This year, 2010, marks the 10th anniversary of the UNO Convention against transnational organized crime, called the Convention of Palermo, from the city in which it was signed and which made the fight against organized crime rise to the highest political level.
Among the key points, it certainly has the following: the necessity of identifying the concept of the organized criminal group; the necessity of creating suitable trial regulations to combat the complex criminal phenomenon that has a variety of illegal activities and a diffusion in various Countries; and lastly, the necessity of a strong and decisive national and international judicial collaboration.
When, in 1944, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Declaration of the Ministerial Conference of Naples and decided to consider, as a priority, the question of elaborating an international convention against organized crime, it recorded that this phenomenon no longer concerned only the domestic policy of the States, but was serious enough to endanger their own security: it was, therefore, an important issue in international politics that required an internationally concrete response.
It was not easy to reach this objective.
And, perhaps, it is not far from the truth to say that the alarming information that came from East Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, was determinant in pushing States – which, until then, were contrary to hypothesizing whether the participation in a criminal organization was punishable or not – to change opinion and, therefore, come closer to the tradition of the Latin Countries which are already familiar with the crime of criminal association, in various forms.
During the preparatory work of the Convention, which was held at the United Nations office in Vienna, and in which I participated as a member of the Italian Delegation, it was found that many principles, then incorporated in the Convention, were already in the Italian Legislation, and often inspired by Giovanni Falcone himself.
And it is, in fact, to the memory of Falcone and Borsellino and their work in this distinctive sector of the collaboration between Offices – which, in Italy and abroad, have the task of the investigations into organized crime – that I believe we should associate this qualitative leap.
The recent investigations of various Public Prosecutors who try to reveal all the hidden details of the massacres which end only with the loss of their own lives made me forcibly remember the moment the venture, theirs and ours, started and which I believe is worth recounting, for the first time, so that one can understand the enormous difference there was between the investigative instruments available then and those of today.
Also for colleagues who face serious and complex investigations in the national and international field, it is not easy to perceive what really was the state of the craft with which one faced the mafia phenomenon in those days and what and how much innovation has been made which, in its turn, has determined fundamental legislative innovations.
As Deputy Prosecutor of Palermo, I spent many years and experienced many vicissitudes with Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino – they were Magistrate Judges, a figure which has now disappeared with the new Code of Procedure.
From a strictly professional viewpoint, I worked almost exclusively with Falcone, from the first great trials against the Sicilian mafia and its international connections (1980) until I went to the Ministry of Justice; also with Paolo Borsellino, in certain phases of investigation on the so-called trial for the political homicides (Mattarella, Reina, La Torre) until he transferred to Marsala in 1986 and when he returned to Palermo until the day of the massacre. Beyond work, I enjoyed a friendship of great affection with Borsellino.
Remembering and reliving important human and professional experiences, which marked us deeply, the first thought that comes to mind cannot be other than their tragic end.
I was in Washington the day of the murders of Via D’Amelio because I was the Public Prosecutor in a trial that the Court of Palermo held in that city against exponents of the highest order of the Sicilian mafia and Colombian cartels over the arrival in Sicily of 600 kilos of cocaine.
At the ceremony commemorating Paolo, I remembered the famous phrase of President Kennedy: “Do not ask what America can do for you, but what you can do for America” and I thought how Borsellino had acted and how he had given his life demonstrating what he could do for his own Country.
A few months previously, in a terrible night of May 1992, I was alone with Paolo for some minutes in the mortuary before the body of Giovanni Falcone. We remained in a long and profound silence and I had the sensation that, in those moments, Paolo felt assailed by a responsibility even greater than he had experienced until then.
Kennedy’s phrase is well suited to both, who for their entire life gave testimony to how each one of us can have a profound effect on the activities we carry out, improving and innovating the instruments available, acting with tenacity, perhaps also stubbornness, to successfully reach objectives previously held unthinkable.
1)Tenacity and stubbornness are, perhaps, the right concepts to express in what way Falcone wanted to reach an objective which had been thought almost impossible until then: that of knowing beforehand and then fighting the criminal phenomenon of “Cosa Nostra.
I will try to fix the memories at the moment in which this new way of carrying out investigations began and for which Falcone was definitely a brilliant pioneer.
In May 1980, at the Office of the Public Prosecution of Palermo, three big mafia trials were being held which, for various circumstances, were entrusted to me by State Prosecutor Costa, and which, after the first procedural acts, were passed to the Office of the Investigating Judge and were assigned to Giovanni Falcone. And it was from this time that the work of “Judge Falcone” was destined to become known as “the Falcone Method”.
The former method of investigation was completely inverted; rather than be limited to the verification of the work carried out by the Police which, in the old code of procedure, drew up a report on the activities performed, Falcone desired to assume the investigations directly, personally conducting many operations and delegating others, but singularly and specifically and no longer in a general way. But above all, taking a unified vision of the mafia, never before considered.
The three trials to which I previously referred are almost the antecedent of the “maxi trials” which followed four years later, above all with the declarations of Buscetta; to these, others were added and together gave us an extraordinary quantity of information, much of which was to be the confirmation “ante litteram” to the successive declarations of the first persons who turned State’s evidence.
But it would not have been important if it had not been seen as part of a whole, different activities, but all ascribable to the oneness of the mafia. The first trial (against Spatola Rosario + 120 defendants) concerned a plurality of facts: relations between the Sicilian mafia and that which then seemed the American mafia. Numerous episodes of heroine traffic between the two groups, and the kidnapping of Sindona in New York and his reappearance.
The second trial (against Gerlando Alberti and others) had begun with the arrival in Palermo, notified by the French Police, of three chemists from Marseille, following which was the discovery of a heroine laboratory.
The third trial (against Mafara Francesco and others) had its origin with the arrest, at the Rome Fiumicino Airport of a Belgian carrying 8 kilos of heroine from New York to Palermo (and not vice versa!).
On first reading, the crimes seemed to have been committed by distinctly separate criminal groups although certainly mafia; no names were common to the three investigations and no elements directly connected them. Instead, they had one particularity in common: all were involved with the heroine traffic and links abroad, in the sense that the facts under investigation were verified in part in Palermo or, however, in Italy and, in part, abroad.
2) Falcone immediately applied his method, the first pillar of which was exactly the principle that he had always believed: the oneness of the mafia.
He was certainly the first to perceive that the mafia was a unitary body and that its various and structured criminal activities, even though carried out in different places and far away from Palermo, did not belong to autonomous groups, but were always ascribable to a single entity.
The practical consequence of this principle was, however, that all the investigations which demonstrated the existence of “Cosa Nostra” had to be centered in Palermo, which was for this entity its natural home.
At that time, this principle was not taken for granted, at all, and also many of us, with Paolo Borsellino himself, were not always in agreement, or at least, believed that there was not sufficient proof of this one unique entity and that, in any case, it was not possible to develop all the mafia investigations in Palermo.
Falcone strongly opposed the principle of the so-called spontaneous germination, as if a mafia group could rise spontaneously in Rome or Milan, independent of the ‘mother earth’ which was certainly Palermo.
On this and on other points, before and after the appearance of Buscetta as a State’s evidence figure, there were discussions and also contrasts between the colleagues who, over time, were called to follow other trials and to become part of that “pool” which constituted the beginning of a collective work in the investigations of mafia; but I believe I can say that from these discussions not only a strong bond was created, but above all, a new way of investigation, and new methodologies and practices were developed, often in the absence of regulations, they were “invented” to face previously unknown aspects of the mafia reality.
A strong bond developed also with those of the Investigative Police who worked with us and shared with commitment and enthusiasm the new challenge; the State Police and the Guardia di Finanza (the Corp that deals with customs, excises and tax crimes) were able to find the necessary resources to follow the various phases of the three trials simultaneously.
Already, the Investigative Police had supplied important elements to demonstrate the single entity of the mafia. Between the numerous defendants very many telephone calls were made, both in Palermo and between here and New York and several parcels sent to family or relatives residents in America were reported.
To try to understand the relationships between these criminals, I thought of listing each name, and little by little a sort of genealogical tree emerged, rather like those which appear in the history books on the Reigning Houses; it was in this way that a spectacular and surprising discovery was made.
Four families had tied their relationships with crossed marriages and with the ‘godfather’ bond (which, in Sicily is equivalent to a kinship relationship), so as to create a extremely solid power group on a strictly family basis; moreover, this group was divided; one operated in Palermo and the other in New York: the respective summit bosses were Salvatore Inzerillo and John Gambino. In those times, these two monopolized the heroine traffic and were the same subjects who organized the sham kidnapping of Sindona. In fact, it was afterwards discovered that he was the cousin of both and had been the guest of Spatola, in Palermo.
Also the American DEA were working to discover the relations of kinship among the defendants in Italy and America; we realized this one day when we visited the US Embassy in Rome, where an agent, using a large electronic billboard was working on the same names. We were told that it was the work of an analyst, who had been expressed called from Minnesota to realize the genealogical tree, which I had created on a sheet of paper – without any technological help!
In the trial, it was essential to demonstrate the existence of a constant traffic of heroine between Palermo and New York: this was possible, with the seizure in both Italy and in the USA of several lots of narcotics, with the collaboration of an infiltrator of the DEA within the Gambino Family and also with the parallel investigations conducted in the United States.
Even with all the many cases of drug traffic between Palermo and the USA which, in the meantime emerged from this or other investigations (I remember that the Alitalia direct flight was called the “mafia line”), notwithstanding, we did not know where this substance was coming from.
We obtained this knowledge from the two above mentioned subjects who, on the one side, enabled us to close the cycle of heroine traffic completely and on the other, reinforced the conviction that it was to be debited to the same criminal group.
In reality, the three trials proceeded in parallel and while Falcone had started to develop the investigations of the Spatola trial, I started directly to follow the first phases of the second trial which was just beginning at the Office of the Public Prosecution: the one which concerned the three French chemists sent to Palermo by the then flourishing “Marseille Clan”, and which tended to identify the contacts of the three foreigners, since the reason for their arrival was still unknown to us.
First of all, their hotel was individuated and the telephone call directed to them were intercepted; the three, with the help of the hotel manager (who paid with his life for his collaboration with the law) were constantly controlled inside the hotel, tailed and followed in their numerous movements in Palermo and places nearby. When an overall picture had been completed, it was decided to intervene and great was the surprise, mine and everyone’s, when the Police communicated that the first heroine laboratory had been found near Trabia.
At that time, we did not even know in what, exactly, a heroine laboratory consisted.
We found a small villa of a few rooms in which was morphine base, acids, stills and other material necessary for the processing. A large quantity of water is necessary to obtain heroine and a lot of electricity: we discovered that the water was drawn from a nearby well and the electricity was stolen from the public network.
I issued, as then the Public Prosecutor could do, an arrest warrant for the subjects we found, among whom were the three chemists and Gerlando Alberti. It was a sensational discovery.
The mafia was so sure of their control over the territory that they risked setting up heroin production laboratories in populated areas; afterwards, we found another two in the middle of the city.
In later stages of the investigation, it was ascertained that the heroine was produced at an extremely high degree of purity (almost 98%) and was targeted for export in the United States; instead, the drug that was consumed in Italy came from Oriental Countries and was of a much inferior quality.
In the third trial, with the arrest of Gillet at the Rome Airport, with 8 kilos of heroine from New York, three subjects entered the scene (two Belgians and a Swiss) who – not being Mafiosi, but only hired by the mafia to carry out acts for which the mafia did not have the know-how – once discovered, it was not difficult for them to reveal that they had been commissioned to find the morphine base in the Middle East, namely in Turkey and Lebanon (Valle della Bekaa) and bring it to Palermo; in some cases they had transported to America heroine that had been produced in Italy, in other cases they had brought back enormous quantities of dollars to Palermo – proceeds from the sale of the drug.
The three (Gillet, Barbč, Charlier) can be considered the first subjects who turned State’s evidence ante litteram and I still remember our almost incredulity in front of revelations, for those times, unexpected and which, certainly, opened sensational scenarios.
For me, that experience was fundamental, both in the preparatory and in the hearing stages.
During the interrogations of the defendants – all sentenced to severe penalties – another aspect of the Falcone method emerged: the absolute correctness in posing the questions and transcribing the answers (directly and by hand). Never, (not even in front of the subsequent well known persons who had turned state’s evidence) did Falcone ask whether Tom or Dick belonged to the mafia or had committed crimes or even simply if he was known to the defendant. The questions were aimed to uncover facts or responsibilities of persons of whom the defendant had already spoken; Falcone never tried to influence the person under interrogation. The relationship to which I had always assisted was absolutely professional although at times, marked with moments of personal attention as when, receiving the information of the homicide of Salvatore Inzerillo, we gave our condolences to the cousin in the subsequent interrogation.
It may be said, that in front of authors of massacres or, however, of brutal crimes, we had no emotions: we felt the State that administers justice.
3) The second pillar of the ”Falcone method” was that relative to the banking and assets investigations. Certainly, in the past, these investigations were done (e.g. those following the Di Cristina homicide), but never in such an extensive and painstaking way, sifting each single cheque issued or paid by the defendants and searching the reason for payment of each one. In this, Giovanni had an almost maniacal perseverance and scrupulosity: thanks to this, it was discovered that an entire agency of the CRAM (Rural and Artisan Bank of Monreale), with head office at Bocca di Falco, served the interests of the Inzerillo Family with Calabrian and Neapolitan individuals implicated in cigarette smuggling (in which also Inzerillo was involved): connections were also individuated with institutions and societies which, on the one side, collected money of illegal provenance and on the other, produced further wealth.
Particularly interesting was the fact that part of the proceeds of the sale of the heroine returned to Palermo and finished in the construction enterprise of Rosario Spatola and in the society of Leonardo Greco at Bagheria.
Also this discovery was the antecedent of the next much larger one which came about some years later during the operation called the “Pizza connection” always between Palermo and the United States, then merged into the maxi-trial.
It was of huge importance. As the only Public Prosecutor of the trial, I followed all the preliminary stages of the investigation, which had numerous defendants, among who were Gaetano Badalamenti and Tommaso Buscette (at that time residents respectively in Spain and Brazil, while most of them were in the United States) and on the 16th April, 1984, I issued arrest warrants, which were effected in the various Countries involved.
The investigation proved that the heroine produced in Palermo was sold in the pizza parlors in many cities of the United States and the proceeds, through numerous passages in various banks of different Countries, served to give both a start to a new cycle of traffic and to invest in real estate operations.
After his arrest in Brazil, Tommaso Buscetta began his collaboration with Giovanni Falcone.
That operation allowed us to know the legislation of the United States on the protection of witnesses (the Amendolito case) and to make contacts with the Authorities of other Countries through which that money had transited without meeting particular difficulty and where the banking secrecy was in force.
Therefore, the banking investigation ran parallel with what I would call the traditional investigation, was fundamental in ascertaining responsibilities and, once again, showed us how the various and different activities always answered to a single criminal organization.
With the valuable help of all the Police Forces, in the absence of a database, a simple, but certainly effective system was realized, i.e. the gathering and cataloguing of every type of information, of every element of an economic-financial nature, of every connection between facts and persons for each single defendant.
From those years on, the S.C.O. of the State Police, guided by functionaries such as De Gennaro, Manganelli and Pansa, developed an excellent work in Italy and abroad, which gave definitive substance to the intuitions of Falcone; they “invented” the modalities for the management of the first persons turned State’s evidence – when no administrative legislation yet existed to provide for their safety and also how to provide for the necessary small expenses, (I remember, here, the cases of Francesco Marino Mannoia and of Antonino Calderone, arrested in Marseilles), -- and intensified relations with the foreign Police.
4) The third pillar of the Method was that of the collaboration between the National and International Judiciary, which was very little developed, at that time.
Falcone understood, immediately, that the mafia had, by then, extended its tentacles also in other Italian zones and even abroad, so that also there, it was necessary to search for evidence for our trials: and the Method required the personal sacrifice to go out and find this evidence.
The first contacts (to which many others were added) were established with the Judicial Authorities of Milan, in the ambit of the Spatola trial because the largest quantity of drugs (40 kilos) had been seized in that City and transited via Milan to avoid airport controls of Palermo and Rome.
The Judicial Authorities of Palermo, at that time, did not enjoy a very good reputation. The failure of many trials, due to an evident inadequacy of the investigations, gave rise to much diffidence in other Offices; just imagine then what our Milan colleagues thought when went to request of them that that load of heroin be transmitted to Palermo, as it came under their jurisdiction!
I still remember the incident (and I do not want to) in which the then Investigating Judge, Judge Pizzi, was determined to refuse our request.
But Falcone convinced him and since then a climate of reciprocal trust has been established with Milan, which allowed us to begin a new and different season of fruitful collaboration as never before.
Another case of complete collaboration in the same trial was that relative to the remembered Sindona affair, which in Milan was particularly followed by colleagues of the Office of the Public Prosecution, Colombo and Turone: from the intersecting of the findings made by the two judicial offices, it was possible to completely reconstruct the path of Sindona from America to Italy and his return; some of his meetings and even, with the statements made to Falcone by Miceli Crimi, his compliant injury carried out by the latter. Analogous activity was carried out first with the United States, then with Canada and subsequently with many European and non-European Countries.
5) We went to New York, for the first time, during the course of the Spatola trial in December, 1980.
Many times afterwards, we remembered that first trip with Falcone: we went to the Office of the Federal Attorney, Rudolph Giuliani and we were two Mr. Nobodies who asked collaboration from the United States!
There were no treaties between our Countries, there were no significant previous occasions, we had nothing but the formal authorization for the mission and there had been no prior contacts between the Police forces of the two Countries.
The first impact with that Office and with the DEA was, for us, full of surprises. Certainly, we were welcomed with politeness and certainly, we were studied: basically, we asked for information and probatory documents regarding prominent persons of the Italo-American mafia, but what struck us (remembering it today makes one smile) was the discovery of the computer!
I had not yet seen it directly although I knew its potentiality. When we seated ourselves to commence discussions, we opened our notebooks and agendas in which we had listed the names of the defendants, and beside each name, the principal facts which we had to verify; the DEA agents opened their computers in which were listed the same names with the connection and references already compiled.
They explained to us that the computer network was articulated by County, State and Federation and that it was an indispensable instrument to combat an organization structured like the mafia!
We were certainly in full agreement, but could not be sure that also Italy would soon be so equipped. However, the result was extremely positive.
Almost instinctively, a strong personal relationship grew between the collaborators of Giuliani (above all, Louis Free and Richard Martin) and first, with the Agents of the DEA and then with those of the FBI who, over the years, allowed our Italian colleagues to move with the United States with the same promptness and concreteness as our American counterparts.
On many occasions we developed a really innovative collaboration, as in the remembered Pizza Connection operation.
Italian Police Agents were sent to certain American cities and formally included in the operative team of that Police force, so that they could understand and translate, contextually, the conversations heard in the telephonic interceptions, which were exchanged in Sicilian dialect and which gave us the proof of the sale of heroin in the pizza parlors.
We were still at the introduction of the now common investigative team (which was provided for by the Convention of Palermo and of the European one of judicial assistance in criminal material of 2000), but the quantum leap, the look towards the future, which was the basis of the new investigative method, was evident.
Good relations with the United States facilitated the contacts with other Countries, especially those of Common Law, and among these that with Canada was particularly useful although a mafia fringe was installed, and where, beginning from 1984, assisted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, we went several times, both with Falcone and with Leonardo Guarnotta, for the first investigations against Vito Ciancimino.
At that point, it was important to begin to know and study the differences between the two Systems.
The first request to the United States for the extradition of John Gambino and others did not have (and could not have had) any outcome; in fact, it was not enough, as we thought, to attach the arrest warrant which synthetically contained the elements of proof against the defendants, because this contrasted with the principle of the “probable cause”, necessary for the US Federal Judge, but of which we had no knowledge.
This new awareness induced us to study the fundamental principles of American Law and, further ahead, to ask the Department of Justice of the United States to send us their representative on a stable basis, attached to the US Roman Embassy, to help the Italian magistrates in their contacts with the American investigators. The first to come to Italy with this appointment (the beginning of the liaison magistrates) was, in fact, Dick Martin, who used the experience accrued with us in the first trials.
But personal relationships could not be sufficient; norms and treaties were necessary, since the US legislation had no knowledge of the crime of criminal association and this resulted in making reciprocal collaboration difficult.
Therefore, we studied the possibility of preparing new Government Agreements, both in material of judicial assistance and of extradition, and we came to these Agreements in 1984.
6) We made very many missions abroad with Giovanni Falcone and we always returned with a great amount of data, information and judicial acts.
All in all, an absolutely unique experience was gleaned from the United States; not only various rogatory letters were initiated, but investigations were developed, which I call parallel and specular, in the sense that in Palermo and in New York, often one investigated the same fact: we, on the departure of the heroine and they, on the arrival of the same load. In another circumstance in the United States, the departure of 600 kilos of cocaine and its arrival at Palermo (operation “Big John” from the name of the vessel that transported the narcotics, and the trial of which we were holding in America, as I have already mentioned, happened in the very days of the Borsellino murder).
Therefore, on the desks of the magistrates of the two Countries, there were the same acts and the same evidence; the judicial results, however, were not at all the same due to the different Systems.
From a separate viewpoint, the contact with the United States gave Falcone many new ideas which, over time, he tried to introduce into our System. First and foremost, the collective work: the first idea of the “anti-mafia pool” originated in this way at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution and Preliminary Investigations Office of Palermo, which met with more ample needs: to dilute the risk, to enable the investigations to be followed by magistrates who would specialize in this work, the non-dispersal of the large quantity of information which must be gathered; and much further on, the same idea of the DDA and the DNA, since he was firmly convinced of the necessity of concentrating the mafia investigations in few judicial offices, to form specialized magistrates (and also Police forces) and to create a judicial body of national coordination.
Another idea gathered from the American experience was that relative to the computerization of the judicial acts. The enormous mass of paper work involved in the maxi-trials made it immediately clear that it would be impossible to manage it without the help of the new technologies: so it was that an operation, never before attempted, was put into motion, and the Court was thus able to read, immediately, any page of that trial.
Falcone also pushed, on certain occasions (influenced by the American experience) not to refuse, prejudicially, the idea of a liaison between the Office of the Public Prosecutor and the Ministry of Justice: but the Italian reality was very different from that of the United States and this idea provoked serious contrasts for him.
The work in common between Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, together with the Office of the Public Prosecution and the Preliminary Investigations Office, particularly materialized in the preliminary investigations of the first maxi trial (terminated in 1985), in which the “Falcone Method” was applied in its most advanced and thorough way.
That arduous effort testified definitively to – on the declarations of the first subjects turned State’s evidence and on the investigations carried out – the unitary structure of Cosa Nostra, and the traffic, crimes and massacres of which is was, and continues to be, guilty.
The outcome of that trial, extremely heavy for the defendants, can be seen as the first part of the path of two parabolas: one ascending (that of the effectiveness of the struggle against the mafia and other forms of organized crime), the other, descending (that of Cosa Nostra, which replied by inaugurating the season of the massacres, imposing a very high sacrifice of bloodshed on the Country, but certainly not in vain).
The new objectives
From the sacrifice of Falcone and Borsellino, as from a vital spring, many streams have flowed which, still today, carry lymph to the ground where all the anti-mafia initiatives are being cultivated:
- first and foremost: a civil society more careful to refuse any Mafioso connection, (which has been seen in Sicily, however, not yet in other regions such as Calabria and Campania), but evident in the most recent declarations of the national and Sicilian Confindustria;
- a more effective legislation to fight the various forms of organized crime (reference to the regulations 41 bis – to ensure a maximum security penitentiary regime for the Mafioso bosses – and regulations for a more real and concrete aggression against the mafia assets, the results of which have been seen also recently, in the operations in Sicily, Calabria and Campania);
- a more careful analysis of what is perhaps, the most dangerous criminal phenomenon (the ‘ndrangheta), which is revealing itself to be always closer to the traditional structure of Cosa Nostra, also in the conquest of national and international spaces;
- the creation of new International Organizations and new Government Agreements which, in the very spirit of the Falcone efforts, tend to realize a more effective judicial collaboration. We can refer to the Eurojust, to the Liaison Magistrates for contacts with other Countries, to the International activities of the DNA which, on the one side – collaborates with the Ministry of Justice and, often, also with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and with International Bodies (UNO, ECSO, EU) to which it furnishes the support of its own experience and, on the other – has signed Memoranda of Understanding with the Offices of the Public Prosecution of the Countries most sensitive to our matters, to create a synergy and a peer culture between the investigators who face the transnational organized crime.
Results, therefore, have been achieved, but the ‘construction yard’ that Falcone and Borsellino were so horribly forced to abandon, must remain open because the construction of civil life is still fraught with both national and international obstacles.
There has been no decrease in the national ambit in the penetrability of organized crime into the business world, the investment ambit and, often, the public administration, which so much penalizes the Southern Regions (and not only those).
In the International ambit many Countries still have difficulty – due to their culture, traditions and even qualms about their image – to acknowledge the Convention of Palermo, to open their investigative structures not only to formal judicial collaboration, but to a deeper collaboration which can neutralize the banking secret and the other regulations that do not allow the individuation and possibility of striking at the illegally accumulated wealth.
But Falcone and Borsellino knew very well that the mafia could not be crushed only by trials; it is fought, first and foremost, through the culture.
One day, Francesco Marino Mannoia, in reply to my question as to what initiative the State should take to defeat the mafia, said: “gaol all the Mafioso and throw the key away, because, you know, we always start again from scratch. And work at the roots – in the schools – because we have a culture that you could not begin to imagine”.
Therefore, culture against culture.
In celebrating the 150th year of the Unification of Italy, it is less out-of-place than could be superficially imagined, to invite all of us to reflect upon that suggestion of one of the first persons to turn State’s evidence against the mafia. |
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