CESARE TERRANOVA: THE JUDGE WHO SAW THE MAFIA AS POWER

In the 1960s, Cesare Terranova was the first judge to state that the Mafia was not a series of isolated crimes but a system of power infiltrating politics and the economy. He returned to Palermo in 1979 to keep investigating and was murdered alongside his bodyguard Lenin Mancuso. His widow, Giovanna, carried on the struggle until justice was done years later.

Cesare Terranova was born in Palermo in 1921 and from a very young age he was drawn to law.

Sicily was his place in the world. Although he came to know—sometimes by force—different places, the landscapes of the island’s interior, of the tiny Petralia Sottana, the town where he was born, were his recurring memories during the two years he spent imprisoned in a detention camp in Africa at the end of World War II. As soon as he was released, with his skin and character toughened by sand, sun, and prison, he went straight to the far west of Sicily, to the city of Messina, to complete his law degree. The following year, he graduated and, with the same passion and determination with which he had completed his studies, Cesare was appointed to a magistracy in Messina. He became a very young magistrate of twenty-six, who, because of his dedication and commitment, would constantly move from office, home, and region. From Messina he moved to Rometta, where he headed the judicial office; from Rometta to Patti, and from there to Palermo, the capital of Sicily.

In the 1950s he met Giovanna Giaconia, the great love of his life. A year later, just as quickly as life had swept him along, they married while he was still serving as magistrate in Rometta. Giovanna was the perfect complement to a rigorous man and worker. Cesare himself admitted this in his writings, which seemed to work for him as a kind of therapy or confession to his own subconscious, where he valued Giovanna’s affection and understanding, especially in disagreements. Her support for Cesare’s career was one of the many signs of her devotion, and he knew it. In 1958, Cesare and Giovanna moved to Palermo; the young and brilliant magistrate, now thirty-seven, arrived in the Sicilian capital to occupy a desk in the imposing Palermo Court, at the heart of the aristocratic mafia stronghold that was on the verge of bleeding itself dry.

As soon as Cesare took up his new post in the Investigative Office of the Palermo Court, cases involving Cosa Nostra began to pile up on his desk until they nearly obscured its surface. Perhaps because he was the youngest, or the most eager at the time, Cesare took on every investigation that reached him about the mafia families of Palermo and its surroundings, and beyond investigating, he made it a point to understand their members and, above all, their dynamics.

Cesare and Giovanna shared a deep love.

In the 1960s, Cosa Nostra began a series of internal moves that reflected the new criminal activities of the era: drug trafficking, especially heroin shipments to the United States. The money that heroin began to generate multiplied, and, as always happens, together with gunpowder in the hands of criminals, it unleashed events that changed the course of history. One mafia killing always led to another. For nearly two years, opposing factions waxed and waned depending on each side’s tactical calculations. While Palermo’s aristocratic mafiosi were killing each other, in Corleone—a small town remembered only for the devil—a group of peasants-turned-thugs-turned-mafiosi began their climb in the Sicilian underworld by murdering the local Cosa Nostra boss, a physician named Michele Navarra. The leader of that group of peasants turned killers was Luciano Leggio, a farm laborer linked to the mafia through his uncle and promoted by Navarra to his right-hand man and trusted hitman. Ten years earlier, on Navarra’s orders, Leggio had kidnapped, murdered, and made disappear Placido Rizzotto, a local labor leader, for over a decade.

Law enforcement, especially the Carabinieri, had been compiling reports on mafia organizations in southern Italy since the early 20th century. Often these reports were the foundation of judicial investigations that generally ended in nothing. Over time, however, the reports improved year by year, and what had once been a bundle of names and conjectures was becoming precise X-rays of the families, their members, their kinship ties, and their past and present activities. Two of these modern reports landed on Cesare’s desk: “Angelo La Barbera + 116” and “Luciano Leggio + 63.” Both were drawn up during the first mafia war and both ended up as judicial investigations directed by Cesare. The first inquiry led to disaster: a trial held in Calabria—400 km from the crime scene—in which many defendants were acquitted and a handful of mafiosi received ridiculously light sentences compared to their crimes. The second investigation fared even worse, with a trial in Bari, nearly 700 km from Palermo.

Cesare’s investigative and judicial ability marked his professional growth, but when it came to the mafia—and one mafioso in particular—it was his fearless, defiant character that would seal his fate. During the pre-trial investigations of those two cases, Cesare interrogated Leggio regarding several crimes, especially the murders of union leader Placido Rizzotto and mafia boss Navarra. Imprisoned in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison, Leggio carried on his mafia life as usual, enjoying his status and intimidating anyone, whether another mafioso or a magistrate. In the interrogation, Leggio refused to answer any question. He even refused to confirm his own name. Cesare calmly asked his clerk to record that Leggio did not know who his father was, suggesting he was a bastard. It was an insult to the mafioso’s face. To suggest such a thing was one of the worst slights a person—mafioso or not—could receive. For the pride and false respect that Leggio believed he commanded, Cesare’s scorn became something he would never forget.

Cesare Terranova.

Cesare and Giovanna’s moves from office, home, and region resumed. Thirteen years after his work in Palermo, Cesare took the post of prosecutor in the Republic of Marsala. But it was to be his briefest move. Cesare appeared on the Italian Communist Party’s list as an independent and in 1972 entered the National Parliament, which meant another move, this time to Rome, for seven years. Naturally, given his experience and commitment, Cesare joined the Antimafia Commission alongside Pio La Torre, a Sicilian trade unionist and PCI member. During their two terms, Cesare and Pio worked to change both the understanding of the mafia from Rome—Italy’s political and economic center—and the tools available to prevent and fight its expansion. Four years later, they opposed the frivolous report produced by the parliamentary majority. Instead, the two Sicilians drafted a minority report, a true manifesto on the Sicilian mafia in the mid-1970s. With clarity and conviction, Cesare and Pio exposed the links between mafiosi and Sicilian politicians, producing a document that foretold the mafia’s future criminal enterprises—particularly through political collusion—and its emerging leaders.

Cesare’s time in Rome was intense professionally, but relatively safe personally. While mafia groups were present in the capital, the main threats there were terrorist groups from the far right and left. But south of Rome, the mafia remained democracy’s executioners. The Bari trial, which Cesare had investigated, was reviewed by a higher court. In that review, Leggio was sentenced to life for the murder of his predecessor Navarra. Cesare’s earlier investigation thus bore some fruit. By then, however, Leggio was already a fugitive. Immediately after being acquitted in Bari, he moved to northern Italy and lived freely despite an arrest warrant. In 1974, during a police raid in Milan linked to a series of kidnappings carried out by the Camorra, ’Ndrangheta, and Cosa Nostra, security forces stumbled upon him. He was imprisoned, yet continued to run his mafia family, although his influence in Cosa Nostra gradually waned.

Lenin Mancuso with Cesare Terranova

Since joining the judiciary in 1946, Cesare’s commitment and talent made him a pioneer in the fight against the mafia. His dedication was always paired with a multidisciplinary study of the mafia phenomenon. Cesare was one of the first to recognize the transformation of the mafia from a predominantly agrarian force to an urban, entrepreneurial, and international one. A transformation that in general economic terms had taken place in the Middle Ages was happening in the mafia after WWII, with the rise of drug trafficking, the financial system, and the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Cesare identified changes in method and structure, but insisted the mafia itself remained unchanged in its essence and objectives. “In 1963 people spoke of a new mafia. But the mafia is only one, and it is always the same. As a criminal phenomenon, as a custom, it does not change. What changes are the methods, the insertion in a particular social and economic reality. We could say it moves according to the needs of the moment,” Cesare declared in a newspaper interview on September 23, 1979.

By that time, Cesare and Giovanna had once again moved office, home, and region. They were back in Sicily, in their homeland. After finishing his second parliamentary term in June 1979, Cesare requested reinstatement to the judiciary, this time at the Palermo Court of Appeals, the final step before directing the Investigative Office, from which he could lead anti-mafia inquiries. Upon their return, Giovanna lived with unease. Only months earlier, Boris Giuliano, the head of Palermo’s Mobile Squad and an internationally recognized investigator of drug trafficking networks, had been assassinated while having breakfast at a café. The Corleonesi faction, since Navarra’s murder, had been eliminating rivals to consolidate power. These ignorant, brutal peasants, driven by raw ambition, decided that the same strategy used to eliminate internal opposition should be applied to external obstacles: journalists, police, prosecutors, and politicians who stood in the way of their dominion over Sicily. While Cesare was aware of the risks of returning, he believed in an older mafia tradition that avoided attacks on state representatives. The mafia’s thesis was—and remains—that unnecessary bloodshed is bad for business.

Death was routine in Palermo. Mafia killings were reported with the same monotony as war coverage elsewhere. On September 25, 1979, the atmosphere was heavy, laden with the residue of gunpowder and blood. Cesare and Giovanna lived in a third-floor apartment in central Palermo. Each morning, his friend and bodyguard, Lenin Mancuso, would pick him up in Cesare’s car to go to the Palermo Court. Their professional relationship had grown into a deep friendship.

Palermo’s center was chaotic with traffic, then as now. Lenin had parked the car a few meters from the building entrance. He greeted Cesare at the door and handed him the keys—Cesare liked to drive. They walked the short distance together, talking. Cesare sat behind the wheel, Lenin in the passenger seat. Just as Cesare was about to start the engine, two cars blocked their path. Three armed men got out and began shooting. Walking forward while firing, they closed in. Lenin first tried to shield Cesare, then to exit the car and return fire. It was useless. The attackers’ firepower far outweighed his. One gunman approached the vehicle, leaned to the side, and shot Cesare in the back of the head. Glass, blood, and a head tilting to the right, chin resting on chest, glasses slipping from his nose, formed the tragic tableau Cesare unwillingly embodied. His body remained upright only through inertia, his arms hanging lifeless at his sides. Lenin, gravely wounded while defending him, died hours later in the hospital.

Cesare Terranova always accompanied by Lenin Mancuso.

Who had ordered and executed the murders was obvious. In 1982, a trial was held in Calabria. Giovanna, the widow, joined as a plaintiff. The accused was Cesare’s old enemy, Leggio—the man he had pursued in court and insulted to his face. Leggio was acquitted. Two years later, thanks to testimony from Tommaso Buscetta, the mafioso who collaborated with Judge Giovanni Falcone, the investigation was reopened and the Cosa Nostra Commission charged as the intellectual authors. Once again, the case was closed for lack of evidence. No one was convicted. Giovanna continued to seek justice for her husband and his friend. A year after Cesare’s murder, after sinking into a deep depression, she joined the Association of Sicilian Women Against the Mafia, which supported families torn apart by the mafia and educated young people about its consequences. In an interview, Giovanna said: “I sank into a bottomless abyss, for a time I lost track of time. Then life resumes, more or less slowly, although such a death is never forgotten. It is unforgettable because to grief is added horror, gratuitousness, the vulgar brutality of murder, the violence that also attacks the dignity of the human person. At first, the instinct is to retreat into your own pain, with no thought of taking action. That is what I experienced too. But then I felt I was not the protagonist of a merely personal tragedy, but of a collective one, that the danger threatened an entire society, not just me.”

Eighteen years after the murders, three mafia informants provided new information, reopening the case. They revealed that Leggio had sought the Commission’s authorization to kill the judge—an authorization granted—and that the four-man hit squad included high-ranking mafiosi, one of them the brother-in-law of the ignorant and bloodthirsty Toto Riina, Cosa Nostra’s supreme leader. In that third investigation, Leggio, the Commission members, and three gunmen were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Cesare’s memory lives on in Italy and beyond. A forward-looking magistrate, who recognized changes in the mafia’s structure and the savagery of its methods, he had also written his own will in anticipation. A handwritten testament full of love and reflection, in which Cesare thanked his family and his great love Giovanna for the lessons and support that shaped him into the man and magistrate remembered today in Italy and around the world.