The murder of the famous judge on May 23, 1992 shocked Italy and marked a turning point in the fight against Cosa Nostra
It was May 8 or 9, 1992. Maria does not remember the exact day, but she does remember the words he told her when his brother, Judge Giovanni Falcone, went to visit him: «We must act quickly against the mafia because the democracy in our country is in danger”. On May 23, two weeks after that gloomy premonition, Falcone himself, a symbol of the fight against organized crime in Italy, was murdered in an attack by Sicilian Cosa Nostra, which also killed his wife, also a magistrate. , and three of her escort’s agents. “The first episode of the attacks on our democracy would be my brother’s massacre, followed shortly after by that of his partner, Judge Paolo Borsellino,” said María Falcone, who is today president of the foundation that bears her name. responsible for guarding his memory.
That action by which the mafiosi blew up part of the highway between Palermo and Punta Raisi airport caused an earthquake in Italian society and marked a turning point in the fight against the Cosa Nostra. Three decades later, several events recall Falcone, today in Italy, where he is considered a sort of “secular martyr” for his courage and ability to revolutionize the way organized crime, still the great national cancer, is being fought.
“With Falcone, Italia was able to defeat Cosa Nostra first and then put the other mafia in trouble. It marked a historic moment when justice defeated the mafia while the state enacted anti-mafia laws that are still among the best in the world today,” explains French journalist Marcelle Padovani, author with Falcone of the book “Things of Cosa Nostra.” , from. a reference work for which he conducted a series of interviews with the magistrate.
Padovani rejects the label of ‘saint’ or ‘hero’ for Falcone, considering him a “servant of the state, but not of an imaginary state that could be fantastic, but of the one that existed when he was alive. That was his extraordinary strength.” His ability to modernize the foundations of the fight against organized crime was confirmed by the reporter when she was invited to an act of the European Parliament in memory of Falcone: «The European Parliament itself praised his figure and set as an example that followed by all Member States the anti-mafia legislation that Italy implemented in those years».
These laws were largely the result of the reflections of this Palermo magistrate and of a reserved nature, who died at the age of 53. “He managed to build the world of the anti-mafia,” Padovani emphasizes. Falcone’s sister agrees that his big contribution was that “he invented a fight against the mafia from the ground up”, with “very careful” investigations following “dirty money” and leading to the appearance of Justice employees among the members. of the Cosa Nostra clans. The creation of the National Antimafia Directorate was also the fruit of his intuition, today still the most important organization in the fight against organized crime in Italy and from which he was unable to disembark because he was previously murdered.
Despite the shadows surrounding the attack that ended his life, even thicker in the case of Borsellino’s death 57 days later, Padovani doesn’t believe a dissenting part of the state was behind Falcone’s death. “I’m a bit baffled by the theories about alleged conspiracies. There was an extraordinary trial against Falcone’s killers. They arrested and convicted everyone,” he recalls. The last instigator of the murder was Salvatore ‘Totò’ Riina, ‘capo dei capi’ of Cosa Nostra, responsible for the bloodiest phase of the Sicilian mafia and who was to be arrested the following year. Riina died in 2017 in the special room for prisoners of a hospital in Parma after spending 24 years in ’41 bis’, the harsh prison regime envisioned for the heads of mafia clans, especially beloved by Falcone.
The impression that the murder of the judge left on Sicilian society can be felt three decades later on people like Dario Riccobono. He was a child when the crime took place, which hit him very close, as he lived with his family in Capaci, the town where the attack took place. “It was our 9/11. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t remember what they did on May 23, 1992. It shocked us all and made people protest in the streets, fed up with the violence,” explains Ricobbono, who is part of the Addiopizzo collective, a movement of rejection of the payment of the ‘pizzo’, the tax levied by the mobsters. “We all feel guilty that day and when Borsellino was murdered later. They were normal people. They were not heroes, but we were the cowards. After the carnage, the people understood which side to stand on and that they had to take sides.
Thus became a reality of one of Falcone’s ambitions, the creation of a popular rejection movement against organized crime because, as he said, “the judiciary alone cannot end the mafia.” The moment for another of his most famous quotes to come true is not yet on the horizon: «The Mafia is not invincible. It is a human event and, like all human events, it has a beginning and will have an end.
Source: La Verdad
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