Capaci and Via D'Amelio Bombings
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Palermo prosecutors who built the case behind the 1986-1987 Maxi Trial that convicted hundreds of Cosa Nostra members using unprecedented cooperation from mafia informants (pentiti), had become the Sicilian mafia's most feared adversaries. On 23 May 1992, as Falcone's car convoy drove from Palermo airport, a remotely detonated bomb packed beneath the Capaci highway destroyed the road, killing Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, and three police escorts Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro. Fifty-seven days later, on 19 July 1992, a car bomb exploded outside Borsellino's mother's apartment on Palermo's Via D'Amelio as he arrived to visit her, killing Borsellino and five escort officers: Agostino Catalano, Walter Cosina, Emanuela Loi, Vincenzo Li Muli and Claudio Traina. The killings, ordered by Cosa Nostra boss Salvatore 'Toto' Riina in direct retaliation for the Maxi Trial and to forestall further prosecutions, provoked an unprecedented public reaction in Sicily, including mass demonstrations and bedsheets hung from balconies in protest, a mobilization later remembered as the 'Palermo Spring'. The Italian state responded with a sweeping crackdown, deploying the army to Sicily and passing tougher anti-mafia legislation, which captured Riina in January 1993 and numerous other bosses over the following years; the bombings, occurring as the Tangentopoli corruption investigations were simultaneously dismantling Italy's post-war party system, are widely credited with accelerating the collapse of the First Republic's old political order.
- Year: 1992 CE
- Category: Political
