Scourge the invincible martyr5/28/2023 ![]() There was a whispering campaign within the Palermo judiciary people said he had been 'bewitched' by the Mafia. They dismantled the anti-Mafia pool of judges, which he had designed to limit the exposure of individuals and unify investigations. A law has only now been passed, accelerated by Falcone's murder, to pledge help for both mafiosi and members of the public who risk their lives by providing information.Īs his fellow judge and lifelong friend Paolo Borsellino, himself assassinated on 19 July, recounted after Falcone's death, political and judicial enemies began to close in on Falcone in the summer of 1988. Falcone fought to gain proper state protection for the pentiti and their families, but nevertheless one ex-mafioso, Salvatore Contorno, lost 35 relatives and another, Tommaso Buscetta, lost 10. The evidence the pentiti gave Falcone led to the famous Palermo maxi-trial of 1987-88, which put 465 mafiosi in the dock, and placed all their lives equally in danger. ' In 1986, Falcone was interviewing Michele Greco, the boss of bosses, when Greco issued a coded warning by comparing him to Maradona: 'Invincible on the field, unless someone trips him up.' Falcone's own deceptively simple style occasionally borrows from this code, and echoes the ability of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia to touch on a single point to reveal the whole. Otherwise, others will shoot against you. When Antonino Calderone's brother Guiseppe was leaving a meeting, he was warned of his own death by a few bars from an opera whistled by another mafioso: the unsung words were: 'Shoot, or disappear. This also made him able to interpret the compressed language of Cosa Nostra, whose metaphors and double meanings are illustrated in the chapter on 'Messages and Messengers.' Veiled warnings - 'You work too hard you should rest' - were frequent. The pentiti trusted him, he explained, because 'they are being heard by someone who has, in one way, lived through similar experiences to their own.' But Falcone had grown up in the same neighbourhood of Palermo as many of these men, and had as a child 'breathed the air of the Mafia with every breath'. The supergrass Antonino Calderone declared: 'I collaborated with him because he was a man of honour' - the ultimate Mafia accolade, and an epithet usually strictly confined to their ranks. Many of these pentiti (repentants) refused to deal with anyone else. ![]() ![]() With their own reasons for being disillusioned with the Mafia, they saw that here, finally, was someone worth confessing to, someone who could achieve results. ![]() Explaining not only how the organisation remains so strong, but how a whole society is complicit in accepting it, he declares that the mafia is an 'expression of a need for order' in an island that has repeatedly been conquered by foreign powers, and where the people have come to reject all forms of authority apart from the local and familial.įalcone's understanding of Cosa Nostra leapt forward in 1984, when he began to have unprecedented success in encouraging mafiosi to turn state witness. ![]()
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