(by Rossella Daverio) Today 23 May 2020, the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Capaci massacre, the Falcone Foundation invited citizens to hang a white sheet on their windows. White like cleaning, like light, like truth.
It is a beautiful symbol, which urges the awakening of consciences. Because there are few cleaning, light and truths surrounding the murder of Giovanni Falcone. The reason for his death undoubtedly lies in the exceptional nature of his life. THE principals of the terrorist act that killed him remain instead in the shadows.
Giovanni Falcone was an extraordinary man and jurist. He reconciled - as the investigating judge of Palermo wrote this morning Piergiorgio Morosini - two rare and rarely associated virtues: industrious daily combativeness and lucidity in imagining the future. These talents were translated into "a strong sense of autonomy from the centers of power" which allowed him to innovate the role of the magistrate and change the regulatory framework for the fight against organized crime. If Giovanni Falcone had not been there, today we would not have the District Directorates and the National Anti-Mafia Directorate, the rules on collaborators of justice and the 41 bis.
A man of this caliber was obviously very dangerous for his enemies, whose tentacles went far beyond the borders of Corleone to reach the top of the state, its institutions and the hidden decision-making centers that determined its destinies: banks, drug traffickers, arms manufacturers, Masonic lodges, services diverted on both sides of the Atlantic. It took a lot of intelligence and courage to oppose a system so rooted that it was considered untouchable. Giovanni Falcone owned both. So it had to be eliminated, one way or another.
After a few unsuccessful attempts, it became extremely urgent to do so in that summer of '92. On 17 February, something disturbing had happened in Milan: the arrest of Mario Chiesa and the opening, in the Prosecutor's Office, of a folder with the words "Clean Hands" on it. The accomplices of the mafia power who "had invaded the entire body of the nation as cancer" (to quote a memorable editorial by Alberto Cavallari after the Dalla Chiesa murder) saw the complex crack for the first time status quo, founded on subtle balances of interest, in which they had thrived for decades in total impunity. And they knew how and when Giovanni Falcone, who was already collaborating with Milan, would have dealt them the coup de grace.
In this changing picture, who really were those who first denigrated him with an intricate plot of files, then threatened him, finally sentenced his death? He himself defined his enemies "refined minds». And he certainly wasn't referring to viddani from Corleone. So who was sitting behind the monitor directing? Who was sent to Sicily first and then to Rome to spy on their moves? Who betrayed him on the occasion of the failed attack of the Addaura and of the unfortunately successful one of Capaci, revealing his plans and his movements, which were secret, that is, known to a number of people who could be counted on the fingers of one hand?
These days he has re-emerged with arrogance, following the television broadcast Atlantis de La7, the name of Bruno Contrada who, of all the alleged traitors of the Palermo judge, has been the most accredited for years. Alfredo Morvillo, Falcone's brother-in-law and also a magistrate, declared to Atlantis is Giovanni revealed to him that he had been betrayed by "a senior law enforcement officer". This confirms the hypothesis Contrada, who was a policeman and head of the Palermo Mobile, as well as the Sisde manager (as the internal secret services were called at the time).
Slimy and ambiguous character, who moved with great ease in the gray area between legality and illegality, Bruno Contrada is certainly one of those who do not like white.
Arrested in December 1992 for external competition in a mafia association, he was however exonerated by the European Court of Human Rights and by the Italian Cassation and reinstated, as a pensioner, in the State Police. And above all he has always defended himself with tenacious determination from the accusations against him during the years of imprisonment and beyond.
Before those who, like him, proclaim their innocence throughout their lives, it is legitimate - under the Constitution, which requires us to respect the sentences - to ask the question: and if he was right? Who would be the people close to Giovanni Falcone who betrayed him several times? Are they still active and perhaps holding positions of responsibility in the country?
This would suggest a recent statement by Vittorio Teresi, coordinator of the pool of investigators in the Mafia-state investigation. If Falcone could have completed the regulatory package he had in mind - said Teresi - he would have managed to achieve «the goal of all of us: that is, the total, complete and irreversible destruction of the mafias ». And he added. «This goal is still opposed by many states. And by many representatives of this state ».
Similarly, the very nature of the mafia system could lead one to think that behind Contrada there was much more. Organized crime and its godfathers, clear and hidden, live on appearances. Nothing that is seen is real. Respect for the facade, formalism and bureaucracy are the theatrical backdrops that hide the stage machines. Behind the "next motives" of a crime, which appear before everyone's eyes, there are always "remote motives", which very few know. And finally, in the mafia act, there are protagonists and stunt doubles: since the protagonist cannot take risks, a stunt double that resembles him and can be burned is used instead. It is no coincidence that Giovanni Falcone himself declared that the mafia "is a whole theater".
What if Bruno Contrada had been, in all these years, only the precise stunt double of someone else, placed much higher than him in the interests of the mafia and in the organization of the state?
«I know. But I have no evidence. I don't even have any cluesHe wrote in 1974 Pier Paolo Pasolini in a famous and prophetic article. "I know why I read, I get informed, I coordinate even distant facts, I put together the disorganized and fragmented pieces of a whole and coherent political framework, which restores logic where arbitrariness, madness and mystery seem to reign".
Today there is a certainty that there was a lot of logic and little folly in the death of Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and his escort agents Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro and Vito Schifani. But, unfortunately, the mystery remains.
It would be time for those who know how to speak. And who doesn't know how to investigate or ask. Otherwise the fight against the mafia will remain a match-fixing.
Otherwise the snake will never be annihilated, because its head will not be hit.
Otherwise we will never be an authentic democracy, given that the people cannot exercise the power that belongs to them without the awareness that arises from the truth.
Otherwise Giovanni Falcone - and with him Paolo Borsellino, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Piersanti Mattarella, Boris Giuliano, Pio La Torre, Rocco Chinnici, Ninni Cassarà and too many others — they will continue to be killed again every day.