Piersanti Mattarella

Piersanti Mattarella was president of the Sicilian region and was shot dead in Palermo on 6 January 1980, in his car, with his wife beside him and his brother Sergio arriving minutes later to pull him out. He was a Christian Democrat and the son of a minister, and he set out to do the one thing that made him dangerous: to clean up the awarding of public contracts in a region where construction money was the main channel between the Mafia and the political parties. He cancelled tenders, ordered inspections of school building works, refused to sign what his predecessors had signed, and governed with the external support of the Communist Party, which in Sicily in 1979 was an unforgivable arrangement to several constituencies at once. He was killed by a young gunman who has never been conclusively identified. The trials convicted the Cosa Nostra commission in the abstract - the leaders who must have ordered it - while the execution was attributed at various times to Mafia soldiers and to neo-fascist terrorists from outside Sicily, and the investigation has been reopened repeatedly, most recently in the 2020s. His brother Sergio went into politics as a direct result, wrote the electoral law of 1993, and became president of the Italian Republic in 2015 and again in 2022. The killing came at the start of the worst period of the Sicilian Mafia's war on the state, which continued through the murders of Pio La Torre, Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Palermo airport is named after the last two. Sergio Mattarella has spoken about the killing publicly on its anniversaries throughout his presidency. The case was reopened again in 2023 with new forensic work on the weapon. Nobody has been convicted of pulling the trigger.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history