Twenty-third May 1992. A date that no Italian will ever forget. An indelible wound not only to the fight against the mafia scourge, but to the entire democratic and institutional stability of the country. The Capaci massacre is 28 years old, or the terrorist attack carried out by Cosa Nostra a few km from Palermo (precisely in the territory of Isola delle Femmine) against the anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, in which four other people lost their lives besides him: his wife Francesca Morvillo, also a magistrate, and the agents of the escort Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro. There were also 23 injured, including agents Paolo Capuzza, Angelo Corbo, Gaspare Cervello and the judicial chauffeur Giuseppe Costanza.
The facts: at 17.57 on that Saturday, the bombers they blew up a section of the A29 motorway, while the escort procession was passing over it - traveling from Punta Raisi airport to the city of Palermo - with the judge, his wife and the police officers on board, accommodated in three armored Fiat Cromas. The killing of Falcone was decided, from what was subsequently learned during the maxi trial, on the occasion of some meetings of the regional and provincial "Commissions" of Cosa Nostra, which took place between September and December 1991, and chaired by the boss Salvatore Riina , captured on January 15, 1993 and then died almost three years ago, on November 17, 2017 while in prison in Parma.
To coordinate the attack and to personally activate the detonator that blew up the motorcade, was John Brusca, prominent exponent of the mafia, convicted of over a hundred murders. He was arrested on May 20, 1996 and declared that he too had participated, in that case only as a principal, in the Via D'Amelio massacre, in Palermo, where a few weeks later Falcone also lost his friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino, on July 19, 1992.
Both attacks were experienced with particular indignation by public opinion throughout the country, which with these unprecedented actions he perceived the vulnerability of the state in the face of organized crime of the mafia type. against which the guard must never be lowered.
Today the massacre of Capaci and the death of Giovanni Falcone are more topical than ever, in the weeks in which the controversy over the granting of lighter prison conditions to dozens of mafia bosses exploded, as a result of the health emergency that has also swept prisons but which cannot and must never make us forget the needs of a just justice .
