Thirty-three years ago he died Giovanni FalconeIt was 17:58 PM on May 23, 1992. Giovanni Brusca activated the remote control that caused the explosion of 500 kilos of TNT placed in a drainage tunnel under the A29 highway, near Capaci. The Palermo judge, who was traveling on board his Fiat Croma, was killed by the mafia together with his wife, a magistrate Frances Morvillo and to the escort agents Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro in what all of Italy remembers as the "Massacre of Capaci".
On the thirty-third anniversary of his death, we publish an extract from the prologue of the first edition of “Cosa Nostra things”, book published on November 13, 1991 by Rizzoli which collects twenty interviews made between March and June of the same year to Giovanni Falcone by the French journalist Marcelle Padovani. A precious testimony that tells the story of the judge's activity and the now famous "Falcone method", but which also allows us to know, through his work, his relationship with his colleagues and even with the repentants, the person who was hiding behind the "pragmatic magistrate”, behind what Italy considers a hero who gave his life to serve the State. A man that Padovani describes as “cheerful, full of humor and joy of living, who the difficulties of life had made neither restless nor anguished”. “An enlightened Sicilian”, who until his last day never stopped believing that the mafia can be defeated.
The prologue of the first edition of “Cose di Cosa Nostra” by Marcelle Padovani
I met him for the first time in 1984 at the Palermo courthouse, behind its armored doors, protected by a twenty-four hour electronic surveillance system. I was struck by the clarity of his ideas, the level of information in his possession, the sincerity of his anti-mafia commitment. And by a kind of methodical reserve: the awareness of having to be perpetually on guard? His enormous capacity for work and his self-denial were the object of admiration, sometimes not disjointed from a certain mocking irony. For eleven years, however, he lived in the artificial atmosphere of the courts of justice, the prisons, the super-protected offices. He never went out, he saw the sun only through the armored windows of his Alfa Romeo. In front of his house two policemen stood guard day and night. Some tenants had suggested in a letter to Giornale di Sicilia to gather all the magistrates who constituted a risk to the safety of others in a sort of fortress, perhaps a prison…
I saw Falcone regularly again for Nouvel Observateur, for a book and for a film that we shot with the director Claude Goretta in 1987, at the end of the maxi trial. The television crew had nicknamed him Johnny and during the two months of filming had shared the security measures applied by the police officers in charge of protecting him: his name was never pronounced in the lobby of a hotel or in a restaurant, so as not to provide the "enemy" with involuntary information about him and his movements. But, nevertheless, he was our main topic of conversation. When, at the end, Johnny granted us a forty-minute interview, we discovered a different man, cheerful, full of humor and joie de vivre, who the difficulties of life had made neither restless nor anguished. An enlightened Sicilian, from the "Age of Enlightenment", so different from the century of madness in which we live. An extremely shy man, who avoided personal topics like the plague during conversation. Little by little, I too have learned to express myself in a kind of coded language, to interpret the inflections of voice, to never ask and above all to never say too much. Just like Falcone with the alleged mafiosi. Or like the mafiosi among themselves, always on edge in their daily work of deciphering signals. It is a fascinating intellectual activity, which demonstrates the emptiness of long digressions and encourages saving words: the verb has such a charge of density that it corresponds to the most blatant action.
Are we sure that Giovanni Falcone doesn't want to teach us a lesson? During the twenty interviews that form the backbone of this book, the solitude of this extraordinary magistrate appeared to me even more evident than in Palermo. But the certainty of final victory has never abandoned him. The opacity of a large ministry, the logic of "politicking" politics, the Machiavellianism of the Roman "palaces" have not yet distracted him from his fixed idea: the State has the means to defeat the Mafia.
Falcone is still an anomaly in the panorama of the Italian judiciary. He comes from a conservative, middle-class family, living in the center of Palermo: his father was a provincial official, his mother was very religious and involved him in church life. As a child, he served mass. As an adult, he nurtured a respectful nostalgia for the faith. As a teenager, he became passionate about rowing, before wondering about his future: would he be a doctor or a magistrate? During this period, he became inflamed by a rhetorical text by Giuseppe Mazzini that more or less read: “Life is a mission and duty is its supreme law.” When he speaks of his father today, Falcone emphasizes his great austerity: “He boasted of never having set foot in a bar in his entire life.”
Having put medicine aside, Falcone thought about a career as a naval officer; he applied to the Naval Academy and, at the same time, to the Faculty of Law at the University of Palermo. In the end, law prevailed and in 1964 Falcone passed the exam to enter the judiciary. He recalls the feelings he felt and which to a certain extent remain the same today: "I belong to that category of people who believe that every action must be completed. I have never asked myself whether or not I should face a certain problem, but only how to face it".
Nourished by Spartan principles, he could not settle for civil law, to which he devoted himself in the early years of his career. His vocation was for criminal law. Or rather: for trials against the mafia. And how can it be otherwise, in Sicily, for someone who is consistent with himself? Journalists passing through Palermo have repeatedly tried to find out how he lived, what was the intensity of his daily fear, if the proximity of danger caused him anguish. Falcone always responded serenely: "The thought of death accompanies me everywhere. But, as Montaigne says, it soon becomes second nature. Of course, you stay alert, you calculate, you observe, you organize, you avoid repetitive habits, you stay away from crowds and any situation that cannot be kept under control. But you also acquire a good dose of fatalism; after all, you die for many reasons, a car accident, a plane that explodes in flight, an overdose, cancer and also for no particular reason".
Irony about death is part of the Sicilian cultural heritage. Leonardo Sciascia was a master of it. Falcone for his part recounts with a certain amused satisfaction the jokes of the time of the maxi trial. “My colleague Paolo Borsellino comes to visit me at home. Giovanni, he tells me, You must give me the combination to your office safe immediately. And why? Otherwise when they kill you how do we open it??”. And he still smiles when he thinks back to the humid, sultry afternoons spent with his colleagues from the anti-mafia pool writing their own gruesome obituaries to publish on the Giornale di Sicilia.
Falcone will become a textbook magistrate, a servant of the State who takes it for granted that the State must be respected - not an ideal and imaginary State, but this State, as it is. Paradoxically, by only trying to apply the law, he has turned himself into a disturbing character, a judge who causes trouble, an inconvenient hero. Gifted with an extraordinary capacity for work and an elephant's memory, he has been able to intelligently exploit the police, he has effectively organized his own personal security. He has surrounded himself with qualified people. He has shown himself to be extremely rigorous in the exercise of his profession as an investigator: without ever hitting vague targets; without ever embarking on any initiative whose success he had not assured himself; without ever entering into a personal controversy with a presumed mafioso. The operations "Pizza Connection", "Iron Tower" and "Pilgrim", conducted in concert with American investigators, and then that true masterpiece that was the maxi trial of 1986, will go down in history as examples of the "Falcone method".
One can try to reconstruct the relationship between this pragmatic magistrate, alien to any ideological abstraction, careful to respect the rules, concrete and reserved, with one of the mafia bosses, or a repentant, subjected to his hammering interrogation. Insolent or victimized, closed in an obstinate silence or violently protesting, Falcone opposes them with an unshakable calm and self-confidence. No knowing glances, no relationships based on the familiar form, but not even insults: they must realize that they are facing the State. "During the interrogation of Michele Greco, head of Cosa Nostra in Palermo, every now and then we said to each other: Look me in the eyes!, because we both knew the importance of a look that goes with a certain type of statement."
This is Falcone's ace in the hole: Sicilian, or rather - better - Palermitan, he has spent his entire life immersed in the widespread mafia culture, like any other Sicilian and like any mafioso, and he knows perfectly the lexicon of small things, gestures and half-gestures that sometimes replace words. He knows that every detail in the world of Cosa Nostra has a precise meaning, is connected to a logical plan, he knows that in our consumer society, in which values tend to disappear, one might think that the rigid rules of the mafia offer a solution, a loophole apparently not devoid of dignity, and he has consequently learned to respect his interlocutors even if they are criminals.
Sometimes he discovered in them an unsuspected humanity: “What warmth, what a sense of friendship when we said goodbye to the repentants Buscetta, Mannoia, Calderone”. And Calderone himself declared to the newspapers: “I collaborated with Falcone because he is a man of honour”. And, having left Italy for an unknown destination in an attempt to escape the inevitable revenge of Cosa Nostra after the confessions given to the judiciary, he sent him this extraordinary letter: “Mr. Judge, I have not had time to say goodbye to you. I want to do it now. I hope that you will continue your fight against the mafia with the same spirit as always. I have tried to give you my modest contribution, without reservations and without lies. Once again I am forced to emigrate and I do not think I will ever return to Italy. I think I have the right to rebuild my life and in Italy that is not possible. With the utmost respect, Antonino Calderone”.
Was Giovanni Falcone bewitched by the mafia? In reality, he was the only magistrate who dealt continuously and with absolute commitment with that particular problem known as Cosa Nostra. He is the only one capable of understanding and explaining why the Sicilian mafia constitutes a logical, rational, functional and implacable world. More logical, more rational, more implacable than the State. But Falcone pushes the paradox even further: faced with the government's incompetence and lack of responsibility, he had to set himself up as the defender of certain mafiosi against the State, especially the repentants, victims of transversal vendettas. Cosa Nostra kills their father, mother, relatives and friends for having broken the front of silence and they had to wait for a 1991 law to be able to benefit from an official protection program, to have the right to live. Falcone, therefore, had to find himself on the other side of the barricade, alongside mafiosi and ex-mafiosi against the barbarity of the State.
Here is the situation of this singular magistrate: better than anyone else he can fight the mafia because he knows and understands it. But is it really so strange that a fanatic of the State like him is fascinated by Cosa Nostra precisely for what it represents of state rationality?
The mafia as a system of power, articulation of power, metaphor of power, pathology of power. The mafia that becomes a State where the State is tragically absent. The mafia as an economic system, always implicated in illicit, profitable activities that can be methodically exploited. The mafia as a criminal organization that uses and abuses traditional Sicilian values. The mafia that, in a world where the concept of citizenship tends to dilute while the logic of belonging tends to strengthen; where the citizen, with his rights and duties, gives way to the clan, to the clientele, the mafia, therefore, presents itself as an organization with an assured future. The political content of its actions makes it, without a doubt, an alternative solution to the democratic system. But how many are those who today realize the danger that it represents for democracy?
