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21 marzo, Luigi Ciotti: "Liberiamo l'Italia da mafie e disuguaglianze"
17 gennaio 2025
Excellent Cosa Nostra killers Nino Madonia and Giuseppe Lucchese - already convicted for many other important murders and still in prison - are under investigation by the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office as the material executors of the murder of the President of the Region of Sicily Piersanti Mattarella, which took place on 6 January 1980 beneath his house in Via Libertà in Palermo. The news was published by La Repubblica on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the assassination of the man who was considered both the political heir of Aldo Moro, national secretary of the Christian Democrats who was kidnapped and killed two years earlier by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), and the man who wanted to clean up politics and the DC in Sicily. The registration 'was not communicated with a deed, the investigation remains secret,' Madonia's defender, Giorgio Vianello Accorretti, explained to lavialibera.
The news of the investigation into the two Cosa Nostra men has an important aspect because it reopens a question that arose in the 1980s and emerged several times: which track to follow to solve the murder of Piersanti Mattarella? Two investigative hypotheses have been debated: that of a political crime wanted by the Mafia leadership against a politician who wanted to put an end to their business, or that of a political crime carried out by men of the extreme right in cahoots with the Palermo criminal organisation. The first led, in the late 1990s, to the convictions of the instigators: important names such as Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano and others. The second, on the other hand, was a hypothesis identified by Giovanni Falcone in the 1980s, considered to be an alternative or complementary to the mafia trail, and repeatedly revived and corroborated by information and readings from other important Italian trials, such as the one on the Bologna station massacre of 2 August 1980. These readings are then joined by broader political analyses, linked to Mattarella's openness to the Italian Communist Party (as Moro wanted to do) opposed by a part of the State apparatus, those linked to the deviated P2 Masonic lodge, and by the United States.
"The time now seems ripe for a thorough reconstruction of one of the most dramatic phases of our country's history," said PD deputies Anthony Emanuele Barbagallo and Chiara Braga, who in 2023 proposed setting up a parliamentary commission of enquiry into the Mattarella murder and the season of mafia terrorism from 1970 to 1993.
Mafia, the story of Francesca Morvillo, the judge killed in 1992 with Giovanni Falcone
On 6 January 1980, Piersanti Mattarella was leaving the house with his wife Irma Chiazzese, son Bernardo Mattarella and mother-in-law to go to mass, when a young man in a blue jacket, barefaced, approached the driver's side and fired. The killer then ran to a Fiat 127 (stolen the night before), got another gun, and fired more shots. Who was in that command?
According to the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office, there was Nino Madonia, a name that had already emerged in the past in the reconstructions provided by some turncoats. However, he had never yet been officially entered in the register of suspects. The man is the son of Francesco Madonia, boss of Resuttana, the area of Palermo where the assassination took place. Madonia is currently 72 years old, is held under 41-bis (confirmed a year ago by the Court of Cassation) and was 28 at the time of the assassination. According to the investigators' reconstruction, he would have been the shooter. The driver would have been Lucchese, known as Lucchiseddu, 67 years old. He was 22 at the time. It is possible that other people were also involved.
Madonia has obtained heavy sentences over the years for the murder of Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Emanuela Setti Carraro and agent Domenico Russo, for that of Judge Rocco Chinnici, Commissioner Ninni Cassarà and agent Roberto Antiochia, for the assassination of the communist deputy Pio La Torre and his collaborator Rosario Di Salvo, for the Pizzolungo massacre in Trapani (in which Barbara Rizzo and her sons Giuseppe and Salvatore Asta died) and for the failed assassination attempt on Giovanni Falcone at Addaura. A - non-exhaustive - frightening CV. More recently (at first instance and on appeal) he was held responsible for the murder of police officer Nino Agostino and his wife Ida Castelluccio.
Madonia was also in contact with men from the secret services, such as Giovanni Aiello, known as 'faccia di mostro' (monster face), and especially Bruno Contrada, former head of Palermo's mobile squad and later a senior secret service official, who was convicted of conspiracy to commit mafia-related crimes, a conviction that was later overturned after the European Court of Human Rights sentence. That between Madonia and the secret services was a relationship that began - so the magistrates claim on the basis of statements by pentiti witnesses - after a number of bomb attacks carried out, including against public buildings, over the Christmas period of 1970, a few weeks after the failed Borghese coup. 'Mafia strategy of tension', the Palermo public prosecutor's office called it. According to the turncoat Francesco Di Carlo, close to Riina, they were put in place 'at the request of outsiders'.
If his name had already emerged - to the point that in the Agostino murder trial, the lawyer Fabio Repici, defending the civil plaintiff, had claimed that Nino Madonia was Mattarella's killer -, the newest element is the name of Giuseppe Lucchese, another Cosa Nostra killer with many convictions behind him. A fugitive from justice from the early 1980s until 1990, he had been a member of the Corleonesi firing squad led by Riina, and killed dozens of people including Francesco Marino Mannoia's sister, mother and aunt after the news of the latter's repentance. He was also among those convicted for the murders of Pio La Torre, Ninni Cassarà and Beppe Montana.
The Anti-Mafia Commission attempts to shed light on the killing of Paolo Borsellino
In the Mattarella case, so far the heads of the Cosa Nostra dome: Michele Greco, Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano, Bernardo Brusca, Giuseppe Calò, Francesco Madonia and Antonino Geraci had been definitively sentenced as instigators. "It is undoubtedly to the Commission, Cosa Nostra's top body, that the decision to eliminate President Mattarella must be linked, due to the damage that his action had already caused and, even more so, due to the danger he represented for the future of the illicit and business interests that were part of the organisation itself,' reads the motivations of the first degree. And again: 'It is clear, in fact, from the statements of collaborators, that the Mattarella murder was strongly desired by Riina and the Corleone family', and did not find agreement with Stefano Bontate, head of a traditionalist wing that favoured a 'non-violent' infiltration and could rely on links with Salvo Lima.
The trial - which also concerned other significant political murders, such as that of the provincial secretary of the DC party Michele Reina and that of Pio La Torre, regional secretary of the Communist Party and member of parliament - also saw Giusva Fioravanti and Gilberto Cavallini in the dock, two terrorists from the Nuclei Armati Revoluzioni, a formation of the subversive right, both of whom were definitively sentenced for the Bologna station massacre.For a long time they were also considered the material perpetrators of the Mattarella murder, but in the course of the 1990s trial they were acquitted for lack of evidence.
Already in those proceedings, some turncoats raised suspicions about Madonia. 'All collaborators who made statements on the material executors of the crime agree in pointing to Nino Madonia as one of the killers of the president of the Sicilian Region', it is written in the motivations of the sentence of the Palermo Court of Appeal of 17 February 1998. New investigations had begun after the indictment of Attorney General Leonardo Agueci, who had recalled the statements made by the turncoat Francesco Di Carlo, according to whom Mattarella was assassinated by Madonia in a commando with two other Mafiosi, who had died in prison years earlier.
In the 1995 sentence against the instigators, it is stated that with the election of Piersanti Mattarella as president of Sicily in 1978, the business-mafia interests, 'consolidated within the political power in the municipal and regional levels, had been challenged (and were at risk)' and this was 'precisely by an exponent of the Democrazia Cristiana, the party that until then had held power in Sicily in an undisputed form and had ensured the Mafia, in a regime of substantial hegemony, the management of all the most important affairs of Sicilian economic life, starting with public works contracts'.
Mattarella had launched legislative initiatives to limit malfeasance in public works and construction, for example by 'cleaning up' the public works department, ordering controls on the contract for the construction of six schools in Palermo and changing the town planning law, facts that caused discontent among building contractors and landowners. The DC politician wanted to break clientelistic relations between politics and power groups and for this reason he was open to dialogue with the political forces of the left. All this had made him disliked by Vito Ciancimino, former DC mayor of Palermo and political reference point of the Corleonesi.
'Mattarella's absolute unwillingness to make any kind of compromise jeopardised those balances between public administrations and mafia interests that through other parties it had long been possible to create and maintain,' the assize court wrote in its motivations, stressingthat Piersanti Mattarella was the bearer 'of a renewed willingness to confrontation, even at local level, with the PCI', because 'he was trying to widen the area of the majority to other parties, including the PCI, precisely in order to diminish the power of conditioning of the groups most hostile to his policy of renewal'.
During the investigation, the current President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, brother of the victim, had declared:
'In recent years I have matured the conviction, which, moreover, had already become clear to me in the immediate aftermath of my brother's murder, that he was killed due to a whole series of interconnected factors that inspired the decision to eliminate him. Already from the preliminary investigation, I believe that it has emerged that my brother, when he was President of the Sicilian Region, made some very significant gestures that in themselves, in an environment steeped in mafia influence, could have provoked his murder'.
The subversive right-wing track had been identified by Giovanni Falcone in the 1980s and has recently been relaunched following the sentence by which the Bologna Court of Assizes, on 9 January 2020, sentenced to life imprisonmentGilberto Cavallini, of the Revolutionary Armed Nuclei, for having facilitated the execution of the Bologna massacre by Giusva Fioravanti and other right-wing extremists (Cavallini's conviction was confirmed on Wednesday by the Court of Cassation). Almost one hundred pages of the motivations are dedicated to the murder of Piersanti Mattarella, retracing the declarations of Cristiano Fioravanti, Giusva's brother, to the investigating judge in Palermo, Giovanni Falcone, and a series of clues.
'I know in fact, because he himself revealed to me, that he is involved in the Mattarella murder', Cristiano Fioravanti had said on 29 March 1986. There would have been an exchange of favours with 'unspecified circles that had an interest in the killing of the President of the Sicilian Region'. He had told of a meeting at the home of Francesco Mangiameli, a Palermo-based extreme right-wing militant who had masterminded the escape from prison of Pierluigi Concutelli, a comrade imprisoned for the murder of Judge Vittorio Occorsio. The meeting had taken place 'in a period I do not know how long before the Mattarella murder'. 'My brother added,' said Cristiano Fioravanti, 'that the murder had then actually been committed by him and by Cavallini'. In another interrogation, he specified that his brother did not name Mattarella, but spoke generically of a Sicilian politician who was returning from mass with his wife. Cristiano was convinced that his brother had been 'instrumentalised' and 'used' by the occult powers they were fighting against. For years he confirmed and then retracted his statements, to the point that the judges in the first Mattarella murder trial did not consider him reliable.
The historical revisionism of Giorgia Meloni
Giovanni Falcone did not rule out the neo-fascist trail a priori. He himself had explained this on 3 November 1988 to the Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Committee, before which he gave an account of the relations between Cosa Nostra and politics, of an investigation into Ciancimino and then of the 'political murders' of Reina, Mattarella and La Torre: 'The execution, the methods, clearly indicate that they are murders carried out by persons linked to Mafia criminality. But the motive (without going into details) is definitely not mafia-related or at any rate not exclusively mafia-related'.
Continuing, he added that 'the problem of greater complexity with regard to the Mattarella murder derives from the existence of evidence against right-wing subversive exponents such as Valerio Fioravanti. I can say it very clearly because it also results from statements made in court by Cristiano Fioravanti, who accused his brother, of having told him that he himself, together with Gilberto Cavallini, was the material executor'.
"It is therefore an extremely complex investigation," he continued, "because it is a question of understanding whether and to what extent 'the black trail' is an alternative to the mafia trail, or interpenetrates with the mafia trail. Or alternative, or complementary. 'Which could mean welding and, above all,' he added, 'the need to redo the history of certain events in our country, even from very distant times'. He was the first to remark that "for several points the matter is coincident" with the trial for the Bologna massacre and that "there are connections and coincidences also with the trial for the Naples-Florence-Bologna train massacre", some of which "go back to certain passages of the 'Borghese coup'" in which "certainly" Cosa Nostra was involved, as demonstrated by the bombs placed by the Madonia family at Christmas 1970. "These elements entail, for the Mattarella murder, if we do not want to manage this trial bureaucratically, the need for a very thorough investigation, which we are currently carrying out and which we do not expect to be completed in a short time".
The Rapido 904: A Hidden Wound on the Italian Republic
For the super-accused Tommaso Buscetta, the path of the subversive right was not the right one. As far as he knew, the assassination had been decided by the Cupola, i.e. the highest organ of Cosa Nostra, and it was Riina who had wanted it, 'albeit with some dissent', for example that of Stefano Bontate and other bosses. The turncoat guaranteed 'that the fascists (i.e. the exponents of the NAR, ed.) had nothing to do with this murder' because 'Cosa Nostra does not let two fascists act to kill a regional president. It is nonsense'.
Later, the magistrates excluded the involvement of Fioravanti and Cavallini. From the sentences, some details emerge. For example, Fioravanti resembled Nino Madonia and this could have been misleading: 'Di Carlo (Francesco, ed.) reported having, seeing the photograph in the newspapers of Valerio Fioravanti, commented with Brusca himself on the fact, noting how Nino Madonia looked very much like the black terrorist,' wrote the assize court. In particular, Madonia, like Fioravanti, had light-coloured eyes and the expression of the same was glacial'. The Palermo judges also agreed on this similarity.
Is the black trail, therefore, closed? 'Nino Madonia is perhaps more fascist and more amenable to the secret services than Giusva Fioravanti was,' lawyer Repici summed up.
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