On a Saturday evening in May 1992, Giovanni Falcone and his wife Francesca Morvillo drove towards Palermo, the well-known mafia hunter in government service at the wheel. Around 6:00 p.m., 500 kilograms of explosives explode under the road on the A29 near the town of Capaci. The support car is thrown into the air, Falcone’s car crashes into the bomb crater. The 53-year-old and his wife die, as do three bodyguards. They fell victim to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.
Anyone chasing the mafia is putting their lives in danger – then as now. Recently it became known that an attack on the public prosecutor Nicola Gratteri was to be carried out in Calabria. Anniversaries like that of the “Strage di Capaci”, the Capaci massacre of May 23, 1992, are sometimes special occasions for the mafia to show that they still exist.
Like Gratteri, Falcone was under constant personal protection. “Cosa Nostra does not forget,” said the mafia hunter, who was born in Palermo in 1939, in an interview just a few days before the attack. At the time, the lawyer promoted his idea of a “superprocura,” a super public prosecutor’s office so that the Mafia bosses couldn’t spread any further. At that time, he and his colleagues laid the foundations in the fight against the dreaded Cosa Nostra.
“Judge Falcone devised a new method of investigation, later known as ‘follow the money’,” says Lorena Di Galante, chief of the second precinct of the national anti-mafia investigative directorate (Dia). This made it possible to trace bank transfers by the mafia and to reconstruct the movement of illegally obtained money. Such investigations are now cornerstones of investigations, they revealed the interdependencies in society, on a political, economic and corporate level.
A few weeks after Capaci’s assassination attempt, the mafia also killed the lawyer Paolo Borsellino – a childhood friend of Falcone – with a car bomb in Palermo. The series of attacks tore Italy out of its indifference to organized crime. The judiciary later identified the masterminds, witnesses unpacked and broke the omertà, the law of silence within the mafia towards the authorities. Many ended up behind bars. So does the powerful mafia boss Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the “boss of bosses” from the small town of Corleone, whose name is known to many from the film “The Godfather”.
Financial police, carabinieri or the state police report weekly on arrests and confiscated goods worth millions. Di Galante does not reveal how many mafia criminals are estimated to be active in Italy, but does reveal the success of the investigation since 1992: more than 11,000 people were arrested in connection with the mafia and around 7.68 billion euros in goods were confiscated.
Several organizations divide the south: the Camorra in Campania, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, and various mafia clans in Puglia. Their offshoots are spread all over the country and sometimes all over the world.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, bloody mafia wars were still being fought, killing around 1,000 people, according to Anti-Mafia Directorate Prosecutor Salvatore Dolce. Today the clans prefer to operate “silently”. “The ‘Ndrangheta has been considered the most dangerous mafia for a number of years,” explains Dolce. It is also active in the rich northern regions such as Lombardy with the capital Milan, in Veneto, Liguria and Piedmont, as well as abroad – in Germany and Austria, Switzerland, Canada and even Australia, especially in retail and gastronomy . The ‘Ndrangheta have significant economic resources from the international drug trade, gambling, trafficking in petroleum products, as well as extortion and infiltration of public works contracts.
According to the Antimafia investigative directorate, Cosa Nostra changed its strategy in the 1990s and went into hiding. It has spread throughout the economy, for example in the field of renewable energies or in waste disposal in cities, explains Di Galante. The Camorra, on the other hand, functions like a holding company made up of powerful mafia clans that are woven into the social fabric.
May 23rd is an important day of remembrance and admonition for Italy. President Sergio Mattarella, born in Palermo, will comment on the attack. For him, the anniversary has a personal meaning: his brother Piersanti was murdered by the mafia in 1980 as the regional president of Sicily.
Source: Nachrichten
