Capaci and Via D'Amelio Bombings
The Sicilian mafia killed two anti-mafia magistrates with bombs fifty-seven days apart in 1992, and Italy's tolerance of it ended. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were friends who had grown up in the same Palermo district and had built the pool of investigating magistrates whose maxi-trial in 1986 and 1987 convicted 338 people on the evidence of the first significant informant, Tommaso Buscetta. The convictions were confirmed on final appeal in January 1992, which removed the assumption that they would be quietly reversed and made both men worth killing. Falcone was returning from Rome on 23 May when about 400 kilograms of explosive in a drainage culvert under the motorway near Capaci were detonated by remote control as his convoy passed; he, his wife and three escorts were killed and a section of carriageway was destroyed. Borsellino was killed on 19 July by a car bomb outside his mother's flat in Via d'Amelio, with five bodyguards. The public reaction was not what the mafia expected. Sheets were hung from balconies across Palermo, some 7,000 troops were sent to Sicily, the hard prison regime under article 41-bis was applied, and informants came forward in numbers. Totò Riina was arrested in January 1993 after twenty-three years as a fugitive, in Palermo, where he had been living. Palermo airport is named after both men. Falcone's own summary is the sentence Italians quote. He said that the mafia is a human phenomenon, that like all human phenomena it has a beginning and an evolution, and that it will therefore also have an end.
- Year: 1992 CE
- Category: Political
