Giovanni Falcone: the Italian judge who brought the mafia to justice
One hot Sicilian night in July 2017 somebody attacked a
statue in a piazza in the poor San Filippo Neri neighbourhood of Palermo. They
meant business too. It took a determined effort to knock the head from the
solid marble representation of Giovanni Falcone. Not content with mere
decapitation, they picked up the head and slammed it against the gates of a
school nearby, one that happened to bear Falcone’s name. Even 25 years after
his death the judge who did more than anyone to bring hundreds of Sicilian
mafiosi to justice was still upsetting certain locals.
“Insulting the memory of Falcone is a miserable exhibition
of cowardice,” said Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian prime minister. Nobody had
seen or heard a thing, of course.
They’d called it the Maxiprocesso, the Maxi Trial, the
largest ever held anywhere in the world. It had begun in February 1986 and ran
for nearly two years but effectively didn’t conclude until January 1992, when
the appeals process was exhausted and the last of the convictions confirmed.
It was a trial like no other, taking place in a
specially-constructed, missile-proof concrete bunker adjacent to the Uccardione
prison in Palermo, and one at which 475 people were indicted for crimes
perpetrated by the Sicilian mafia. The indictments ran to more than 8,000
pages.
The defendants ranged from lowly muscle to some of the
highest-ranking figures in the ruthless network of crime syndicates. Sentences
would be handed down totalling nearly 2,700 years, not including the whole-life
terms meted out to 19 of the organisation’s most notorious members. It was a
major blow to organised crime in the region and beyond, one whose fallout is
still tangible enough for statues to be attacked a quarter of a century later.
The leading prosecution figure at the trial was Giovanni
Falcone, a man who knew Sicily, knew Palermo and knew many of the people he was
prosecuting.
“I grew up in the same neighbourhoods,” he said. “I
understand how a Sicilian mind works.”
While Falcone was one of a number of judges instrumental in
bringing to justice hundreds of people whose murderous activities had riddled
Sicily with crime and fear for generations, it was his success in turning a
major Mafia figure into an informant that paved the way for a mass imposition
of justice.
Tommaso Buscetta was a big player in the drug smuggling
network that ran between Italy, Brazil and the United States, but when several
members of his family were killed in Mafiosi disputes he decided to turn
pentito, informant, on condition he spoke only to Falcone. For six weeks in 1984
Buscetta was coaxed gently by the judge into revealing more about the internal
workings of the Cosa Nostra than anyone before. Crucially, Falcone secured for
the first time confirmation that the Sicilian mafia was effectively one
organisation with a defined hierarchy, not a loose federation of family groups
answerable only to themselves. Falcone’s conversations with Buscetta led
directly to the arrest and charge of more than 350 people, including Michele
Greco, the head of the Commissione provincial, the Sicilian Mafia Commission,
set up to arbitrate in disputes between rival mafia groups and authorise the
murders of political figures, judges and journalists.
“Before [Buscetta] we had only a superficial idea of the
Mafia phenomenon,” Falcone said. “Through him we began to see inside the
organisation. He gave us a lot of information about the structure, the
recruitment techniques and the functions of Cosa Nostra. Above all he gave us a
broad, global, wide-ranging vision of the phenomenon with an essential
interpretative key, a language, a code.”
For the first time the grip of the Cosa Nostra on Sicilian
society was being loosened finger by finger, coordinated by a man who had grown
up alongside many of them. Even at school Giovanni Falcone was known for his
strong sense of right and wrong and willingness to stand up and be counted for
it. He would take on boys much older than he was if he saw a child being
bullied or mistreated, some of his adversaries being members of known Mafia families.
Proudly Sicilian, after considering joining the navy he
stayed on the island to study law at the University of Palermo and was
appointed as a judge in 1964, specialising in bankruptcy. At the beginning of
the 1980s he moved into penal law, joining the Ufficio istruzione, the
investigative branch of the Palermo prosecutor’s office. Even if he’d been
under any illusions about the difference between the bankruptcy cases on which
he’d made his name and his new job, the assassination of the judge lined up to
head the department, Cesare Terranova, three months before Falcone arrived
would have cleared up any doubts.
Falcone immediately threw himself into investigating the
global heroin smuggling networks run out of Sicily. Using methods honed in his
previous role Falcone followed the money, unpicking intricate, shadowy strings
of financial transactions in Italy and beyond that led to 74 convictions and
prompted a major disruption of the world’s drug trade.
It was dangerous work, and Falcone knew it. Gaetano Costa,
the judge who signed the arrest warrants in the heroin case, was shot dead in
the street shortly afterwards. In the spring of 1982 Pio La Torre, the man who
made mafia conspiracy a criminal offence, died in a hail of bullets at the
wheel of his car in a Palermo side street. The same year the Italian government
sent Carlo Alberto della Chiesa, a general in the Carabinieri, to Sicily to
bring the mafia under control and within weeks of arriving he and his wife were
murdered on their way to a restaurant.
Falcone became used to a life of heavy security and it was a
price he was prepared to pay. The windows in his home were piled with sandbags,
he travelled everywhere in bullet-proof vehicles and in 1986 when he married
the magistrate Francesca Morvillo it was in a secret ceremony at a heavily
guarded location. Three years later, when he was investigating a series of
Swiss bank accounts linked to mafia activity, a bomb was found in the grounds
of a villa Falcone had rented on the northern coast of Sicily.
Despite his successes, for all his selfless work and
determination to stay on the island he loved, Falcone became increasingly
disillusioned. Not so much with the danger to his life but with the petty
political parochialism that riddled the island’s bureaucracy. He was passed
over for the role of Sicily’s chief prosecutor despite being the obvious
candidate and the man given the job made it clear he didn’t believe the mafia
was a single organism, as had been established at the Maxi Trial. There were attempts
to sideline Falcone, handing him cases of domestic abuse and low-level criminal
activity, until in the spring of 1991 he accepted a job as director general of
internal affairs at the Ministry of Justice in Rome.
Reluctant as his departure from Sicily was, in the capital
he set about a major restructure of the judicial processes relating to mafia
activity, creating a national body to fight organised crime above a network of
regional organisations. His new job also qualified him to ensure the conviction
and sentences handed down at the Maxi Trial would be upheld in the face of
corruption or the notoriously labyrinthine Italian bureaucracy.
For all his success in Rome the call of Sicily remained
strong and he would return as often as possible. On May 23, 1992, Falcone and
his wife flew into Palermo on a private plane. They set out for their home in
an armoured cavalcade and as they approached the turning for Capaci a bomb
placed in a drain culvert beneath the road was detonated by remote control.
Falcone, Francesca and three police officers were killed in an explosion so
powerful it was picked up by earthquake monitors on the mainland.
A few weeks after Falcone’s murder his old schoolfriend and
fellow crusading prosecutor Paolo Borsellino was also assassinated, the two
deaths leading to a huge public outcry and an unprecedented loss of faith in
politicians. Political figures were openly abused at the funerals, even by
police officers. Chastened, the authorities instigated a heavy crackdown on
mafia operations that led among other successes to the arrest and conviction of
kingpin Salvatore Riina, the man who had ordered the Capaci bombing.
A few months before he was killed Falcone had given a
lengthy interview to a French journalist. “I opened an account with the Mafia,”
he said. “One that can only close with my death.”
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