I would like first of all to express some views on the primary difficulties that we encounter while investigating the Mafia. The first difficulty we encounter is connected with the very nature of the Mafia. I will speak above all about Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, the Mafia of Palermo, the impenetrable secret structure as far as it concerns its essential components: "the heart and the brain".
Another investigative difficulty stems from the consensus, often not voluntary, in favour of the Mafia by certain sectors of the population, of the society. This represents an obstacle to collaborating with State authorities, the so called "wall of silence". This difficulty to collaborate with the government stems from the fear of retaliation, but sometimes also from adhesion, perhaps unwilling, but conditioned by a certain "culture" which the Mafia is permeated of and which the Mafia surrounds itself with.
Another investigative difficulty is a certain cultural resistence, by local or national offices to take in the highly subversive character of the Mafia, this sometimes derives from underestimation, from lateness, from unreadiness, and sometimes even from collusion, or contiguity between parts of the legal system and the world of illegality.
These difficulties can, at least in part, explain why for many years the answer to the Cosa Nostra problem has been insufficient. The answer became appropriate and meaningful when Falcone and Borsellino were able to adopt within the group which formed around them, a new way of investigating, a new investigative culture, and a new way of organising work.
Falcone and Borsellino's secret, at that time, represented a real and true revolution for investigations on Cosa Nostra and on the Mafia: their secret was to try, first of all, to understand what Cosa Nostra really was, its structure, how it was organised, which were its rules and its articulation, and then to insert within this global picture, the single criminal events, the crimes, the homicides, the extortions, the episodes of drug-trafficking, the interferences into public contracts and so on, that is the single crimes which before then had been dealt with separately, independently on the others and without worrying about reconstructing the organisational picture of Cosa Nostra as a structure encompassing these crimes.
Applying this philosophy, this new investigative culture and using for the first time on Cosa Nostra the instrument of banking investigations, highly innovative at the time, and being able, with their extraordinary intelligence and professionality, to take advantage of the first dis-associations from Cosa Nostra, of the first collaborators with justice: "the supergrasses", Falcone and Borsellino demonstrated what Falcone had repeatedly written and maintained in many of his public interventions: Cosa Nostra is a part of human history and as such has a beginning, a development, and it can have an end. If we wish to see the end we must equip ourselves with new investigative instruments.
Falcone and Borsellino gave demonstration of this through their deeds. They were able to prepare, build, and conduct a trial of such dimensions that in Italy it became known as the "maxi-trial". Many years of crimes which had gone unpunished and an organisation which involved hundreds and hundreds of individuals were "brought to court", and with the utmost respect for trial rules and regulations, bosses, middle management and followers of Cosa Nostra were condemned.
The importance of Falcone's and Borsellino's work can still be appreciated because they outlined the fundamental characteristics of Cosa Nostra which today are still substantially valid. From Falcone's and Borsellino's work, and from the results achieved by Police, Carabinieri, and the Services in their daily job of delving into, investigating, developing and up-dating initial data, we can see that Cosa Nostra is not only a criminal association. It is a much more complex entity; it is above all, and we have already mentioned it, a culture, a way of thinking, deeply embedded and widespread and therefore it is able to create a consensus around itself. It has assumed the shape of an organisation which has government-like characteristics, a compact organisation with heads at the top levels, with its territory thoroughly controlled, its own population, its own hierarchic government, a highly "compartmentalised" structure which makes penetrating investigations very difficult, a military structure, a not-so-small army of trained killers ready to intervene either for murder or mass-murder. Above all, Cosa Nostra has created an economic system based on illegal businesses, endowed with enormous capital, with flexible operative models which are able to adapt themselves to many different situations. Even more significant is the ability to take constant care of, develop, and perfect a sort of "foreign policy", foreign relationships, that is building, searching for and consolidating points of contacts with the civil society and with parts of the institutions.
One of Cosa Nostra's characteristics, which is the reason for its strength, its expansion, its persistence in time notwithstanding the blows received, is this net of alliances, of connivances sometimes unfortunately even of collusions which it has been able to establish with some segments of the political, economic, and financial worlds. In essence, Cosa Nostra from the time of Falcone's and Borsellino's investigations has constantly appeared - and the following Police and Carabinieri investigations have confirmed it - as a machine able to operate in any sector at any level, in any country, wherever there is a way of accumulating wealth and power.
Therefore, Cosa Nostra shows itself as a winning criminal model, able to expand, even outside Sicily's borders, even outside our national borders. It is not an exaggeration, it merely responds to the reality of Cosa Nostra and the Mafia to conclude by saying that the power, the expansion, Cosa Nostra's ability to infiltrate the economic and political world make it a danger which knows no boundaries, a danger which concerns every democracy in the world. This is the result of Falcone's and Borsellino's intuitions, professionality, ability to organise their own work and other people's work .
Unfortunately, this is a slice of history of our country which we don't like to talk about because it is negative. However, exactly at the time in which Falcone and Borsellino were able to demonstrate that, with adequate organisation, the Mafia could be contained if not beaten, obstacles of a very different nature came up during their work, with the result that instead of strengthening, supporting and pushing forward towards further results with the necessary support, their work was buried. The pool of investigative magistrates of Palermo was demolished. Falcone had to find the space to continue with his fight against the Mafia not in Palermo but in Rome, while Borsellino, only a few months before his death, was able to find a job which corresponded to his quality and his professional experience.
The consequence of this withdrawal from the anti-Mafia fight, of this weakening of Falcone and Borsellino's pool, was a going back to an insufficient judiciary and investigative response to the Mafia, a slowing down of the action and a lack of significant results.
However, looking only at the results obtained, forcing ourselves to isolate the effects from the causes, after the blood bath of Capaci and Via D'Amelio, after Falcone's and Borsellino's deaths and the deaths of the men and women who were with them, we are seeing a marked change in trends, there is a moral revolt of the population, and there is a regaining of pride and efficiency on behalf of the various structures institutionally called - Police, Carabinieri, the Judiciary - to contrast the threat of Cosa Nostra.
A legislation, which for the first time was aimed specifically at this phenomenon, its reality and concreteness was approved. A legislation which has as its objective the encouragment of "supergrasses", the collaborations that Falcone and Borsellino had asked for during their lives and hadn't been able to obtain. After their deaths, special provisions established for prison conditions for Mafia bosses, restrictions which had never existed in the past and which undermined the power Mafia bosses exerted also from their prison cells.
After Capaci and Via D'Amelio, the will to get organised and to pursue all together certain objectives led to the arrests of many dangerous fugitives, some had been at large for a long time (Riina, Santapaola, Pulvirenti, the Ganci father and son, the Graviano brothers, and many others whom we cannot list here). Some extremely serious crimes were reconstructed, together with the killings of Capaci and Via D'Amelio, as far as the material reconstruction is concerned and the planning by the bosses of Cosa Nostra. The first openings appeared ( that is initial investigations which have to be verified, checked, and confirmed by the judging authorities), regarding the relationships between the Mafia and politics, the Mafia and investigations, the Mafia and the Masonry which have represented an indisputable element of strength, for Cosa Nostra during these years.
These are the main steps of the investigative and judiciary response to the Cosa Nostra phenomenon up to today. Today we find ourselves with some extra problems because three years after the mass-killings, there is within public opinion a strong tendency to go back to normality, and this is understandable and physiological because one cannot live in a continuos state of high nervous tension.
There are at times controversies, sometimes used as a pretext, many times unjustified just like during Falcone and Borsellino's time, on the legitimacy or on the functionality of legislative instruments like the one on the handling of the collaborators of justice "supergrasses", or on the conditions for the detention of Mafia bosses.This happens because once again people forget that we are dealing with instruments that our nation has given itself, on the basis of reality, of the specificity, and of needs which concretely arose. Viceversa, in front of controversies, of reasoning starting from abstract points of view, without reference to the concrete needs of the fight against the Cosa Nostra phenomenon, we find today that we are facing more difficulties than some years ago.

However, the potential for a response which can contain the phenomenon, and the possibilities of reduction and elimination of the phenomenon remain unaltered. The daily work by the police and Carabinieri with the help of the Services is something which I have the duty to remind you of, not only from a formal point of view but really as an acknowledgement which I owe as a representative of an office which has found himself operating in a certain region in Italy.
This job is continuous, relentless, sometimes the results are immediate , sometimes are more difficult to see because when operating against Cosa Nostra, they can be seen only after months, perhaps years of careful, tiring, hidden and unknown investigations.
Two more words to conclude. Which are the problems that today, as always, we face in the investigative context, in order to organise our response effectively, so as to achieve positive results? Above all, the first absolutely firm and unavoidable starting datum is the fact that Cosa Nostra's main strategic resource is its organisation. Cosa Nostra is like a living body. If it is injured in any part, it can cauterise it immediately and it can rigenerate its tissue. This means that the gaps which we open in all the levels of the organisation are systematically filled. Then, it is important and decisive to arrest Cosa Nostra's bosses after Riina, we must catch Provenzano, Aglieri, Brusca, and Bagarella. But, it must also be clear that this is not enough. It is decisive to fix as a basic objective of the anti-Mafia strategy, the disarticulation of the organisation, of the organisation in its entirety, beyond capturing the individuals even if they are super-criminals of Cosa Nostra. Even now, the most important factor of a strategy to disarticulate the organisation is the contribution of "supergrasses", and the restricted prison conditions for the detained Mafiosi.
We should and we could speak about the "supergrasses" for hours: I would just like to say that their contribution is, even today, extremely important. By developing inputs by the "supergrasses", comparing them, checking the statements (which is absolutely necessary) the Police and the Carabinieri have obtained, are still obtaining, and will surely continue to obtain, important results.
In order for this not to remain as an empty statement, a statement of principle, but in order for my words to have a real meaning which derives from the experience of my daily work, I would like to recount a recent episode which relates to the killing of Capaci, where Falcone lost his life.
The foreign guests perhaps do not know that the investigations on a magistrate who was a victim of a crime cannot, according to our law, be conducted by the magistrates of the place where the event took place, but rather by magistrates from another city. This is why the investigations on Falcone's murder, which took place in Palermo, are being conducted by the Judiciary office of Caltanissetta. The magistrates investigating on Falcone's murder have done a great job, an extraordinary job, a very positive one: investigations, counter-investigations, and still other investigations, banking investigations, investigations on the flow of telephone conversations with an unimaginable vastness.
We can say that at a certain point they knew everything about the blood bath in Capaci, how it had really been organised and even how the men had been placed, so that the attack could be carried out. They knew everything, they knew it thanks to their excellent and intelligent work, thanks to the collaboration between Police and Carabinieri which was also excellent and intelligent. The only thing missing was the spark, the "quid pluris" to give life to this extremely important material that the Caltanissetta colleagues had gathered with their "traditional" investigations.
As chance would have it, it was up to me as magistrate of the Prosecuting Attorney's Office of Palermo to receive the first confession of one of those responsible for the slaughter of Capaci, and I remember it because the moment in which - it was late at night - this collaborator of justice who declared for the first time to be responsible for the murders of Capaci, and explained the fundamental lines essential for the commando's action which brought about the blood bath, he gave me some particulars that even I, who know about the work in Caltanissetta, did not know it analytically.
Frankly, when the details were told me, I considered them incredible, because I could not believe that for this terrible slaughter that unsettled our entire country and which worried the whole world, a children's scooter was used to make the explosive pass under the tunnel that crossed the road from Punta Raisi to Palermo.
When I was told this, I confess that I was puzzled, and when at six in the morning, I gave the report to the Caltanissetta colleagues, and they told me right away that an instrument of that kind had been used, on the one hand I felt reassured, on the other, once again I understood, and this is what I have tried to demonstrate through this concrete example, that even the most sophisticated investigations, even "by the book" investigations are incomplete if they do not have a contribution which comes from inside the organisations which, being secret, can only be known by living in and working with them. What the "supergrasses" give us is significant and important because it allows us to work from within, to dig, and to know when we have done a good job, when we have been lucky, when we have found elements confirming that we have caused the weakening of the structure.
This is true not only for the Italian legislation but I believe it must be true for all legislations. We should promote co-ordination among legislations of the nations interested in the phenomenon in relation to the crime of Mafia-type conspiracy, and to the measures for encouraging collaborations. These are irreplaceable because they come from within the organisation structures, they therefore reveal elements that only who has lived within this organisation knows.
In conclusion I wish to stress two aspects, leave them to you as food for thought, which I believe are strategically crucial in the fight against organised crime: the need for a harmonisation in legislations and the need for international cooperation.