Falcone aftermath: memory beyond rhetoric and controversies

Last Updated: May 23, 2024

Strage Falcone, la memoria oltre la retorica e le polemiche

Explain To me Briefly The Following Article

The indispensable and urgent investigative need that led the Florence Prosecutor’s Office to schedule the interrogation of a well-known face – reluctantly – from the judicial chronicles of the last twenty, if not thirty years, General Mario Mori, investigated for complicity in the 1993 massacres in Rome, Florence, and Milan, will surely be explainable and explained with very valid reasons. The prosecutor of the Tuscan capital, Filippo Spiezia, yesterday motivated it with the need to “complete the investigations under his office’s jurisdiction”; he did not say why this completion had to be done right on the anniversary of the first of the massacres of the horribilis biennium of ’92-’93, but so be it.
To look perhaps superficially, but not entirely far-fetched, Falcone, even dead – and dead 32 years ago – continues to be pulled by the jacket. Bent to the will of his so-called epigones on the one hand, quite often for political reasons; erected as a shield by those who are always ready to say that with Falcone alive, certain magistrates would never have ventured into unprovable theorems, on the other hand.

And perhaps, in the fervor of the showdown and exaggerated due process, a slightly hairy minimum, one forgets that the first important judicial theorem, named after Tommaso Buscetta, was devised by “that” investigating judge and the anti-mafia team of which he was a part, and it did – oh yes – serve for the maxi and many other mafia trials. Despite the scorn of the guarantors of the time.

Dragging Falcone back and forth, on the anniversary of today, can also produce worse effects, not so much in dividing words on the fight against Cosa Nostra but in resorting to actual actions, as partly happened last year, hard and pure anti-mafia on one side, law enforcement on the opposite front. The sense of responsibility of the organizers of the “counter-demonstration” and the guardians of order will have to ensure that this “counter” procession does not end up as it did in 2023, because even a minimally violent outcome would undoubtedly make only one victim: the memory of Falcone.

The idea of a single thread that connects the massacres and plots of all kinds, from Portella della Ginestra to via Palestro, passing through Capaci and via D’Amelio, is suggestive, if not seductive. It is beaten by journalists and writers, but also by magistrates or former magistrates who have plenty of arguments to explain what they have failed to prove in their proper place, that of the courtroom, despite years and years of investigations, inquiries, interrogations, wiretaps, seizures, searches, reasoning, connections, deductions that always clash with that damned obstacle called evidence and with the other, the overcoming of every reasonable doubt, criteria not invented by enemies of justice but elaborated by judges themselves.

The result is losing sight of the main objectives of the war against Cosa Nostra, an endless war in which people line up for factions and parties they support: just look at the frequent shield raids of the center-left in favor of (not all) prosecutors and the closed ranks of the center-right in favor of General Mori, to which is now added the public solidarity (“Respecting the judiciary”, of course) of the same Carabinieri.

In short, the contradictions that always arise when talking about justice are reflected in what remains of the fight against the mafia, often transformed into a fight against anti-mafia. The epigones of Falcone should stop playing the roles of Japanese soldiers who in the ’70s were found on Pacific islets still ready to fight the American invader. The fact that the mafia has changed is a phrase too often abused to repeat it: yet there are those who cannot see it in the swaggering and violent roles of Scarpuzzedda, Madonia, Lucchiseddu, and the heads of the butchers, Riina, Provenzano, Bagarella, Brusca. The organization today is much more subtle, no longer has the military strength (and impunity) to strike and massacre, nor enjoys the indiscriminate or passive social consent that tolerated its deeds. It seeks new (old) lucrative traffics, first and foremost drugs, and the three-day confrontation between magistrates from all over the world, currently taking place in Palermo on this subject, can only draw the attention of those – called to investigate today – who do not succumb to fictional themes about the Great old man, the Puppeteer, the Colluding prince.

The theme remains that of easy money, one does not become a mafioso for prestige but to enrich oneself. There are vested interests with politics and there always will be, but there is no longer Vito Ciancimino entrenched in the heart of the public administration: it is necessary to corrupt, spend, dispose of resources by paying those who have the keys to the coffers. The Messina Denaro affair, the final parabola of the super-fugitive next door (in a literal sense), summarizes many of these concepts: violence reduced to a minimum and yet exaggerated wealth, ostentatious, pure power, unlimited consensus on certain territories and widespread complicity, all too much. Messina Denaro was the last remaining killer. In his story, in his too brief imprisonment, in his transformation from a pure Corleone to a dandy with a wine glass in hand, in the abandonment of the hiding model to Provenzano, there is ultimately the image of the new Cosa Nostra. That is where we must start again, to understand that the mafia is not only still there but in excellent health. You just have to realize it and continue fighting it. In the name of Falcone, Morvillo, Paolo Borsellino, and their bodyguards.