Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and the Procura of Palermo [1]

 

 

Peter Schneider, Fordham University

Jane Schneider, Graduate Center, 

City University of New York

 

 

      This spring and summer mark the tenth anniversary of the assassinations of Judges Falcone and Borsellino in Palermo. We wish here to honor their memories by describing the vicissitudes of their courageous work in the public prosecutor’s office of Palermo during the ‘long decade of the 1980s’, stretching from the late 1970s until their brutal assassinations by the mafia in May (Falcone) and July (Borsellino) of 1992.  It should be clear as well that we would commemorate not just the work of two dedicated servants of the state (and civil society), but also the institutional history that allowed them and their no less dedicated colleagues to achieve some extraordinary success in the ongoing struggle against organized crime and political corruption.

 

      Just as the ‘long 1980s’ became a crucible of violence between rival mafia factions in Sicily, it also framed an intensified police-judicial crackdown on the mafia, the highpoint of which was the ‘maxi-trial’ which began in February, 1986 and lasted until December, 1987.  During this period, sometimes called the ‘Palermo Spring’ (Palermo Primavera), Sicilian prosecutors indicted 475 mafiosi, trying 460 of them in a bunker-courthouse specially constructed for this purpose inside the walls of the Ucciardone, the city’s massive nineteenth century Bourbon prison. Most were convicted and, to the surprise of many, the convictions were upheld several years later in 1992, after the final stage of appeal. The antimafia process framed by these events continues to this day.

 

                   This essay traces three themes in the vicissitudes of the criminal justice effort. The first has to do with its marked discontinuity.  The prosecutors’ efforts gathered momentum from the late 1970s into the years of the maxi-trial, but were then undercut by a public opinion backlash whose purpose, they believed, was to delegitimate their actions. From their perspective, the attacks opened the door to a series of embrogli that prefigured the dramatic massacres of 1992. The judiciary was revitalized in the aftermath of the Falcone and Borsellino murders and the police action became effective again, yet the path remains bumpy, with the issue of delegitimation continuing to reverberate through the courthouses of Sicily and the nation. 

 

      Second, contributing to the discontinuity of the criminal justice effort are the intrigue and uncertainty produced by the relationship between the mafia and politics. Given its history of conditioning powerful interlocutors, the mafia was most always able to deflect police and judicial investigations that ran afoul of its interests.  The investigators and journalists who follow it closely speak not only of interwoven networks, but also about a covert local, regional, and national power grid.  Nodes of this grid lie hidden in the very offices of the police and judiciary of Palermo and Rome.  It is the local view that investigators who come too close to certain ‘hot wires’ (fili caldi) are asking for trouble. Just which hot wires Falcone and Borsellino were preparing to touch in 1992 is still a matter of speculation.  But while possible, it is difficult to imagine that the actions were taken solely to revenge their past successes, or to destabilize the existing order.

 

      And, finally, the third theme: despite the unevenness and vulnerability of the police-judicial effort, the magistrates and police inspectors seem to have turned a corner, above all in the wake of 1992.  Ironically, the tragedies that we commemorate helped provoke this outcome. Two broad developments encouraged this shift: first, the emergence in 1982 of a Palermo-centered social movment, the movimento antimafia, that has consistently supported the judicial effort and continues to do so; and second, the fall of the First Italian Republic in 1992. 

 

 

The Sicilian Magistracy and the Antimafia Pool

 

      Since the 1970s, Sicilian magistrates, in past generations close to the landed aristocracy, have come to represent a more heterogeneous social base. Better educated, they are considerably less vulnerable than their predecessors to mafia ‘conditioning’. The magistrates of this generation no longer consider it normal to engage in reciprocal social relations with mafiosi and their families.  By rejecting the social relations that were commonplace in their fathers’ day, they find it relatively easy to distance themselves from those they would prosecute. 

 

      Many of the ‘second generation’ magistrates in Sicily also share experiences and professional networks with their national cohort that prosecuted terrorism in the 1970s.  At the end of that decade, a group in the Palermo Procura, led by Falcone, Borsellino, and the more senior head of their office, Rocco Chinnici, created an informal antimafia ‘pool’. Consolidating their individual efforts to reconstruct and document criminal histories, they cooperated in the development of new investigative and prosecutorial strategies.  Most important, they assumed collective responsibility for carrying mafia prosecutions forward: all the members of the pool signed prosecutorial orders, so as to avoid exposing any one of them to particular risk. 

 

      In the early years, the pool had few resources – little office space, too few telephones, no computer technology, inadequate protection – yet its half dozen members demonstrated an impressive esprit de corps and confidence. One of their most significant innovations was the cultivation of mafia turncoats, or pentiti. In the past, individual police officers had connections to informants (confidenti), but those informants were generally not willing, or expected, to testify in public (Lupo 1993: 222-23; see also Pezzino 1995: 266-70).  Indeed, sometimes the police officers acted as informants to the mafia.  (In the 1970s, when Leonardo Vitale did offer to testify in court to his own crimes and those of his mafia colleagues, the judges eventually declared him to be mentally ill.)  The internecine mafia war of the late 1970s and 1980s altered this dynamic through the exaggerated violence it visited upon the ‘losers’, provoking the pioneering collaboration of the first pentiti Tommaso Buscetta and Antonino Contorno. Their decisions to collaborate with the magistracy were momentous. As Falcone wrote of Buscetta, he “furnished a great deal of information on the structure and functions of Cosa Nostra, but especially gave us a global vision, an essential key for reading its language and codes” (Falcone 1991: 41; quoted in Pezzino 1995: 269).

 

      This strategy of encouraging pentitismo derived in part from the earlier prosecution of terrorism, which had relied heavily on the cumulative effect of turning some of the accused perpetrators into witnesses against others. In addition, Falcone was in close communication with the United States Department of Justice, which was simultaneously pursuing the transatlantic drug-smuggling network that became known as the ‘pizza connection’. The Department's Federal Witness Protection Program gave asylum to Buscetta and Contorno, protecting them from their potentially lethal enemies in Italy.  That program, like the American RICO (Racket Influenced Corrupt Organization) law, then became a model for tightening criminal justice in Italy.  Thanks in part to this context, the number of collaborators, nationally, reached 1200 by 1997 and has continued to grow.  The 363 witnesses against Cosa Nostra in 1997 represented 6 to 7 percent of the presumed 5,500 organized crime figures in Sicily (see Jamieson 2000: 104-105; Paoli 1997: 159.)

 

      Given the internal dynamics of the mafia wars, many of the persons who became pentiti were already in such jeopardy that they felt they had little to lose from flaunting the mafia’s code of omertà. By testifying they could gain a reduced sentence, a more comfortable incarceration, financial aid and other support for their immediate family, the opportunity to subject a mafioso enemy to police capture or a stiffer sentence, protection from the enemyís machinations, and sweet revenge against mafia leaders who, as mandanti, had set them in motion but then abandoned or betrayed them.

 

The Police/Judicial Crackdown: Phase I

 

      The trajectory of the police-judicial crackdown on the mafia resembles the flight of a bird in stormy weather.  An upswing around 1980 peaked in the maxi-trial of 1986-87; a downswing then reached its nadir in the summer of 1992. 

 

      Our account begins with Giovanni Falcone whose career bracketed the first two phases of the crackdown. He was born in 1939 to a middle class family in a neighborhood of central Palermo where the mafia was present but quiescent; Tommaso Spadaro, a boy with whom he played ping-pong in the neighborhood Catholic Action recreation center, would later become a notorious mafioso smuggler and killer, but mafiosi were not a major presence in his childhood (La Licata 1993: 23, 83).  After taking a degree in law at the University of Palermo and passing the examination for the magistracy, he was assigned to the prosecutor’s office in Trapani and Marsala, and then to the bankruptcy court in Palermo.  It wasn’t until early 1980 that he joined the ‘Office of Instruction’ of the Palermo Procura, at a particularly tense moment. Cesare Terranova, a former parliamentary deputy and antimafia reformer, was to have headed this office, but he was killed on September 25, 1979.  Only two months earlier, on July 21, 1979, Boris Giuliano, head of the police investigation squad and in pursuit of heroin traffic, had been assassinated.  The mafia killed his successor, Captain Emanuele Basile, on May 5, 1980. Taking Terranova’s place was Rocco Chinnici, whose days were numbered but who, for the moment, was Falcone’s boss.

 

      Around this time, 55 members of the Spatola, Inzerillo, and Gambino mafia alliance were accused of drug trafficking and related crimes and taken into custody, their arrest warrants signed by the head of the Palermo Procura or Procuratore Capo, Gaetano Costa.  This showed the tenacity and courage of Costa, who signed the indictments after virtually all of the other prosecutors in his office had declined to do so – a fact that leaked out of the office and eventually cost him his life. When the case was passed to the Instructional Office, Chinnici assigned it to the young Falcone who applied the skills he had honed unraveling bankruptcies and began to follow the money trail created by heroin deals. To the amazement of many and consternation of some, his explorations produced a picture of ‘the Sindona mafia’ involved in the rise to power and eventual fall of the notorious banker/financier, Michele Sindona.  Illegal traffic, money laundering, heroin sales, and ties to freemasonry were all involved (La Licata 1993: 69-71). In conducting this investigation, Falcone was probably the first Sicilian magistrate to establish working relationships with colleagues from other countries, thus developing an early understanding of the drug traffic in its global dimensions. Through Belgian and French inspectors, he learned that the chemists of the ‘French Connection’ had moved from Marseilles to Sicily, where clandestine labs for refining heroin had already been established; visiting the United States at the end of 1980, he worked with the U.S. Justice Department on “some of the biggest international law enforcement operations in history” (Stille 1995: 36). His inquiry also extended to Turkey, an important stopover on the route of morphine base that was smuggled from Southeast Asia; to Switzerland, where bank secrecy laws facilitated money laundering; and to Naples where cigarette smuggling rings were being reconfigured as heroin operations.  

 

      Many who knew Falcone in this period (the present writers included) were impressed with his ability to see the big picture and his determination to explore it, however much he and his colleagues were handicapped by ridiculously meager investigative resources.  As Stille has written, he won 74 convictions in the Spatola Case, based on his having proved “with a web of solid evidence, bank and travel records, seized heroin shipments, fingerprint and handwriting analyses, wiretapped conversations and firsthand testimony that Sicily had replaced France as the principal gateway for refining and exporting heroin to the United States” (Ibid: 46).

 

      On May 1, 1982, Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, veteran leader of the national campaign against terrorism in the 1970s, arrived in Palermo to become the Prefect and coordinate the stateís repression of organized crime.  Around the same time, the young deputy chief of the police investigative squad (the Squadra Mobile), Antonino (Ninni) Cassarà, developed a relationship with Contorno as an informant, code-naming him, prophetically, Fonte di Prima Luce (Source of First Light).  Cassarà used Contorno to create a map of the families of the Palermo region and a report on their increasingly conflictual relations and involvement in narcotics.  Working closely with Falcone, two months later they unleashed a retata or dragnet roundup of 162 mafiosi wanted for drug trafficking and homicide (La Licata 1993: 98-99). 

 

      Among the bosses who remained at large was Salvatore Greco nicknamed the Engineer, whom the Giornale di Sicilia described as the “gray eminence of the entire organization, the one who held and pulled the strings, whether the task was to guide the extermination of enemies or to decide on strategies for moving drugs”.  He had been a fugitive for 20 years, living a life of luxury in Venezuela. His cousin and deputy, Michele ‘the Pope’ also escaped the dragnet, although he headed the list of those sought.  All told, the Greco clan was like a lion, the newspaper said, but sweeps of their Ciaculli territory had so far yielded only ‘little fish’.  Moreover, their chief Corleone allies, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, seemed invincible.  Riina was at large while Provenzano had already established his enduring reputation as one of the mafia’s most illustrative fugitives.

 

      As 1982 unfolded, the troubles multiplied.  April 30 is the date of the assassination of the Sicilian Communist leader and national deputy, Pio La Torre, a leading proponent of antimafia legislation.  The next to fall was General dalla Chiesa, gunned down in his automobile on the Via Carini of Palermo, together with his driver and young wife, on September 3.  Given his popularity and the significance of his appointment as ‘super-prefect’ of the antimafia forces, this event was a national scandal.  In its wake, and energized by the massive outflow of sympathy and anger that the murders of La Torre and Dalla Chiesa generated, the Parliament enacted the legislation that La Torre had promoted in vain before his death. The new law, known as the Rognoni-La Torre Law, granted the judiciary greater access to bank records in order to follow money trails, allowed the state to sequester and ultimately confiscate the assets of convicted mafiosi, and defined membership in the mafia as a crime independent of other possible criminal acts. [2] Under its provisions, Falcone and Chinnici issued 14 arrest warrants for the Dalla Chiesa killing with Michele Greco, still at large, again at the head of the list.  That was July 9, 1983.  On July 21, a car bomb massacred Rocco Chinnici, two of his bodyguards, and the concierge of his building.  Like the murders of Terranova and Costa, this event was brutally unsettling and it, too, called for an investigation.

 

      Chinnici’s replacement as head of the Instructional Office of the Palermo Procura was Antonino Caponetto, a distinguished Florentine magistrate.  Although near retirement, he too proved to be a strong supporter of the antimafia process and under his administration Falcone with several other investigative magistrates, including Borsellino, Giuseppe Di Lello, and Leonardo Guarnotta, reinvigorated their work as members of the antimafia pool (Caponnetto 1992; Stille 1995: 85-90).  By June of 1984, Falcone was off to Brazil to arrange for the extradition of Buscetta to Italy.  Buscetta’s extraordinary testimony produced what became known as the ‘Buscetta Theorem’, namely, “that the Cosa Nostra was a unitary and secret organization and that the events that signified its life, apparently unconnected, were not independent one from the others but were connected and responding to a single strategy” – a strategy that was set by the cupola, or mafia Commission (La Licata 1993: 99-100).  It was this proposition, coupled with Buscetta’s other revelations, that enabled Falcone to issue another 366 arrest warrants by September 29.  From there, he went on to prepare, together with Borsellino, the prosecutorial document for the maxi-trial: ‘8,607 pages in forty volumes, plus appendices of 4,000 pages, including documents and photographs, laying out evidence against 475 defendants,’ 460 of whom had been arrested.  In Stille’s words, “the maxi-indictment, the bulk of which was written by Falcone himself, is a great historical saga with the sweep of a Tolstoian novel Like the great historical novel of Sicilian life, The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, it is a lucid diagnosis of a diseased society” (1995: 174; see also Stajano 1986).

 

      The two magistrates were forced to complete the work on the maxi-indictment in a maximum security prison on the island of Asinara.  Falcone and his fiancée, magistrate Francesca Morvillo, and her mother, together with Paolo Borsellino and his family took refuge there in the summer of 1985 as tension increased in Palermo, occasioned by a series of catastrophes in the police Squadra Mobile.  The murder of police inspector Beppe Montana initiated the crisis.  Both Borsellino and inspector Cassarà had grown to admire this young man who, in 1983, had discovered Michele Greco’s arsenal of pistols, machine guns, and sawed off shotguns. The following year Montana arrested the childhood neighbor of Falcone, Tommaso Spadaro, who was by then a major trafficker in cigarettes and drugs.  On July 25, 1985, Montana’s men arrested eight mafia fugitives, one of whom was a business partner of Michele Greco (Greco himself would remain at large until February 20, 1986).  Three days later, Montana was dead, felled by four shots from a pistol.  Borsellino and Cassarà were devastated.  The tragedy deepened when a 25 year old man arrested as a suspect in the killing was allegedly beaten to death by enraged policemen.  Three senior officers of the police were ordered transferred by the President of Italy; and ten other officers were charged with responsibility for the death of the prisoner. 

 

      Then, on August 6th, perhaps to avenge that death, Cassarà was murdered, together with his young assistant, officer Roberto Antiochia.  Compounding the trauma for the police and magistrates, Cassarà’s trusted driver, Natale Mondo, who had been fortunate to escape the assassins’ bullets, came under suspicion of being involved in setting up the ambush.  He was later exonerated (and later still, killed by the mafia) but this and other events of the time served to unravel “the team of able investigators that had been slowly and painfully reconstructed after the assassinations of Boris Giuliano and Emanuele Basile” (Stille 1995: 170). 

 

      Falcone and other members of the pool saw the handwriting on the wall: the more the police went after the fugitives, the more the mafia would attempt to destroy the police.  Despite the large number of arrests that led to the imminent maxi-trial, the mafia-in-hiding remained capable of terrible deeds -- hence the preventive sequester of Falcone, Borsellino, and their families.  Stille captures the irony as follows: “(It) was a telling indication of the upside-down nature of life in Sicily on the eve of the maxi-trial: mafia fugitives moved freely about Palermo while government prosecutors had to live in prison for their own protection” (Ibid: 172).

 

      And yet, the trial did begin in February 1986, and on December 16, 1987, the judges delivered their stunning guilty verdicts to 344 mafiosi, handing down prison sentences totaling 2,665 years.  Among the guilty were Luciano Liggio of Corleone, Michele Greco (‘the Pope’) of Ciaculli, at long last arrested, and the fugitive Corleone ‘butchers’ Riina and Provenzano.  Only former Palermo mayor Vito Ciancimino, apprehended while laundering great quantities of money through a Montreal bank, could be considered a political or what the press calls a ‘third level’ conviction, along with the super-wealthy Salvo cousins, Nino and Ignazio, who "for forty years [as owners of a vast tax-collecting franchise] had conditioned the economic and political life" of Sicily (Caponnetto 1992: 36).  Several other defendants remained fugitive and 114 were released due to insufficient evidence. In all, it seemed a remarkable step toward reversing the mafia’s destiny.

 

      Like most of the important antimafia prosecutions, the maxi-trial was staged in Palermo. Other provincial capitals of Sicily – Agrigento, Caltanissetta, Trapani, Catania – are also frequent sites for trials (indeed, any case involving a Palermo magistrate as victim must be tried in Caltanissetta).  In addition, a few trials involving the mafia have been set in continental Italy.  But the Palermo Palazzo di Giustizia, a massive and forbidding structure in fascist modern, has been the center of the storm. Here, notwithstanding the stark marble interiors and cavernous corridors that seem to dwarf all human endeavor, reducing voices and footsteps to muffled echoes, small groups of prosecutors and judges turned their offices and meeting rooms into workshops for making history.  That these beehives of activity would provoke unease and jealousy inside the palazzo was, perhaps, inevitable, the more so if we remember that the grid of the mafia’s hidden power had penetrated the institution.  In no time at all, the place acquired a nickname: the Palazzo dei Veleni (Poisons).

 

      Outside the Palace of Justice and the bunker courthouse, life for the antimafia magistrates was by turns exhilarating and frustrating.  Given the dangers to which they were exposed, they lived (and still live) an armored life, prisoners of the measures that are necessary to protect them.  Although they did not wear masks, as did their counterparts in Colombia, they could circulate only in armor-plated vehicles driven by one of their ‘guerillas’ and escorted front and back by unmarked police cars with sirens screaming.  Shopping for clothes, going to the cinema, swimming at the beach, and eating in popular restaurants -- pleasures that people of their class take for granted, were all foregone.  Meanwhile, during the maxi, Palermo as a whole took on the appearance of an armed camp as additional police, soldiers, and Carabinieri were assigned to guard its streets.

 

 

Phase II: 1988 to 1992

 

      Almost before they were over, the maxi-trial in Palermo and a comparable trial of Camorra leaders in Naples were raising the specter of an institutional threat to civil liberties, due both to the large scale of the processes (the sheer number of defendants and charges being tried) and their reliance on pentito testimony. The Neapolitan magistrates, less cautious than their Palermo counterparts, had particularly fanned the flames by convicting a popular TV personality, Enzo Tortora, of collusion in Camorra activities, based only on the unsubstantiated testimony of one, rather unreliable, pentito witness.  Tortora was later cleared of the charge by an appeals court, but the fact that he spent considerable time in prison (and subsequently died of cancer) made him emblematic of the call for civil liberty ‘guarantees’ (see Jacquemet 1996: 288; Stille 1995: 203-11).   

 

      On January 10, 1987, almost a year before the maxi ended, the famed novelist Leonardo Sciascia launched an unsettling missile in the form of a review of a recently published book by British historian, Christopher Duggan, on the fascist period and the attempt to suppress the mafia directed by Mussolini’s Iron Prefect Cesare Mori (Duggan 1986).  Writing for the Milan daily, Corriere della Sera, Sciascia used the review as an occasion to mount an attack on what he labeled the professionisti dell' antimafia, the ‘antimafia professionals’. First, he established his own antimafia credentials by quoting extensively from his early "mafia novels", Il giorno della civetta (Mafia Vendetta, 1960) and A ciascuno il suo (To Each his Own, 1966).  When his books were first published, he noted, it was fashionable to ignore the mafia; today it is the fashion to talk about it all the time.  The current "flood of rhetoric" was preferable to the past indifference, but it contained a confused "racial resentment" regarding Sicily and Sicilians, as if Sicily could not be pardoned for its sins, even though it had also produced such luminaries as Verga, Pirandello, Guttuso (and by implication, Sciascia himself). 

 

      The review referred to the vastness and pain of the mafia problem, and the complicated ways that ordinary people are complicit with it. This is not mystification, claimed Sciascia.  One can understand the mafia, but it would take more time, and a more nuanced analysis, than the antimafia professionisti seem prepared to give.  Most important, they were naive about the clear risks to democracy inherent in an overly aggressive approach. Mori, according to Sciascia, was authoritarian; he had a strong sense of duty and belief in the legitimacy of the state through which he justified his assumption of ‘virulent powers’.  Anyone who dissented was labeled "mafioso".  Now, he continued, there was a magistrate, Paolo Borsellino, who was promoted out of the line of the magistrates’ own rule of seniority because he dealt with mafia crimes. Nothing better enhanced a magistrate's career than bringing a mafioso to trial; others were held back because they lacked this opportunity. The attack created a storm of shocked protest, as Borsellino was second only to Falcone in public esteem in the antimafia pool.  On January 14, Sciascia retracted, telling reporters that he did not mean to impugn the judge's qualifications, only the modality of his promotion, adding, however, that the antimafia activists' reaction had proved his point.

 

      The Tortora case and Sciascia’s bombshell invited criticism of the magistracy, adding fuel to an emergent national campaign for a referendum on civil liberties, promoted by a coalition of Liberals and Radicals, together with Socialist Party leaders who had become involved in a bribery scandal in Milan. The heart of the proposed reform, which won by a substantial majority in a vote in 1988, was that judges and prosecutors should be made personally liable and subject to civil lawsuits for ‘errors’ leading to wrongful arrest and imprisonment. The Parliament further expanded the rights of defendants, in particular by separating the functions of prosecutor and judge. Instituted in 1989, this reform meant eliminating the position of the Instructional Magistrate, replacing it with the less powerful figure of the Giudice per Indagine Preliminare (Judge for Preliminary Inquiries or GIP for short).  New rules of procedure and evidence were also promulgated, moving Italian jurisprudence a little closer to the adversarial systems of Great Britain and the United States. 

 

      Perhaps in response to the shifting climate, the mafia once again showed its fangs.  In 1988, Giuseppe Insalaco, former mayor of Palermo, was killed, followed by the appeals court judge, Antonio Saetta, responsible for hearing the maxi appeal. These events, together with the dismantling of the Squadre Mobile, framed the crisis that developed after Caponnetto, head of the Office of Instructional Magistrates, announced his retirement in January 1988.  Most of the Palermo judges and prosecutors, Caponnetto among them, fully expected that Falcone, the moving force in the antimafia pool, would be appointed to head the office (which was not eliminated until 1989). Instead, the Superior Council of the Magistracy (CSM) rigidly followed the 1966 law that established seniority as the basis for promotion and appointed a more senior magistrate who had little experience in prosecuting organized crime. 

 

      That the decision came after heated debate and a split vote in the CSM did little to alleviate tensions in the Procura of Palermo. The new head of the Instructional Office, Antonino Meli, proceeded to assign cases as if there were nothing special about those involving organized criminality.  In effect this eliminated the antimafia pool by encumbering its members with investigations that were peripheral to organized crime, while assigning mafia cases to magistrates who had neither the historic memory nor the appetite to pursue them.  In the middle of the summer of 1988, we were among an audience in the city of Agrigento for the presentation of a book about a major mafia trial in that province. One of the speakers was Judge Borsellino who took advantage of the occasion to denounce the ‘dismantling of the pool’ and accuse the state, in dramatic and chilling words, of failing to support the antimafia judicial effort.

 

      Falcone was about to suffer a series of indignities. In 1989, the Instructional Office was eliminated as mandated by a reform in the criminal justice system. Meli retired and the other ‘instructional’ prosecutors, including Falcone, were folded into the Procura under its new head, Piero Giammanco. On May 16, 1989, the pentito Contorno was arrested in Bagheria near Palermo and charged with participating in several attacks on the Corleonesi. Shortly thereafter, five letters written by an anonymous ‘corvo’ (literally, crow, but meaning ‘provocateur’) circulated within the Palazzo di Giustizia, charging that Falcone, together with police inspector Gianni DeGennaro, had directed Contorno’s secret return from protective custody in the United States so as to set him up for these misadventures in Sicily.  On June 20th there was a serious attempt on Falcone’s life, a bomb found in the water near a secluded beach house in Addaura where he happened to be entertaining two Swiss magistrates who were working with him on a money-laundering case.  This attempt on his life could only have matured with the clandestine help of one or more ‘moles’ operating inside the Palazzo di Giustizia.  According to one of Falcone’s colleagues he himself was, at the time, very concerned because “he knew in his gut but could not prove that there was a mole with secret service connections in the Procura”.

 

      Shortly after the Addaura provocation, the anonymous letters were made public and Domenico Sica, the High Commissioner for the Fight against the Mafia (a position created by Parliament after the killings of La Torre and Dalla Chiesa) initiated what can only be described as a most bizarre investigation into their source. Sica accused a colleague of Falcone in the Palermo Procura, Antonino Di Pisa, saying that Falcone had suggested the name. Falcone immediately denied that he had named anyone to Sica, while Di Pisa vigorously denied being the corvo. In a strange turn, however, Di Pisa also asserted that he was in full agreement with the content of the letters. Meanwhile, Commissioner Sica improperly tricked Di Pisa into leaving his fingerprints on a glass in order to compare them to the fingerprints on one of the letters. The results were inconclusive, Di Pisa was eventually exonerated, and the identity of the corvo never established. 

 

      In this tension-filled moment, Falcone continued his work as an associate to Giammanco, the Procuratore Capo, but his working conditions did not improve over those of his tenure in the Instructional Office under Meli. He had always been reticent to discuss in public his personal situation in the Palazzo dei Veleni, but he did confide in several friends, including the journalists Francesco La Licata and Liana Milella, entrusting to Milella an account, published after his death, of specific demoralizing events in his relationship with Giammanco. These frustrated his work and in 1991, he accepted a specially created investigative position in the Ministry of Justice in Rome (see Caponnetto 1992: 81-97; Falcone 1991; La Licata 1993: 121-33). 

 

 

 

The Murders of Falcone and Borsellino

 

      On January 31st, 1992, the Corte di Cassazione, the Supreme Court in Rome, upheld the vast majority of convictions from the maxi-trial. Given the mafia’s historical relationship to the regime of center and center-Left parties then led by the Christian Democrat, Giulio Andreotti, this outcome was unexpected. Many of the defendants in the trial had direct or indirect ties with Salvo Lima, the former Palermo mayor, then deputy in the European Parliament, and Andreotti's Christian Democratic point person in Sicily.  Everyone knew, moreover, that the Cassazione traditionally assigned mafia cases to the section headed by a judge with a reputation for leniency, Corrado Carnevale, who was also linked to Andreotti (Caselli et al 1995).  

 

      But 1992 was a time of shifting sands for "old regimes" all over Europe and Italy was no exception.  Already in the summer of 1991, dissident Christian Democrats, allied with former Communists and emergent Greens, had orchestrated a significant electoral reform through a national referendum, threatening all of the old political parties.  In December of the same year, Italy signed the Maastricht treaty, its leaders having to take seriously the stern warnings of Europe's central bankers and technocrats regarding government waste and organized crime.  In northern Italy, the mani pulite (‘clean hands’) anti-corruption investigations were about to explode.  Neither Andreotti nor the highest court in the land could risk the outcry that overturning the Palermo sentences would surely provoke and the maxi-trial appeal was assigned to a section of the court not headed by Carnevale. 

 

      In March, 1992, soon after the convictions were upheld, the mafia murdered Salvo Lima, certainly for his failure to ‘adjust’ the maxi-trial, but also presumably to send a message to Andreotti.  As the pentito Gaspare Mutolo has since revealed, “Lima was killed because he did not uphold, or couldn’t uphold, the commitments he had made in Palermo, The verdict of the Supreme Court was, like a dose of poison for the mafiosi, who felt like wounded animals.  That’s why they carried out the massacres’ (quoted in Jamieson 2000: 56).  (Ignazio Salvo, the mafia’s closest link to Lima, was killed, probably for the same reason, on September 8, 1992.)

 

      On May 23rd, Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three members of their police escort were massacred on the autostrada from the airport to Palermo, as their armored cars passed over a culvert where mafiosi had hidden 500 kilograms of explosives, packed into plastic drums and covered by a mattress. At first, neither the killers of Falcone nor their possible mandanti could be identified, and the usual clouds of dust, rumors and poisons thickened.  A remarkable anonymous letter theorizing a conspiracy between a faction of the mafia and certain leaders of the Christian Democratic Party was mailed to some 39 politicians, magistrates, and journalists in Palermo. The conspirators had masterminded several assassinations, the letter claimed, that of the judge being only one piece in a much larger, and still more sinister, puzzle. [3] Then, stunning the world, on July 19th, Falcone's close friend, colleague and successor, Paolo Borsellino, together with his police bodyguards, was killed by a car bomb explosion, in front of his mother's apartment house.

 

      In the short run, at least, the mafia’s terrorism backfired. Two weeks after the Falcone massacre, a ‘law decree’, effective immediately, then strengthened after Borsellino’s demise, enlarged the definition of prosecutable crimes and established new protections for the justice collaborators.  Further demonstrating the state’s new resolve, 7000 troops were sent to Sicily, given police powers, and deployed to keep watch over sensitive offices, residences, and arteries. The Parliamentary Antimafia Commission was reinvigorated, setting the stage for a series of new hearings and reports, including one on the mafia and Freemasonry.  At the same time, a new institution under the Ministry of the Interior, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia or DIA, received full powers and vastly increased personnel to coordinate the sectors of the police, Carabinieri, and Finance Guard that specialized in organized crime. 

 

      Investigations into the Falcone massacre began immediately and with unprecedented dispatch soon pointed to the leadership of the dominant Corleonesi mafia faction. Police attention focussed on a hillside villa overlooking the highway from which the lethal payload was detonated with a remote control device. There they found cigarette butts left on the ground by a chain-smoking killer; DNA analysis of them (carried out by the FBI laboratory in the United States) identified Giovanni Brusca as the culprit. 

 

      On the day of Falcone’s funeral, the Parliament rejected the candidacy of Andreotti for President of the Republic, electing, instead, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro who, although also a Christian Democrat, had a far more credible record of opposing crime and corruption.  Events of 1991 and early 1992 had already rattled Andreotti’s apparent invincibility. The mani-pulite investigations in Milan, launched on February 17, were quickly swirling toward Bettino Craxi, the Socialist Party leader with whom Andreotti had shared the governance of Italy for over a decade. Even more ominous was the March 12 assassination of Lima, an act read by virtually all commentators as retaliation for Lima’s – and by implication Andreotti’s – inability to ‘adjust’ the maxi-trial convictions, upheld by the Supreme Court.  In the national election of April 5, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, reeling from the Milan scandal and Limaís murder, had suffered losses. 

 

      Underlying this electoral result was the change in voting procedures that had been accomplished through the referendum.  A parallel reform in 1993 provided for the direct election of mayors.  This shift, capped by Andreotti’s defeat, spelled the end of the First Italian Republic, the national structure of power that had governed Italy from the end of World War II through the Cold War era. The murders of Falcone and Borsellino, many believe, helped push this old regime over the edge.  Although there is some debate about declaring the 1992 watershed the ‘birth of the Second Republic’ (Ginsborg 1998), there is no question that the mafia was left scrambling to reconstitute its political shield.

 

      Soon an avalanche of new pentiti surfaced, several from among the Corleone faction, and some providing coveted information enabling the capture of fugitives. Giammanco resigned as Procuratore Capo, to be replaced by a magistrate from Turin, Giancarlo Caselli, who, as a member of the CSM at the time of Caponetto’s retirement, had been a vociferous supporter of Falcone over Meli.  Prophetically, many think, Caselli’s tenure in Palermo, which ended in 1999, began just after mafia fugitive Salvatore Riina’s clamorous arrest in January 1993.

 

      Reacting ferociously to these events, in 1993 mafiosi bombed cultural and artistic targets in Rome and Northern Italy.  A bomb planted near the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, damaging both paintings and structure as well as other nearby architectural treasures and killing an entire family, raised immense public ire.  The strategy, it seems, was to force the state’s hand in a negotiated retreat from 41bis and other repressive measures. It was not these bombings, however, that re-opened the door for reining in the magistrates; on the contrary, the bombs elicited great public disgust.  Rather, the decision of the Palermo Procura to push its investigations to the Third Level, and specifically to prosecute the notable former minister Andreotti, as well as other political leaders, especially the current prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and some of his associates has again made the antimafia prosecutors objects of criticism and debate. 

 

      The state is never univocal. While some its elements work to sustain the rule of law, others are engaged in serious efforts to de-legitimate and subvert its agents. In the last analysis, Falcone and Borsellino were victims of the union of mafia-organized crime and corrupted institutions.  And they were not the only victims. As we now commemorate their loss, we should also strive to remember the other martyrs, peasant, union and political leaders, journalists, judges, and police officers who gave up their lives in the struggle for social justice, political transparency and the rule of law.

 

 

 

Endnotes

1 This essay is based on excerpts from Chapter Six of Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia and the Struggle for Palermo, Berkeley: U. of California Press, in press.

2  A modification of article 416 of the criminal code, hence known as 416bis, the Rognoni-LaTorre law defines ‘Associations of a mafia type’ as (to paraphrase) consisting of three or more persons who use powers of intimidation and the cover of extorted silence to commit crimes, gaining control of economic activities for unjust profits. To quote Jamieson, “the fusion of public-order concerns with economic controls and socio-criminological theory made the law unique in Italian legislative history.  Investigations were no longer concentrated on ‘the crimes of the Mafia’ but on ‘the Mafia as a form of criminality’” (2000: 28-29).

3 To our knowledge, investigators never uncovered the author or motivation of this bizarre letter.

 

 

 

References Cited

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Caselli, Giancarlo et al.  1995.  La Vera Storia D'Italia; Interrogatori, Testimonianze, Riscontri, Analisi.  Giancarlo Caselli e i suoi sostituti ricostruiscono gli ultimi vent'anni di storia italiana. Naples: Tullio Pironti Editore.

 

Duggan, Christopher.  1986.  Fascism and the Mafia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

 

Falcone, Giovanni.  1991.  Cose di Cosa Nostra. Milan: Rizzoli.

 

Jacquemet, Marco.  1996.  Credibility in Court: Communicative Practices in the Camorra Trials. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.

 

Jamieson, Alison.  2000.  The Antimafia: Italy's Fight Against Organized Crime. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

 

La Licata, Francesco.  1993.  Storia di Giovanni Falcone. Milan: Rizzoli.

 

Lupo, Salvatore.  1993.  Storia della Mafia; dalle Origini ai Giorni Nostri. Rome: Donzelli Editore.

 

Paoli, Letizia.  1997.  The Pledge to Secrecy: Culture, Structure and Action of Mafia Associations. Ph.D. Dissertation, European University Institute, Florence.

 

Pezzino, Paolo (editor).  1995.  Mafia: Industria della Violenza.  Scritti e documenti inediti sulla mafia dalle origini ai giorni nostri. Florence: La Nuova Italia.

 

Sciascia, Leonardo.  1960.  Il Giorno della Civetta. Milano: Einaudi.

 

__________________.   1966.  Al Ciascuno il Suo. Milano: Einaudi.

 

Stajano, Corrado (editor).  1986. Mafia: L'Atto d'Accusa dei Giudici di Palermo. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

 

Stille, Alexander. 1995. Excellent Cadavers: the Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic. New York: Vintage Books.

 

  © 2002 ECPR Standing Group Organised Crime