere, construction was carried out on a massive scale, demolishing old Baroque buildings for new tower blocks and asphalting beautiful parks, with the Mafia pocketing most of the profits. Between 1959 and 1964, three quarters of the building licences went to just three straw men, described by the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission as “pensioners of modest means, with no experience of construction, who were apparently offering their name to the real construction barons”.
Following the money trail
Falcone and Borsellino, born in 1939 and 1940, grew up in an era when construction was everywhere and everywhere in Sicily. Their families belonged to the typical Italian middle class, which was enthusiastic about the patriotism and nationalism of the new Italian state. Growing up, they had direct experience of the Mafia and envied their classmates who bragged that their uncles were Mafiosi.
They became friends at university, and both left Palermo after their studies to take up government jobs in various provinces of Sicily. They returned to Palermo, Borsellino in 1970 and Falcone in 1978, and worked in the courts. They never joined political parties, as they wanted to preserve their independence and impartiality in decision-making. They also refused invitations to social gatherings and, if they did attend one, they wanted to know who all was invited. It would have been embarrassing if a photograph had appeared in a newspaper showing either of them drinking champagne in the company of, or shaking hands with, a well-known Mafioso.
When Falcone returned to Palermo in 1978 from Trapani, where he had been working, he was going through a personal crisis. His wife had left him for another man, who was also his boss. In Italy, to be a “cornuto” – that is, a cuckold – is a painful humiliation, and it hurt Falcone for many years. But he gritted his teeth and took up his new job at the bankruptcy court with vigour.
It was a time when the city was ruled by the “Pax Mafiosa” and mafia murders were almost non-existent. Everyone was convinced that this was the final defeat of the Mafia. Nevertheless, it continued to operate. It controlled all the important construction projects in the city, taxes were collected by a private company that was in its hands, good government jobs could still only be obtained with its blessing, suitcases full of drugs and money travelled back and forth between Palermo and New York, and people continued to disappear in the countryside and their bodies were never found. The countryside was still controlled by the Corleone mafia, led by Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano.
But in May 1980, three paid assassins killed Police Captain Emmanuel Basile, who was leading an investigation into drug trafficking. The police arrested 55 members of three different mafia families. After complications, when for a long time no one wanted to sign the arrest warrants, the whole case ended up with Giovanni Falcone. It was his first major trial against the Mafia.
When Falcone examined the evidence, he saw that eighteen of the twenty-eight detainees had no real evidence, so he released them. A few days later, the lawyer for the Mafia family came to see him and said, “We are pleased that you are in charge of this case. We have always admired your sense of balance and impartiality.”
But the Mafia was only happy for a short time. Falcone used his experience in the bankruptcy court to review the Mafia’s financial dealings. He went far back, uncovering a network of financial links between the Mafiosi, examining hundreds of bank statements and cheques and the legal basis for their payment. This investigative method was so new and original that many people did not even understand it. This was a time when there were no computers and all findings had to be written down by hand. His suspects began to clash and claim that they did not know each other, but Falcone proved to them that they were making million-dollar deals with each other.
Meanwhile, of course, the Mafia did not stand still and Falcone was given police protection when one of his assistants was shot dead in the middle of Palermo. He brought the trial to a successful conclusion, but noticed that the accused and other members of the Mafia were disappearing or being murdered during the process. A great mafia war was then launched in Palermo. Nobody saw it coming, although there were a few warning signs.
One such sign was the murder that took place in September 1980, when two assassins entered the Franciscan church of Santa Maria di Gesu and asked where they could get Brother Hyacinth. They entered his room and shot him. When the police began to investigate the murder, they discovered that Brother Hyacinthe was no ordinary Franciscan. His “monk’s cell” had seven rooms, a colour TV and a fridge full of whisky. In the wardrobes hung elegant tailor-made suits, and he had a 38 mm pistol and several thousand dollars in cash.
Some have even suggested that he uses the church garden to bury Mafia victims. The media also discovered that he was very popular with the women’s world, had political friends in Rome and Palermo, and had links with the Mafia, notably the notorious Stefano Bontato.
Bontate was rich, attractive and intelligent, and inherited one of the most powerful Mafia dynasties. He was killed on his 43rd birthday, in April 1981, as he was returning home from a party in his honour. His red Alfa Romeo stopped at a red traffic light and was searched by several assassins. All Palermo waited for his mafia family to take revenge, but all was silent. Only wives and mothers started coming to the police to report that their husbands or sons had disappeared into the unknown. At first it was not clear whether they had been murdered or had gone underground.
Falcone wanted to explain the murder, as the brother of the murdered man was one of the main defendants in the trial he was leading. The Bontate family controlled one of the largest heroin processing laboratories in Sicily, which was discovered by the police in 1980. The killings and disappearances in Palermo followed a steady rhythm, with victims coming from mafia families involved in the drug trade.
The large number of disappeared confirmed the assumption that they were lured into a trap by people who knew them well. When the police investigated what was actually going on, they found the telephone numbers of one of the victims, Ignazio Lo Presti, a respected businessman from Palermo, who was linked by marriage to one of the most powerful business families on the island, the family headed by Ignazio and Nino Salvo. The Salvo family held a private concession to collect taxes, which is said to have enabled widespread corruption on the island. Interestingly, Lo Presti also suddenly disappeared. “Lupara bianca”, they whispered around Palermo, alluding to a hunting rifle with the barrel cut off – a favourite weapon of the Mafia.
Falcone started to check the Salvo family’s financial affairs and immediately discovered a number of irregularities. The Salvo family immediately complained that they were being persecuted by the Communists and demanded the protection of the Christian Democratic Party, of which they were supposedly loyal members. The more Falcone drilled into the Salvo family, the more he became convinced that there was a close link between the Mafia and the corrupt political elite. The symbol of this link was the La Zagarella hotel complex, where both politicians and Mafiosi held lavish weddings for their members, all paid for by the Italian state.
“Skesanci”
In 1981 and 1982, Mafia murders took place every three days in Palermo. Whoever eliminated Stefano Bontato was apparently not satisfied with getting rid of him and some other mafia leaders, but also started killing their relatives, friends of friends, and eliminating all members of the clan who could be an obstacle to him. The killings in Palermo became a national scandal and in March 1982 the Italian government asked General Carrillo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to take over as Prefect of Palermo. Just four months later, in September 1982, Dalla Chiesa was assassinated, along with a security guard and his young wife.
That evening, Falcone had dinner with a prosecutor friend, his wife and his future wife. As soon as he heard about Dalla Chiesa’s murder, he left the restaurant and went to the scene of the crime. Dalla Chiesa was lying on top of his wife in a desperate attempt to protect her from the hail of bullets that had riddled the car.
In the weeks after the murder, Falcone was surprised by a negative press campaign, some of which sought to diminish Dalla Chiesa’s reputation by saying, “He was an old man who lost his head for his young wife, causing his own death by exposing himself unnecessarily.” But Dalla Chiesa did not die because he knew too little, but because he knew too well how the Mafia worked.
During his 120 days in Palermo, Dalla Chiesa did not meet Falcone, Borselino and the other prosecutors, no doubt because he trusted no one in Palermo. But when Falcone investigated his death, he found that they had followed the same trail. This trail led from Palermo to Catania, which was becoming an increasingly important Mafia stronghold.
The murder of Dalla Chiesa followed the logic seen in Hitchcock’s film Stranger on a Train. Two strangers complain about how hard life is and one of them comes up with the idea of the perfect crime; each of them will kill the other’s enemy. Thus, the police will never be able to link the murderer and the victim, because there will be no connection between them.
With the murder of Dalla Chiesa, the Catania Mafia was doing the Palermo Mafia a favour. The government has given reassuring messages to the public that the war against the mafia will not be too radical. Falcone and Borselinno were not given the necessary computer equipment to handle the thousands of pieces of information on the mafia and had to rely on manual data collection. The favours that the State did for the Mafia were not few.
A bomb then blew up Judge Rocco Chinnico and two other security guards, injuring 17 people. It was Chinnici who had encouraged Falcone to insist on investigating the banking links. He ignored the warnings of the President of the Palermo Court of Appeal that this was damaging the Sicilian economy and that Falcone should rather deal with routine cases.
Shortly after the assassination, it came to light that an informant had warned the police in Palermo that Chinnici would be “blown up” because he had issued arrest warrants in the Dalla Chiesa case. Last but not least, in Chinnici’s personal diary, persons who were sympathetic to the Mafia were listed with names and dates. “If anything happens to me, the prosecutor Ciccio Scozzari and the lawyer Paolo Seminara are responsible,” it added.
The diary also said that an assassination attempt on the Falcon was being prepared, organised by businessmen from Catania and the Catanian mafia. Despite this information, the investigations have stalled. It was apparent that one prosecutor could not deal with all the cases. Therefore, the Supreme Court decided that a group of prosecutors, to be led by Giovanni Falcone with the help of Paolo Borselinno, should deal only with mafia cases.
The choice of Borselin was the best decision the Supreme Court could have made. He knew Palermo like the back of his hand, he knew the mafia and he was extremely hard-working. But he was different in character from Falcon. He was communicative, he enjoyed life, even the little things, and he was generally the opposite of Falcon.
In the first two years of the Mafia war, nearly 300 people were killed in Palermo. The incredible brutality of these murders and the emergence of a group of prosecutors dedicated solely to the Mafia resulted in something that had been known in America for several decades: the first “Mafia penitents”, who were prepared to testify against the Mafia to ensure their safety, emerged.
Joe Valachi was the first to break the rule of silence (omertá) in America in the 1950s, and mafia family leaders Lucky Luciano and Joe Bonanno even wrote books about their careers. In Sicily, however, the courts were still convinced that Mafiosi never spoke out. Leonardo Vitale, who had committed several murders, was the first to walk into a police station and surrender in 1973. He was suffering from a personal and religious crisis and wanted to relieve himself of this burden. Not only did he confess to a series of crimes, but he also incriminated more than a hundred Mafiosi, including the future “capo di tutti i capi”, Salvatore Riina. The Palermo court did not believe him and imprisoned him in a lunatic asylum for convicted criminals.
Although several Mafiosi spoke out, it was not possible to get a complete picture of the Mafia’s organisation from their testimonies. Then, in 1983, the Brazilian police arrested Tommaso Buscetta, who had been accused of murder in absentia years earlier. After that, he spent many years in South America dealing drugs. Although Falcone did not believe that Buscetto would talk, he thought it was worth a try and flew to Brazil. He had fifty questions prepared for him and finally Buscetto said, “I will spend all night answering them.”
When he was deported back to Italy, he immediately demanded to speak to Falcone. “I am not a penitent, and my discoveries are not linked to personal calculations. I have spent my life as a mafioso, making mistakes for which I am ready to take responsibility, and I am not looking for a reduction in my sentence or special favours. In the interests of society, my children and other young people, I intend to reveal everything I know about the cancerous creature of the Mafia so that future generations can live more humanely and nobly.”
Buscetto had been talking about the Sicilian Mafia all summer and what he had to say radically changed Falcon’s understanding of this criminal organisation. The Cosa Nostra that Buscetto described was far more sophisticated and hierarchical than the investigators could have imagined. Thirty families in the province of Palermo had their own leader and he represented them in the highest Mafia body, the Commission.
It set general policy and settled disputes between families, deciding on high-profile murders of policemen, judges, politicians and the Mafia itself. Even Dalla Chiesa or Rocco Chinnici could not be murdered without its consent. The Commission traces its roots back to 1950, when Lucky Luciano was deported from America to Italy and advised the Sicilians to set up a Commission following the American example. But when individual families began to fight each other for influence, the Commission too was powerless.
Buscette’s confession sparked mob persecution on both sides of the Atlantic. Hundreds of names of Mafiosi operating in Sicily, North and South America were now available. Falcone and his comrades had all the legal elements at their disposal to bring the Cosa Nostra to justice. Falcone was in Rome a lot at this time, interrogating Buscetta, and when Buscetta asked Falcone how he could remember all the names and dates he had told him, Falcone replied: “If I don’t understand something, Borsellino will explain it to me.” He sometimes accompanied him.
If Buscette’s confessions were important for prosecutors, they were even more important for members of the Mafia. A major precedent was set; the head of a Mafia family broke the law of silence “omertá”, survived and confessed. It has been proven that the police can protect those who speak out. In the light of Buscetta’s revelations, the American consul in Palermo reflected on the political implications of these events and wrote to the embassy in Rome and to the Foreign Office:
“Prosecutors in Palermo have issued 336 arrest warrants for Mafiosi. But these arrests only affected the armed wing of the mafia. No politicians were arrested. Although they have also brought charges against the former mayor of Palermo, Vito Ciancimino. The party of Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti is considered by many to be the most closely linked to the mafia on the Sicilian political scene.”
Pandora’s box against politicians has been opened and many local politicians have fallen into it, notably Salvatore Lima, former Mayor of Palermo.
Massive process
Giovanni Falcone knew that Buscetto had not said everything he knew, which was understandable. Italian prosecutors had no right to promise a reduced sentence, and if Buscetto wanted to survive in prison, he had to watch what he said. However, Buscetto had dealt a powerful blow to the Mafia which could not go unpunished.
On 18 October 1984, eight bodies were found in a horse stable in Piazza Scaffa in Palermo. It was the most mass murder in Sicilian history and many compared it to the St Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago. Inside the stinking stable, the horse stalls were sprayed with the brains of the victims, who had been killed at close range with hunting rifles. Gunshots must have been heard all around the area, but the police were not informed until hours later.
When the police arrived at the scene of the massacre, they found the father of one of the victims trying to take away the mutilated body of his son. The motive for the murder was never explained, but Falcone and Borsellino knew that it had to have been authorised by the Commission.
But this was only a warning. The Mafia usually decomposed the corpses in vats of strong acid. Sometimes this was old and the corpses did not decompose, so the remains of the bodies, wrapped in plastic bags and weighted down with stones, were simply thrown out of the boats into the sea. This way they were left for all to see. Borsellino was in charge of the case.
Then, two weeks later, the mafia struck again. Leonardo Vitale, who had been released from the lunatic asylum where he had been safely tucked away after voluntarily walking into the police station as the first “penitent” eleven years ago, was shot dead while attending Sunday mass with his mother. The Italian state has forgotten him, but the Mafia has not.
Following the confessions of several Mafiosi, preparations for a mass trial against the Mafia have become a national priority. The money to build a new courtroom, almost as big as a sports hall, was generously provided by the state. Thirty large iron cages for nearly 500 defendants were built in a semicircle, with several tables for lawyers added in the middle. On the balcony was a gallery for more than a thousand people, the public and the media.
The entire hall was surrounded by slabs of reinforced concrete that could withstand a bazooka or rocket attack. Outside the hall, a wire fence was erected and military tanks were deployed. The streets around the hall were closed to traffic. These measures were necessary because almost 200 000 families in Sicily lived off the illegal businesses run by the Mafia; they were drug dealers, lottery ticket sellers, cigarette and video smugglers, street bread sellers, they took bets on horse races, they worked in laundries, restaurants and construction sites.
The Mafia did not stand still during the preparations for the mass trial. Beppe Montana was a young police officer who was rising quickly up the hierarchical ladder. In July, he and his team arrested eight escaped Mafiosi. A few days later, as he was returning from a sailing trip and mooring his boat in the Porticella marina, he was met by two thugs who killed him.
Borsellino arrived at the scene of the murder with police investigator Ninni Cassaro. As they were walking back to Palermo, Cassara turned to Borsellino and said, “Let’s face it, we’re walking corpses.”
It was quickly established that one of the killers was Salvatore Marino from a nearby village. What started out as a successful investigation soon turned into a tragedy. During the next fifteen hours of interrogation, without a break, the police beat Marino and forced him to drink salt water just to give up the names of his associates in the murder. At 4 a.m., an unconscious, disfigured and bleeding Marin was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The police lied and claimed that the deceased had drowned.
On 4 August, the family of the deceased carried his body in procession through the city, shouting that the police were murderers. Years of painstaking work to win the sympathy of the population for the police had dissipated like a soap bubble.
On 6 August, Cassara telephoned his wife to say he was returning home. When he arrived outside his apartment in his armoured car with three security guards, fifteen armed Mafiosi were waiting for him, blocking all the neighbouring streets. Cassaro’s wife was at the door of the house and saw at least 200 bullets being fired at her husband by the thugs. Cassara and a security guard were killed on the spot, another security guard was seriously wounded and a third managed to hide under a car.
The fact that Salvatore Marino died was excessive police violence, but Cassara’s movements were unpredictable and he never said in advance where he was going, so someone from the police station had to inform the Mafia that Cassara was coming home.
A few days after his funeral, the police knocked on the door of Falcon and Borsellino’s flat in the middle of the night and told them to go with her, taking only the essentials with them. She took them to the airport and the military plane flew off to an unknown destination. The police were convinced that the Mafia was planning to murder them as soon as possible.
The plane landed on Asinara, Italy’s Alcatraz, a small island off Sardinia, where some dangerous criminals have been held in total isolation. They would stay there for several weeks, from mid-August 1985 to mid-September of that year, and would be joined by their closest family members. At least they will be safe here and will be able to complete their preparations for the mob trial.
On the day the trial began, the Italian newspapers ran front-page headlines with the greasy headline: the Mafia behind bars. But no criminal judge in Palermo dared to preside over the trial. Only Alfonso Giordano, a civil court judge in Palermo, had the courage. The trial did not start so spectacularly until 16 February 1986, with 600 journalists from all over the world watching.
From the start, the defendants wanted to turn the trial into a circus. They demanded cigarettes, wine, threw shoes at the judges. Thomas Buscetto was among the prosecution witnesses and repeated what he had already told Borselin. Some of the mafia leaders, especially Luciano Liggio, directly challenged his testimony – something that Italian law allowed – and these conversations usually ended in arguments and accusations.
The trial did not reveal any political links. Ministers such as Giulio Andreotti won the right to make their statements in Rome without the public being present. During the mass trial in Palermo, there were hardly any more murders. This may have been a sign that the Mafia families had smoothed over their differences and consolidated internally. There were also indications that this consolidation of the Mafia was being led by Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, who had not been seen for twenty years, as they had been successfully hiding.
The period of the trial, which lasted until December 1987, was a time of great achievements in the fight against the Mafia, but also of some serious but less visible setbacks. As many as a third of the accused were still on the run and three-quarters of the important leaders of the Mafia families responsible for the biggest crimes were not in the dock. Throughout the trial, however, Flacone and Borselinno were preparing the evidence for a second, smaller but still massive trial, which was to cover Mafia operations in the countryside.
In May 1986, Falcone finally married his chosen wife, also a judge, Francesca Morvillo. Shortly afterwards, Borselinno decided to leave Falcone and his group and take a job as chief prosecutor in Marsala, on the west coast of Sicily. There were several reasons for this. The mass trial dealt with the mafia in Palermo and the surrounding area, but did not touch the countryside, and Borselinno saw the transfer to Marsala as an opportunity to continue his work. He also wanted to be his own master, since in Palermo he had always been seen as Falcon’s assistant.
As the Grand Trial drew to a close, it was noticeable that politics was becoming more and more involved in the proceedings in Palermo. The prosecutors had no right to investigate members of Parliament without its consent, and Parliament never gave its consent, citing a lack of evidence. This was the experience of Carlo Palermo, a young judge from Trento, who uncovered a major bribery scandal involving the Socialist Party of Minister Gianni de Michelis and Prime Minister Craxi himself.
Attacked by politicians, he demanded a transfer to Trapani in Sicily, but even there he did not stand still, discovering the largest heroin refinery in Europe in the small town of Alcamo. His journey would soon end here, when a bomb exploded on the highway under his car.
On 16 December 1987, the Court of Palermo handed down its judgment. Judge Giordano read the judgment for an hour and a half. Three hundred and forty-four defendants were found guilty, accumulating a total of 2,665 years’ imprisonment. These were not just short prison sentences, as 19 of the most important Mafiosi were sentenced to life imprisonment, including the absent Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. Eighteen of the defendants were acquitted, but all were later murdered by the Mafia, convinced that they had spoken.
For the first time in history, the Court accepts that the Mafia is a hierarchical organisation, led by the Commission, with the different Mafia families working in harmony. It was merciful to the “penitents” and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from three to six years. With the pronouncement of the judgment, an era came to an end for both Falcon and Borselin.
A period of disappointments
But how to move forward? Everyone expected Falcone, on his own merits, to take the post of Chief of the Investigation Department, which had been left vacant. But Falcone did not have a strong political network among his colleagues in Palermo and Rome. There was also a lot of professional envy, personal ambition, and someone else was elected to the post. Falcone was aware of the danger of the political isolation into which he had fallen in his fight against the Mafia and he said to himself: “I am a dead man.” The victory in the mass trial in Palermo only proved how dangerous Falcone could be, but also how deep his isolation was.
Despite this disappointment, he continued to work. After a drought of almost three years, when no new “penitent” appeared, Antonino Calderone decided to speak out. Falcone had been following him since 1981, when he traced his drug money flow. He was arrested by the French police and was in prison in Nice.
Calderone was one of the major loners of the last Mafia war and, fearing death, he left Sicily in 1983. In a French prison, he feared he would be killed by his fellow Sicilians and demanded to speak to Falcone. He came and Calderone spoke for almost a year. He told Falcon things he had never heard before, because he was a member of the Catania Mafia. He was a different mafioso from Buscetta and the other “penitents “. While others did not regret their crimes, he showed deep remorse. He was also the first to give a thorough overview of the activities of the Mafia families of Corleone. He described the leader of the Corleone Mafia, Luciano Liggio, as follows:
“He liked to kill. If you were in his company, you had to watch what you said, because the smallest thing could throw him off balance.” He had a lot to say about the Catania Mafia’s links to Roman politics: “Whenever a Mafioso needed a forged passport, he could always turn to his deputy in the Roman Parliament and the passport was there.”
On the basis of his testimony, the police issued 160 arrest warrants in March 1988. At that time, the new head of the Bureau of Investigation, a position Falcone had so wanted but failed to get, arrived in Palermo. Falcone swallowed his pride, walked up to Antonino Meli and greeted him warmly. The Mafia, however, was not happy with the new head of the Investigation Bureau either. They sent him anonymous letters and scolded him: “You are a pile of shit and go back to the shit from whence you came.”
However, Meli did not do well in his new position. He shut himself in his office and was never seen in the investigators’ offices. He was a typical bureaucrat, arriving at work at 9am sharp and leaving at 5pm, while investigators often worked late into the night.
After arriving in Marsala in August 1986, Paolo Borselinno stepped into a new world. Although Marsala was only 120 kilometres from Palermo, Borselinno had gone from a relatively modern organised anti-mafia group in Palermo to a sleepy provincial office that was also in complete disarray. There were supposed to be eight prosecutors working under him, but there was only one, and even that one had asked to be transferred.
Information was also hard to come by, as the “omertà” was much stricter here than in Palermo. Although Marsala was the largest town in the province, the centre of the local mafia was in the fishing port of Mazara del Vallo, where there were thousands of fishing boats, small and large. The local mafia was closely linked to the Corleone mafia.
But Borsellino was persistent and soon managed to prepare arrest warrants for fourteen important Mafiosi from Mazara del Valla. He sent all his files to Antonino Meli in Palermo, hoping to get help from there, as he would not have been able to do it alone with the reduced staff in his office. The dossier was returned unopened to his address, and Meli simply wrote to him that the matter was not Palermo’s responsibility. Borselinno was extremely disappointed.
Mafia prisoners have also been extremely happy about the new criminal legislation. The new 1986 law allowed for reduced sentences for all convicts who “behaved properly”. Convicted criminals could leave prison for six weeks a year, go to work during the day and return to their cells only at night. This was exploited and in the first half of 1988 alone, 2,992 prisoners disappeared from prisons, half of them Mafiosi convicted of murder, kidnapping and drug trafficking.
Borselinno knew he had more freedom than his comrades in Palermo and decided to speak out. In July 1988, at a symposium on the fight against the Mafia in Agrigento, he said in a speech that the fight against the Mafia in Palermo was at a standstill, that there were hardly any new indictments and trials, and that the group that had fought the Mafia was slowly disbanding and the Mafia was rearing its head.
His speech was picked up by two major Italian newspapers and a scandal ensued. The President of the Republic, Francesco Cossiga, called an emergency meeting of the Council of Prosecutors. Antonino Meli was convinced that Borselinno and Falcone had set the whole thing up, and the former was criticised for washing his dirty linen in public.
Both prosecutors were threatened with suspension and Falcone immediately tendered his resignation. The wrangling and evidence continued into the first days of August, when a rotten compromise was reached, dismissing the charges against Borselin and concluding that he had done everything in good faith. Falcon was given credit for his good work and urged to bury his differences with Meli, while the latter was advised to be “kinder” to him.
While some newspapers attacked Falcone for staying in Palermo and cancelling his resignation, the Mafia saw it differently. In September 1988, the FBI in Brooklyn eavesdropped on a conversation between one of the Mafia’s leaders, Joe Gambino, and a stranger. Gambino asked, “What did Falcone do? Did he resign?” The stranger replied, “No, they made a deal and Falcone rescinded his resignation. He is going back to his job and will do what he has been doing.” Then Gambino cried, “What a crock!”
Meanwhile, in Palermo, Meli and Falcon were still at loggerheads, and the situation had not improved, despite the fact that they both tried to stick to the agreed compromise, which was that Meli would have the final say in the final decisions and would not interfere in Falcon’s day-to-day operational work.
The Mafia naturally exploited this situation and the murder rate soared. Some judges suddenly resigned because of the Mafia’s threats. Falcone had to face another death threat. After a hard day’s work, he wanted to spend the night in the seaside holiday home he and his wife had rented. While he was shaving in the morning, a security guard came and said: “We have to leave immediately. I’ve found a bomb.”
A security guard was checking the beach in the morning and noticed an Adidas sports bag under a holiday home that someone had forgotten. He looked inside carefully and saw electrical wires connected to 50 pieces of plastic explosives. The bomb had a complex mechanism; one remote-controlled, the other manual, which would cause an explosion when someone picked up the sports bag. The most frightening thing was that someone knew that Falcone was going to be staying in a holiday home at that very moment, which was very rare in those days. Was this the work of the police, Falcone wondered.
Slowly, he was getting the impression that they wanted to get rid of him. His unexpected promotion to Assistant Chief Prosecutor of the Republic actually gave him less power. Although he had ten times as many prosecutors under him as before, they were all bureaucrats who had been in their posts for more than ten years and who were mostly opposed to his appointment.
He started running for the Supreme Council of the Prosecutor’s Office, from where he could shape judicial policy. He was convinced that Italy needed a central police force, a kind of Italian FBI, to fight the Mafia. He failed in this candidacy too, and so suffered defeat after defeat.
The prosecutor was killed
Meanwhile, Borselinno enjoyed the happiest and most productive period of his life. He was his own man and by 1990 had managed to complete his team with seven assistants. The new Justice Minister, however, wanted to improve the country’s reputation in the fight against the Mafia and called Falcone to Palermo to ask if he would like to strengthen his team as “Director of Criminal Affairs”.
Exhausted and demoralised by everything, Falcone landed and left Palermo after twenty years in March 1991. What he would do as “Director of Penal Affairs”, no one knew, not even Falcone himself. But he knew where the problems of the Italian judiciary lay, and he had the support of the Minister of Justice, and all the prosecutors in Italy knew that they had an ally in him.
He soon realised that some of his measures had initially met with political resistance, but an event in the summer of 1991 was a turning point. In May of that year, in Tauriani, Calabria, the Mafia murdered a butcher in broad daylight in the centre of the town outside the door of his butcher’s shop, cut off his head and then played with it. The investigation revealed that the whole town, including the town council, was controlled by a single mafia family. The town council in this and two other nearby towns was dissolved by the Minister of the Interior, and the administration of the town’s affairs was taken over by an administrator who had been appointed in Rome.
In the same year, Sicilian entrepreneur Libero Grassi refused to pay “protection” to the Mafia and everyone told him he was crazy. But his example dragged and 140 shopkeepers in Capo d’Orlando followed suit. Grassi became a national hero and appeared on television, but was murdered by the Mafia later that year. The public was outraged and the government dissolved the city administration, which was in the hands of the Mafia, and 18 other city administrations, which were also controlled by the Mafia.
The Mafia did not have to wait long for a response. In March 1992, Salvatore Lima, the former Mayor of Palermo, a prominent Christian Democrat politician who was often accused of having Mafia links, was mowed down at gunpoint near his villa. Although no one understood the significance of this murder at first, it became clear that the traditional links between the Mafia and politics were only fraying and Salvatore Lima had to pay the price.
On the twenty-third of May, Falcone and his wife were returning to Palermo from Rome, as they do every weekend. He flew from the military airport in a government plane and landed at Punta Raisi airport an hour later in the late afternoon. Three police cars with security guards were waiting for him. For reasons of economy, the helicopter did not check the road leading from the airport into the city on that route before his arrival. For this reason, no one noticed that, near Capaci, a group of people dressed as road workers had placed 500 kilograms of plastic explosives in a water pipe that ran under the road.
In the evening, this group of people gathered around a small wooden shed, just over 100 metres from the road, in which a remote-controlled detonator was hidden. As the Falcon approached, a huge explosion split the road. All three vehicles were lifted into the air and a large crater was created at the site of the explosion. The three security guards in the first car were killed instantly, the three in the last car escaped with minor injuries, and in the middle car Falcone, his wife and the driver were seriously injured but still alive when the ambulances arrived. Falcone died after being rushed to hospital and his wife after two operations late in the evening.
Television stations stopped broadcasting special reports, newspapers wrote only about it and Parliament declared a day of mourning. At the same time, there were shouts of joy and applause from Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. Someone called the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper and said that it was a wedding present for the eldest son of the Madonio mafia family, who was married that day in the prison chapel. Five coffins were placed on the stage in the Palermo courthouse and when the politicians came to pay their respects to the victims, the crowd greeted them with shouts of “Murderers, clowns, go home!”.
Falcon’s funeral was a national drama, broadcast on all TV stations.
When Borsellino heard what had happened, he immediately rushed to Palermo and was one of the few people allowed into the room where Falcone was lying. He saw him dying and burst into tears. He carried his coffin and gave a farewell speech, and then fell into a depression. When the Italians saw what they had lost with Falcone, all the burden fell on Borselin, because everyone saw him as the only saviour and successor to Falcone. After five years in the province, Borselinno became the chief prosecutor in Palermo. Falcon’s death, however, brought a crisis among the Mafia’s “penitents”.
Riina is behind bars
Some stopped talking, others hid. Nevertheless, one “penitent” confided to Borselinno that a new criminal organisation called Stidda, the Sicilian name for the star tattooed on the body of its members, had begun to operate on the ground, especially in the towns of southern Sicily. The Mafia was therefore able to adapt to its new situation. Although the Stidda was not as well organised as the other mafia groups, it was no less bloodthirsty and most of the new murders were the result of the war between the Stidda and the old mafia groups.
On 19 July 1992, Borselinno and six of his security guards went to the home of his mother, who lived alone and was not feeling well that day. Cars were parked in front of her home on Via d’Amelio when a motorcade of three cars carrying Borselinno and his security guards pulled up. Only a few days before, his security department had requested that parking be banned in front of Borselinno’s mother’s house for security reasons.
Borselinno got out of the car, surrounded by five armed security guards. As agreed, only one remained behind the wheel of the lead car. As Borselinno approached the door of the house to ring the bell, a parked car full of explosives exploded. The explosion could be heard all over Palermo. The powerful air blast shattered all the windows up to the thirteenth floor.
The late Borselin’s wife Agnese refused a state funeral, saying the state was unable to protect her husband. Nevertheless, 10,000 people attended the private funeral. The funeral ceremony took place in Palermo Cathedral behind five security guards. When the politicians, led by the President of the State, Scalfaro, arrived at the funeral ceremony, the crowd started to shout abuse at them, a scuffle broke out and the security guards had to rescue Scalfaro from the furious crowd. In the following days, Prime Minister Amato sent 7000 troops to Sicily to restore order, acknowledging that the government had lost control of the island.
Now, with a delay of several years, the Italian FBI’s Direzione Investigativa Anti-mafia (DIA) has been set up, the tongues of the “penitents” have begun to loosen again, and it has come to light that the Mafia wanted to assassinate Falcone as early as the late 1980s, but changed its mind as Falcone suffered defeat after defeat, and his influence was supposed to have diminished. When they saw that he had not yet lost all his power, they decided that he had to be removed, because all the government’s anti-mafia measures had his stamp on them.
Then, on 15 January 1993, Toto Riina was arrested in Palermo, driving unarmed in an old Citroen around the city, where he had been hiding for 20 years. Hardly anyone could recognise in the pictures the man who was “capo di tutti i capi”, the boss of all bosses. He was as he appeared on the forged identity card; a Sicilian peasant visiting the city, dressed in a cheap ill-fitting suit, with short hair and stubby fingers. A poor sick old man known as “la belva” (the beast).
It is interesting how the police caught Tota Riina. In early 1993, a mafioso named Di Maggio was arrested in Novara for minor offences, and Di Maggio immediately said that he could lead the investigators to Riina. Di Maggio was a member of the mafia family of Bernardo Brusca. When he was arrested and imprisoned, Di Maggio took over the running of his family. But Brusca returned from prison, saw Di Maggio as a rival and wanted him out. Riina himself intervened, took Brusca’s side and, with a smile on his mouth, said to Di Maggio: “Brusca is not a rotten orange to be thrown away.” Di Maggio knew that Riina was at his most dangerous when he was kind and he ran away.
The police set up a special team to deal with Riina’s arrest. Di Maggio was shown thousands of photographs and countless metres of film until he pointed to a photograph and said, “That’s Riina’s chauffeur.” This was the first clue that led police agents to start watching a certain part of Palermo. The arrest was a great success for the police, but at the same time it raised the uncomfortable question; why hadn’t something like this happened years ago? An old colleague of Falcone and Borselinna gave the answer, saying: ‘Riina was arrested because they chose to do it’. There was no such will before.
The investigations into the murders of Falcon and Borselin have also borne fruit. The decision to murder Falcone was taken by Riina, who gave the task to his assistant. At least 18 people were involved in organising the murder. A butcher close to Falcone’s house told when the security guards came for the armoured car, which was a sign that Falcone was leaving, someone telephoned when Falcone left the office, another when the plane flew to Palermo, another when it landed. Then someone was watching the road and announced that the convoy was approaching, and the detonator set off the Brusca. After the assassination, Riina honoured everyone with French champagne.
The police were able to reconstruct this after reviewing the phone calls made by suspicious mobile phones at critical moments. Whether all this was also coordinated with politicians remains an open question. However, a wiretap showed that at the moment of the assassination, a member of the Roman Parliament was talking to a mafioso, at the very moment when the explosion killed Falcon and his companions. At that time, the telephone conversation was interrupted by the loud sound of the explosion, which could have been heard on the phone, which could be evidence that the Mafioso was near the scene of the explosion at that moment.
Shortly afterwards, former Italian Prime Minister and long-time politician Giulio Andreotti was also accused of colluding with the Mafia. The circle of events was thus slowly brought full circle.
