English articles
Papa Francesco sui beni confiscati: "Il modello italiano è un buon esempio"
6 settembre 2024
Since September 2023, long hearings have been held at Palazzo San Macuto, the seat of the parliamentary anti-mafia committee, on questions that have seemed unresolved for over thirty years. Why was Paolo Borsellino killed? Why was he one of the prosecutors who supported the prosecution in the maxi-trial against Cosa Nostra, which has recently reached its final sentence? Because he had discovered the negotiation between the State and the Mafia to put an end to murders and massacres? Or because he wanted to deepen an investigation into the intertwining of business between large national companies and Cosa Nostra, the one based on the Mafia-contracts dossier? Chairwoman Chiara Colosimo (Fratelli d'Italia) accepted the request of Lucia, Fiammetta and Manfredi Borsellino, the magistrate's children, to investigate some aspects that they feel have not been adequately dealt with, but have been debated for decades.
Little is still known about the reasons behind the Via D'Amelio massacre on 19 July 1992, which resulted in the death of Palermo's deputy prosecutor and the agents of his escort: Emanuela Loi, Walter Eddie Cosina, Agostino Catalano, Claudio Traina and Vincenzo Li Muli. The request of Borsellino's sons to the Anti-Mafia Commission came after some judicial steps:
the final judgement of the Borsellino quater trial, which in November 2021 ascertained the deception made in the investigations after the massacre and the falsity of the revelations of the fake turncoat Vincenzo Scarantino;
the 'Depistaggio' trial against three police officers who 'instructed' the fake turncoat, which concluded at first instance with the acquittal of one defendant and the acquittal due to the statute of limitations of the other two. This trial was followed by another against four policemen accused of perjury during testimony. On 11 July 2024, the lawyers of Paolo Borsellino's sons and that of his brother Salvatore asked the gup of Caltanissetta to involve the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of the Interior as civilly liable;
the final outcome of the trial on the alleged State-Mafia negotiations, with the acquittal of the officers of the Special Operations Group (Ros) of the Carabinieri, General Mario Mori and Colonel Giuseppe De Donno, accused of 'threatening a political body of the State'.
It is precisely the two former officers of the carabinieri who, at the end of their judicial affair, relaunched (through books, interviews and conferences) the version according to which Borsellino was killed to stop the investigation into the Mafia-contracts dossier, an enquiry they conducted.
In addition to these episodes, there are other recently published documents, such as the minutes of the hearings at the Higher Council of the Magistracy of the Palermo magistrates after the massacre, or the two reports of the anti-mafia commission of the Sicilian Regional Assembly chaired by Claudio Fava, with many hearings of the protagonists of that period.
The coming to power of Fratelli d'Italia should also be considered. Already in 2019, during the 18th legislature, and at the beginning of the current one, FdI MPs had filed bills to establish a 'parliamentary commission of enquiry into the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for themassacre of Via D'Amelio on 19 July 1992', the first time signed by Giorgia Meloni who, she often recalls, decided to join the Front of Youth (a youth formation of the MSI first and An afterwards) precisely in reaction to the Mafia attack.
But in addition to this search for truth, for the right wing it is an opportunity to defend the Ros officers and attack those prosecutors, such as Nino Di Matteo and Roberto Scarpinato (now an M5s senator), who in the past have 'dared' to link the massacres to Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell'Utri (the statements of Forza Italia senator Maurizio Gasparri, for example, are illustrative, and he does not mince his words).
"We are here to re-propose these demands for the full knowledge of the truth about the Via D'Amelio massacre," said Lucia Borsellino during the first hearing, "a not indifferent burden, due to the commitment that circumstances like this require from an emotional point of view". The Borsellino family claims that the investigations carried out did not take into account, in part or at all, 'acts, documents and testimonial evidence' useful for understanding the context in which the magistrate worked and his 'profound state of prostration and isolation'.
One of the most important points raised is 'the institutional darkness surrounding the affair of the removal of the red agenda', which has damaged the investigation 'because it would have been an incontrovertible source of information'. This is the 'first piece of the deception'. Lucia Borsellino also denounced 'the silence and non-remembrance of many men of the institutions' and many other shortcomings. The behaviour of the then Questore of Palermo, Arnaldo La Barbera, and the lack of coordination between the Palermo and Caltanissetta public prosecutors' offices, for example on the handling of the turncoat Vincenzo Scarantino (who later turned out to be a 'puppet' fed by the police, to whom many judges gave credit), a factor that would have allowed the depistaggio to be discovered earlier. Then there is the failure to hear Palermo Prosecutor Pietro Giammanco as a person informed of the facts, or the failure to acquire the records of incoming calls on Borsellino's mobile phone.
If the red diary is missing, on which the investigators are still working (new searches of La Barbera's family members were carried out this autumn), Lucia Borsellino has made available to the commission the brown diary, which was given to the family with her father's bag: 'We have been in possession of it for thirty years without ever having known whether this diary has ever had any attention from the point of view of the investigation (...). I have asked my brother to provide this committee with scanned copies of the telephone book that I will hand over to you'. Will anything be understood from those numbers? 'It will be my father who will make it clear who were the people he trusted and those he did not trust'.
Mafia, the story of Francesca Morvillo, the judge killed in 1992 with Giovanni Falcone
'Until 2015, for reasons that were also intuitable, the family kept away from these papers for a very simple reason. We no longer live, the elaboration of mourning is impossible,' said during one of the hearings lawyer Fabio Trizzino, legal counsel of Paolo Borsellino's sons and husband of Lucia Borsellino, providing the parliamentarians with a mass of information, names, references. The lawyer wanted to provide a different version from the one related to the State-Mafia negotiation, according to which Borsellino had discovered the interlocutions between the Ros and the Mafia through Vito Ciancimino, with a series of requests from the bosses to the State, such as the loosening of anti-mafia regulations such as the hard prison.
There were two main arguments that Trizzino brought to the attention of the Anti-Mafia and public opinion: Borsellino wanted to investigate the business network between large Italian companies, Cosa Nostra and politicians, politicians who, however, would have enjoyed some protection from Giammanco, who would have pushed to file the investigation. The head of the Palermo public prosecutor's office would therefore have obstructed Borsellino, isolating him.
"We must try to understand why the man called his office 'a nest of vipers'," the lawyer said, recalling a definition by Borsellino of the prosecutor's office in which he worked. Borsellino had also confided to his wife that if he died, 'those who will have wanted my death will be my colleagues and others'. For this reason, Trizzino insists, 'we have to go and look inside the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office to see if conduct was put in place then that in some way favoured that process of isolation, delegitimisation, and designation as a target'.
Giammanco," Trizzino recalled, "had obstructed Borsellino who, having returned to Palermo as assistant prosecutor on 1 March after a few years at the head of the Marsala public prosecutor's office, was to deal with investigations concerning the provinces of Trapani and Agrigento, rather than the capital area, and had not been delegated to interrogate the turncoat Gaspare Mutolo, a Mafioso who had begun to collaborate and wanted to confide only in him. Borsellino,' stressed the sons' lawyer, 'suffered humiliation because he had to ask his subordinates to intercede with his superior to work on the Mafia-contracts investigation and interrogate Mutolo.
In addition, Borsellino is said to have obtained negative information about his boss: 'Most likely, he learned such terrible news about prosecutor Giammanco that it led him to interrupt the flow of communications,' said Trizzino. What news, it is not known, but it could concern his closeness to the political world involved in the investigation.
The fact is that, after the attack, Giammanco was pushed towards resignation by his 'subordinates' (with a collection of signatures promoted by the then deputy prosecutor Scarpinato). However, the public prosecutor's office in Caltanissetta, competent to investigate the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, never questioned Giammanco as a person informed about the facts during the investigation on Via D'Amelio. So can we hold Giammanco directly responsible for the massacre against Borsellino? 'I have not indicated Giammanco as the instigator,' Trizzino specified in his second hearing.
'The judgments that have become final (Borsellino ter, Borsellino quater in particular) have always emphasised Paolo Borsellino's interest in the investigation called Mafia-contracts,' is a passage from Trizzino's hearing. He refers to an investigation by the Ros of the Carabinieri, which was prompted by Giovanni Falcone in 1989 on the sharing of public contracts and bribes between politicians and Cosa Nostra.
Trizzino referred to an investigation report of 16 February 1991 (in reality, an annotation, less complete) on which a disagreement allegedly arose between the Carabinieri and the prosecutors, with the latter wanting to file the investigation strand on politicians and entrepreneurs and the former opposed. "This report in my opinion, in its imperfection, but adequately developed, was much more than a 'bribe' (in the sense of a simple episode of corruption, ed). It would have targeted the heart of the system,' he said. The system, as was ascertained in the trials of the following years, was called a 'table': the mafia sat at the table with large national companies, such as Rizzani De Eccher or the Ferruzzi Group, the latter being in business with a company belonging to Cosa Nostra's Buscemi family.
That report had led to the first arrests on 9 July 1991, including that of Angelo Siino, a mafioso and businessman, Totò Riina's man and Cosa Nostra's 'minister of public works', and the area chief of Rizzani De Eccher, the surveyor Giuseppe Li Pera. The arrests did not concern the politicians, who would instead have been involved in a strand of the investigation that in 1992 (the Mani Pulite investigation was underway in Milan) the public prosecutor's office wanted to file, is Trizzino's thesis. Borsellino did not want to file those proceedings, the lawyer recalled, adding that on 25 June the prosecutor secretly met with Ros officers Mori and De Donno in the 'Carini' barracks, 'outside the public prosecutor's office, because he must have discovered terrible things about his boss', so much so that - according to the testimony of Marshal Carmelo Canale reported by Trizzino - he wanted to have him arrested.
Borsellino therefore wanted to undermine an established system of power. 'You cannot kill Borsellino and hope that the State will not react,' Trizzino added. 'So there must have been something so important that Riina went above the interests of the organisation and had to stop the magistrates at the suggestion of a third party, those magistrates who could endanger the already dying party system. The lawyer did not hazard a guess as to who these 'third parties' were, but recalled that in addition to Falcone and Borsellino in the crosshairs was Antonio Di Pietro, deputy public prosecutor in Milan in charge of the Mani pulite investigation. Both he and Borsellino were aware that their work would reach the politicians.
On 13 July 1992, the public prosecutor signed the request to archive the file in which names such as the Buscemi brothers and the surveyor Giuseppe Li Pera appeared, accused of mafia association. The latter man, who was arrested in July 1991, was not, however, questioned by the Palermo prosecutors, another element on which Trizzino raised doubts, but on which - as other magistrates heard by the Anti-Mafia revealed - there are different versions.
Roberto Scarpinato, now an M5s senator, was the first to intervene with a summary of the arrests, trials, convictions and authorisations to proceed requested by the public prosecutor's office from parliament against Sicilian DC MPs for investigations into tenders, all of which took place from 1992 onwards, to show that the archiving of the Mafia-tender investigation actually concerns a small part of a broader investigation that was not interrupted on 13 July 1992.
Trizzino instead accused Scarpinato of not remembering correctly. The MEPs Paolo Pittalis (FdI) and the Leghist Gianluca Cantalamessa seized the opportunity to accuse the former prosecutor of an alleged conflict of interest, with the former even raising questions about the 'appropriateness of remaining on the commission'.
The Dem Giuseppe Provenzano and others asked about the involvement of Gladio, a clandestine structure that linked secret services and the extreme right in an anti-communist key, and the Nuclei armati rivoluzionari, a neo-fascist formation, areas on which Falcone had discovered something. According to Trizzino, Falcone would have ascertained that the track was unsupported. "On Gladio, I believe that Falcone is blunt. At a certain point, he says: 'I have investigated, I have made the investigations and I exclude that Gladio could be involved in the political crimes carried out in Palermo'", is the reflection that Trizzino attributes to Falcone.
He added. "When they kill Falcone, Borsellino says to Alberto Di Pisa: 'This is a massacre to stabilise, not to destabilise' (...) It's not about black subversion, Gladio or Freemasonry, but the party system. (...) Because they still think that using massacres one can ... as they did in the days ... but it is not Stefano Delle Chiaie(right wing terrorist, ed), the Freemasonry, I don't know.... Those tracks have been crossed.If there is news, report it, make your investigations. We are proposing another reinterpretation that has been totally neglected'.
During the third hearing, Trizzino let himself go into a long outburst: 'In recent years, only the Trattativa trial has been talked about, when we in Caltanissetta were uncovering the most serious deception in Italian judicial history, now considered prodromal and preparatory to the assassination of Borsellino and his guardian angels, and in the newspapers there was not a line, not one, and they were sanctified...? And on those who were fighting another, much more decisive battle in Caltanissetta there was absolute silence. That silence that continues. And some journalists call me a depistator. No, we have suffered the deception and today we have helped to uncover it'. He was referring, for example, to the lies of Massimo Ciancimino, the son of former DC mayor Vito Ciancimino, who was very close to Cosa Nostra. Trizzino did not mince words in saying that 'it is the moment of redde rationem', of the reckoning.
Listened to on 18 October and then on 6 November, Paolo's brother, Salvatore Borsellino, first expressed his solidarity with Scarpinato and Nino Di Matteo (never mentioned in the hearings, ed.) 'for having sought truth and justice with all their strength over these long years'. "The magistrates towards whom the finger should be pointed are Giovanni Tinebra (former prosecutor of Caltanissetta, who died in 2017, ed), who should have been called to answer for having endorsed blatant deception during two trials, and Pietro Giammanco," he said.
According to his lawyer Fabio Repici, the Mafia-contracts track can be defined 'as a sort of Palestinian track on via D'Amelio'. The reference is to the Bologna station massacre of 2 August 1980 and to that investigative hypothesis that wanted to charge the responsibility for the attack to alleged Palestinian terrorists rather than to the extreme right (the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari) with the contribution of the deviated Freemasonry, Licio Gelli's P2. "For some time now, around the Via D'Amelio massacre in particular, but also around other crimes in which Cosa Nostra or other criminal organisations have participated in a powerful way, there has been a very dangerous phenomenon halfway between denialism and revisionism".
On Trizzino's account of the Mafia-contracts investigation, the hearings of three witnesses of the time, Antonio Di Pietro, Luigi Patronaggio and Gioacchino Natoli, seem to re-dimension some issues.
Listened to on two occasions, the former 'Mani pulite' prosecutor and then politician retraced the story of his contacts with Falcone and Borsellino and his investigations, which led him from Milan to scrutinise even the corrupt-mafia system in Sicily. He recalled his meetings at the headquarters of the Ministry of Justice: 'When I went to the ministry to speak with Dr Falcone, I also met Dr Borsellino a few times. With them he discussed the statements made by the investigated entrepreneurs: 'Everyone (the entrepreneurs, ed.) would say to me: 'I admit everything up to Rome, but from Rome on down I no longer say anything'. And I asked myself: is it possible that from Rome downwards there were no illegalities in the contracts? Not only Falcone was aware of this, but also and above all Borsellino'. For this reason, at the Falcone funeral, the two prosecutors said to each other, 'We must act quickly'.
However, after the Via D'Amelio massacre, Di Pietro was left without an interlocutor in Palermo until Gian Carlo Caselli arrived at the Sicilian Public Prosecutor's Office in 1993. Thanks to him and Francesco Saverio Borrelli, head of the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office, a collaboration was born. According to Di Pietro, in Palermo his colleagues 'had already investigated, were already investigating the same characters, so they had obviously got there regardless of us'. An agreement stipulated that Di Pietro would continue his investigations and, once he discovered alleged crimes committed in Sicily, he would forward the acts. Di Pietro also downplayed what Trizzino said about Li Pera. He recalled when, contacted by De Donno, he received an invitation to interrogate the surveyor locked up in Rebibbia as part of a Palermo investigation. The man had useful information and was unable to talk to the Sicilian prosecutors. "They do not listen to me," he tells the Milanese magistrate. Di Pietro interrogates the surveyor, who does not, however, declare anything shocking: "There were much bigger statements, there was the Enimont trial. I mean, Li Pera's questions were little'.
Di Pietro also posed a fundamental question: 'Is it possible that all this could have generated the will to persuade someone to incite those who already wanted to kill Falcone and Borsellino? And - if so - was this impulse transmitted by the system of corrupt politics or corrupt companies? And by whom, in particular?". To this picture, Di Pietro added a piece: the dossier against him carried out by the secret services on behalf of Bettino Craxi, a socialist politician and former Prime Minister involved in the bribe system. So who could have had an interest in taking out Borsellino? Di Pietro did not venture a hypothesis, but he did dwell on Raul Gardini (head of the Ferruzzi Group) and his interests in Sicily, emphasising how a good part of the Enimont maxi-bribe (a company of the Ferruzzi Group) was destined for the Andreottian current of the Christian Democrats: "Five billion of the Enimont bribe had gone to the Honourable Salvo Lima (murdered by Cosa Nostra on 12 March 1992, ed.) and Lima was Giulio Andreotti's contact person in Sicily". However, he could not investigate further either because Gardini committed suicide before the interrogation or because the Ior, the Vatican bank, never provided the information on the transfers.
A convention against transnational crime
The Mafia-contracts relationship is a 'very complex affair', Luigi Patronaggio defined it. The current Attorney General in Cagliari recalled how Borsellino, in excellent relations with the Carabinieri whose 'expectations he had understood', 'wanted to know a little more about the entrepreneurs and the role of the politicians' during the meeting of 14 July, the day after the investigation was closed. Did Borsellino express dissent for that choice? To a question from Salvatore Sallemi (FdI), Patronaggio replied: 'If you want to tell me that Borsellino tried to stop the filing, I say no, absolutely not. If you ask me if Borsellino asked for more time to see him again, I cannot exclude it'.
At the Antimafia, he specified that that report, 'in its version of 20 February 1991 (...) is actually a record', with many interceptions on which, however, there were 'problems of usability' because 'these interceptions had great difficulty in being read and interpreted, in placing them in the right investigative dimension'. This diatribe between the Arma and the prosecution was evident and 'very painful'. 'I must with equal intellectual honesty say that the prosecutor at the time, Giammanco (...) was not up to the task of that dramatic period that Sicily and Italy were experiencing,' he added. 'Giammanco's was in any case a prosecutor's office managed in a top-down manner, in a bureaucratic manner. There were also suspicions about certain political contiguities between Giammanco and the then dominant political apparatuses in Sicily. Of this I believe the Ros was aware'.
Patronaggio considered it untrue that the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office was motionless on the mafia and contracting front: he recalled the arrests of February 1992, among which was that of Vito Buscemi, brother of Antonino of the Palermo Boccadifalco mafia family, "a long thread that led to the control of 'Calcestruzzi' in Sicily, to connections with Ravenna's Calcestruzzi, with the Ferruzzi group". So that investigation was not dead and buried with the 13 July filing. On the contrary, a front had already been opened on Sirap, the Sicilian Region's company for the management of large contracts, 'where there was heavy cohabitation between regional politics and Cosa Nostra'.
Then, with the arrival of Caselli in 1993, a new working group arose: 'The public prosecutor's office, under the leadership of Gian Carlo Caselli, decidedly changed its register and it is also true that even the investigations of the old public prosecutor's office, before this Mafia-contracts relationship, were not totally at a standstill'. A procedure was created in which the material already collected and then the declarations of pentiti such as Mutolo, Baldassarre Di Maggio and Salvatore Cancemi were brought together. Not those of the entrepreneurs: 'Entrepreneurs from the north, when they came to the south, did not want to talk about the Mafia'. On Li Pera, Patronaggio offered a different version from that of Trizzino: 'He had refused to cooperate' because the Carabinieri, whose confidant Li Pera was, did not trust the Palermo prosecutors.
In his reconstruction, Trizzino also dwelled on the sending to Palermo of documents from the Massa Carrara public prosecutor's office, which, engaged in investigations on the management of marble quarries, had discovered intertwining between companies owned by Antonino Buscemi, a Mafia entrepreneur, and those of the Ferruzzi group. Trizzino accused some Palermo magistrates of covering up fundamental evidence.
One of them, former public prosecutor Gioacchino Natoli, wanted to respond to the 'very serious insinuations and accusations', including that of having had wiretaps from Massa destroyed. But they did not exist, had been ordered by the Sicilian prosecutors, did not provide evidence and are still kept in the archives.Natoli gave a direct and different testimony on the archiving and also pointed out Trizzino's 'crushing of knowledge': 'All the valuable knowledge on the Mafia-contracts system that they had exclusively from Siino's fundamental collaboration in July 1997 and after the declarations of Giovanni Brusca (a mafioso) in 1998/99 should have been known and valorised by the prosecutors Lo Forte and Scarpinato in advance of the story, that is, at the time of the request for archiving filed on 13 July 1992'. On 1 February, Natoli bitterly stated: 'Everything I would have expected at the beginning of my career except to be gratified by the mere hypothesis, the mere suspicion of having contributed, in whole or in part, to the murder of a close friend. In July 2024, the Caltanissetta public prosecutor's office investigated Natoli for aiding and abetting.
The commission continues with the hearings. Three decades later, with many witnesses now missing, it will be complex to arrive at a historical truth, due to Borsellino's sons.
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