The Judge and the Darkness

The assassination of Judge Giovanni Falcone more than three decades ago laid bare Italy’s long war with the Mafia and the cost of defying it.

Capaci, Sicily, the site of the A29 bombing that killed him in 1992.

Giovanni Falcone

At precisely 5.56 pm on May 23, 1992, thirteen drums of TNT and Semtex placed in a culvert on the A29 – the autostrada leading from Palermo Airport to Palermo, Sicily – and near to the small town of Capaci were detonated. The explosion was so massive that it registered 50 miles away at the Geophysical Observatory in Agrigento on Sicily’s southern coast. The explosion engulfed a three-car convoy heading toward Palermo. Three police officers in the first car died instantly. Two of the occupants of the second car, anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone and his wife Francesca, survived only long enough to reach hospital. It is said that Totò Riina, head of the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, toasted Falcone’s death with champagne. Falcone’s last words, spoken to a fireman before being placed into an ambulance, were, ‘If I survive, this time I will make them pay…’

Astonishingly, it was not until the 1970s, a hundred years or so since Italy’s inception in 1861, that people in Italy began to really understand what the Mafia was – after a hundred years of cover-ups, dismissals of evidence, and wilful forgetfulness. It was not even known then that the Sicilian Mafia referred to itself as the Cosa Nostra. It took the long decade of violence from 1979 until 1992 for Italy’s Supreme Court to convince itself that the Sicilian Mafia was not just a hodgepodge of local thugs and gangsters, but was indeed a criminal organisation – a secret society. This put an end to perhaps the Sicilian Mafia’s most long-lasting crime: the claim that it did not even exist.

Giovanni Falcone was born in Palermo on May 20, 1939. Moments after his birth a white dove flew into the apartment and stayed until it was fed – a strange event which lingered long in the memory of the family. His parents were strict, instilling in him not only the importance of hard work but that of bravery and patriotism too. His mother expected him to lead a ‘heroic life.’ Growing up he was well aware of, and sickened by, the violence of the Sicilian Mafia, seeing it for the social disease it was. He was also aware of the institutional culture that ignored its very existence. Wanting to study at the Naval Academy, his father put him down for law school instead, fearing his son’s independent spirit would not do well in the Navy. Falcone became a magistrate in 1964. After choosing to specialise in criminal law, he became a prosecutor in Trapani. It was there, at the age of 28, that Falcone received his first death threat from the Mafia. He ignored it.

Judicial War

After working for the Bankruptcy Court, Falcone was recruited by the anti-Mafia team at the Prosecution Office in Palermo. The skills he had learned in chasing money trails would come in very handy. But he had joined the team at a very dangerous time. By the early 1980s, Totò Riina of the Corleonisi Mafia clan had eliminated all his rivals and taken control of the Sicilian Mafia. The old, low-profile Mafia was to be no more. Both brutal and cunning, to further his aims Riina decided to take on the Italian state. Judge Cesare Terranova, who was meant to head the Prosecution Office, was murdered in 1979. Rocco Chinnici, who actually got the job and who recruited Falcone, would be murdered in 1983. Afraid for his safety, Falcone’s sister Maria asked, ‘Why?’ Falcone replied, ‘Because you only live once.’

It was not just Mafia violence that Italy had been afflicted with. During the 1970s, the ‘Years of Lead’, Italy had had to contend with both left-wing and right-wing terrorism. And it was a law enacted in 1980 to combat this terrorism, awarding reduced sentences to those willing to inform on fellow terrorists, that Falcone would use to such devastating effect against the Mafia. A formidable interrogator, the testimony that Falcone received from Tommaso Buscetta, the first Mafia boss to turn informant, led to Falcone first major success. This was the ‘Maxi Trial’ (1986-87) of 475 alleged mafiosi, 360 of whom were convicted of serious crimes. The Mafia would never forgive Falcone. Indeed, it was after the Italian Supreme Court upheld these convictions in 1992 that Totò Riina ordered Falcone’s assassination.

There was a crucial difference, however, between terrorism and Mafia crime: terrorism lay outside of the state, whereas the Mafia operated both outside and inside. Falcone received ‘push back’ for his success not only from corrupt politicians but also from fellow members of the Prosecution Office. Even the Catholic Church, in the figure of Cardinal Pappalardo, who had spoken out against Mafia violence in the past, expressed concern about the Maxi Trial – the Church not yet then ready to condemn the Mafia wholesale and make a stand for the rule of law.

Tired of the difficult political situation in Palermo, in 1991 Falcone accepted a post in the Ministry of Justice in Rome.

Here, he would become even more effective against the Mafia, helping to restructure the Italian prosecution system, creating district offices to take the fight to the Mafia and a national office to focus on organised crime. But the Mafia were well aware that he returned home to Palermo every week. Falcone was just 53 years old when the bomb exploded on the A29 and took his life.

Unfinished Battle

Two months later, Falcone’s best friend, Paolo Borsellino, also an anti-Mafia judge, who had just spoken out against alleged Mafia links to rich Italian businessmen such as Silvio Burlesconi, was also assassinated. The public in Sicily had had enough. The outcry was such that the authorities were forced to take action, the era of secret dialogues with the Mafia, the compromises, the collusion, over forever. Or was it?

Totò Riina was arrested in 1993, dying in prison in 2017. Giovanni Brusca ‘The Executioner’, who had detonated the bomb that had killed Falcone, was arrested in 1996 and turned informer. But Judge Paolo Borsellino’s red diary containing his most secret notes went missing, and, oddly, Totò Riina’s villa was left unguarded after his arrest, with compromising documents going missing. Information has also since come to light regarding secret negotiations between the Mafia and politicians during the 1990s to reduce the violence, the Mafia choosing to return to its historical low profile after the madness of the Totò Riina years.

Statues of Giovanni Falcone were erected all over Italy, and politicians made very fine speeches in Sicily and elsewhere to his memory. But the Mafia is very much still active in Italy and internationally. The work of his brave judicial successors continues. Of the three Italian Mafias – the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Camorra of Naples, and the ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria – it is the ‘Ndrangheta who were least affected by the crackdown of the 1990s, and who remain the most mysterious and powerful organised crime group in the world.

Seven months before his death, Falcone wrote, ‘There is no doubt we will have to fight the Mafia for a long time to come. For a long time but not for eternity: because the Mafia is a human phenomenon, and like all such human phenomena it has a beginning, an evolution, and will also therefore have an end.’

(The author is a novelist and retired investigator with an abiding passion for crime fiction and Chinese history. He is the creator of the Magistrate Zhu mysteries.)