FRANCESCA MORVILLO: AN ANTIMAFIA JUDGE

There are women who have not only been victims of the mafias but have also carried out their work against organized crime, fully aware that continuing to confront mafia power would put them in danger — even at risk of death. One of these women — whose name is often known, but whose story rarely is — is Francesca Morvillo. Here is part of her story.

Francesca Morvillo, an antimafia judge

Francesca Morvillo’s life and career were, in many ways, unique. She was born in Palermo on December 14, 1945, and earned her law degree at the young age of 22. It was the culmination of a brilliant academic career, during which she passed almost all her exams with top marks and honors. She graduated with a thesis on Security Measures and the Rule of Law. Her writing was rigorous and direct. Immediately after graduating, Francesca began preparing for the judiciary entrance exams, which she passed with distinction in 1968, becoming one of the first female magistrates in Italy.

Francesca Morvillo on her graduation day.

Like her father, Guido Morvillo — Deputy Prosecutor of Palermo — and her brother, Alfredo Morvillo — also a magistrate in Palermo — Francesca was destined to work in the justice system. She began as a judge in the Agrigento court and later served as Deputy Prosecutor at the Juvenile Court of Palermo. Among other prestigious roles, she also served as a counselor at the Court of Appeals.She had no children, but she dedicated a part of her life and commitment to young people: before donning the judge’s robe, she taught classes to juvenile inmates at the Malaspina Institute in Palermo. For many years, her passion for law held the foremost place in her life, although she also taught courses at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Palermo.

During a dinner with friends and colleagues, Francesca met Giovanni Falcone, then an investigative judge at the Palermo court who, despite the weight of his cases and the threats he faced, made an effort to make her laugh. Francesca had married in 1979, but the marriage quickly fell apart. Giovanni noticed the melancholy and heaviness in her expression during those days. The two magistrates fell deeply in love. Francesca was the only woman who could truly understand and grasp the nature of Giovanni’s work and sacrifices — he was not an ordinary man. He also knew that only another magistrate, one who fought for justice with the same passion — as Francesca did — could endure what the years ahead would demand of them. Their relationship began at a time when investigations against the mafia were accelerating, as were the attacks on state officials involved in them. When they met, Falcone had already been in Palermo for a year, first as a bankruptcy judge and later — summoned by Rocco Chinnici after the assassination of Judge Cesare Terranova and his escort officer Lenin Mancuso in 1979 — as an antimafia magistrate. It was a time of constant massacres in Palermo. That same year, Cosa Nostra murdered Michele Reina — regional secretary of the Christian Democracy party — and Boris Giuliano — head of Palermo’s Mobile Squad Police; in 1980, they assassinated Piersanti Mattarella — the politician and brother of Italy’s future president — Carabinieri Captain Emanuele Basile, and Gaetano Costa, the Prosecutor of Palermo.

Francesca Morvillo and Giovanni Falcone on one of their rare vacations.

The 1980s would be both tragically devastating and full of hope for Sicilian society. In 1980, amid the ongoing murders of police officers, politicians, judges, and innocent bystanders, the so-called Antimafia Pool was created at the initiative of Judge Rocco Chinnici. It was composed of a group of magistrates — supported by police officers of proven integrity and competence — who dedicated themselves exclusively to pursuing Cosa Nostra. But the mafia's killings would not stop. In 1982, Pio La Torre — regional secretary of the Italian Communist Party — and his colleague Rosario Di Salvo were assassinated, as were General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro. In 1983, with a car bomb — an old method that had returned to the scene — Rocco Chinnici, the founder and ideologue of the Antimafia Pool, was murdered. In 1985, police officers Beppe Montana, Ninni Cassarà, and Roberto Antiochia were also gunned down. During those years, Giovanni Falcone began to understand the inner workings of the mafia and started developing new investigative methods. On the one hand, he sought out and contacted mafiosi willing to become pentiti — repentant collaborators. He observed that the only traces the mafia left behind were those generated when money moved. These financial traces had to be identified, analyzed, systematized — in order to reconstruct the structure and activity of mafia organizations.

Judge Francesca Morvillo was one of the first in Italy.

As the investigations progressed, Giovanni’s life began to change: he was assigned his first security detail and began living a shielded, armored life — one that Francesca would also have to adopt. After eight years together, they both finalized their divorces and got married. During those years, their relationship was often targeted by gossip and attempts at delegitimization: “Let him shave, to outdo the communist judge,” and “Let him marry Francesca, to outdo the judge with mistresses.” The image of the famous antimafia judge — divorced, working with the FBI on the Pizza Connection investigation, introducing not only new investigative techniques but also the crucial testimony of pentiti Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno, and publicly denouncing that the mafia operated with the protection and complicity of various sectors of the State — was under constant attack. So too was the fact that he was now in a relationship with another divorced judge, herself the daughter and sister of magistrates.

In 1986, after three years of living together, Francesca and Giovanni were married. The ceremony was discreet — in many ways intended to go unnoticed, as was customary for divorcees at the time. It was officiated by Leoluca Orlando, then mayor of Palermo, and one of the witnesses was Antonino Caponnetto, the new head of the Antimafia Pool. Giovanni and Francesca’s relationship was not built on subordination but on mutual respect and a shared mission. The driving force behind their partnership — and their individual lives — was a professional, even metaphysical and romantic project: the dream of transforming Italy through the power of the law. Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo were united by the cement of that immense dream.

Their love was regularly tested by obstacles. Giovanni’s stroke of luck — and risk — came when the mafioso Tommaso Buscetta agreed to collaborate. That cooperation accelerated the investigation and forced Giovanni and the rest of the Antimafia Pool to prepare an indictment against 707 mafiosi. Faced with threats and pressure, Giovanni and Paolo Borsellino, along with their families, isolated themselves for a month in the Asinara prison on the island of Sardinia to complete the indictment under high security. Francesca never left his side and supported him in every way she could. She also continued her work as a judge in the juvenile court. She had made peace with not having children. As Giovanni used to say, “We must not create orphans, we must protect children.”

Francesca and Giovanni agreed not to have children: "You shouldn't have orphans, you should have children."

The hearings of the Maxiprocesso di Palermo — as the trial prepared by the Antimafia Pool came to be known — began on February 10, 1986. It was the result of years of work by Giovanni and all his colleagues. The Maxi Trial became a turning point in the fight against the mafia. For the first time, the elite of Cosa Nostra — along with dozens of hitmen, smugglers, extortionists, and self-proclaimed "men of honor" — appeared in a courtroom, specially modified for the occasion. Thanks to the meticulous investigations carried out by the Pool, and the testimonies of pentiti Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno, the organizational structure of Cosa Nostra was reconstructed for the first time with near-perfect accuracy. The trial revealed the international drug trafficking routes, money laundering schemes involving banks and construction companies, and identified those responsible for 120 murders. After 349 hearings, the court withdrew for deliberations. Thirty-five days later, it returned with a verdict: 346 convictions and 114 acquittals. The judges imposed 19 life sentences and a total of 2,265 years in prison on hundreds of mafiosi.

Despite the success of the trial, a darker chapter began for Francesca and Giovanni. Known as the “season of poisons,” Giovanni came under a long and systematic series of attacks — not only from Cosa Nostra, but also from certain sectors of the State that sought to delegitimize his work and his name. It could also have been called the “season of poison and gunpowder.” On June 21, 1989, at a villa in Addaura, near Palermo, where the Falcone–Morvillo couple rented a summer residence, security forces found a bag filled with explosives. That very day, Swiss judge Carla Del Ponte and her colleague Claudio Lehman had been invited by the couple — they were discussing the routes of suspicious money laundering that reached as far as Switzerland's cantons. The possibility that a bomb could have killed all four of them led Giovanni — and several others in the judiciary and police — to suspect that the attack had been planned by someone within the State itself. Attention turned to the so-called "deviated" — corrupt members of the secret services.

Francesca Morvillo and Giovanni Falcone entering an event.

After the attempted bombing in Addaura, Giovanni, Francesca, and the rest of the Antimafia Pool began to feel that the threat to their lives was more real than ever. Giovanni feared putting Francesca in danger and tried to keep her as far from him as possible. Fear led him to ask her to separate from him; he forbade her from sharing the same house. Years later, Francesca’s brother would write in the book Il bersaglio -The Target-, that the attack and Giovanni’s decisions “had rather serious consequences for the couple (...) she was very shaken, and it severely affected their family life, because during the entire summer, at night my sister would return to Palermo while he remained there (in the villa at Addaura). (...) This, of course, had practical repercussions and concrete inconveniences, along with the emotional shock that all of it caused her.” Francesca knew that her place was by Giovanni’s side, and she insisted on staying with him. They spent the days together, but at night she was escorted back to her home in Palermo. The same argument repeated again and again. A journalist friend of Giovanni, who once witnessed one of their many arguments, recounted: “I saw that Falcone was carrying a gun [...] at one point he asked his wife to step outside, and they argued because he didn’t want her at the Addaura villa. At least that night, they had argued almost the entire time, because she wanted to stay, and he insisted she leave. Falcone told her, *‘Do you understand that I have to stay lucid? I have to remain lucid. I have to understand, I have to think. And if I’m thinking about myself, I can’t be thinking about you.’”

The risk was high. The attacks by the mafia and parts of the State against Giovanni nearly forced him to leave the island. In 1991, Giovanni was transferred to the Ministry of Justice in Rome. His work in Palermo had become extremely difficult, and he believed he could do more for the fight against the mafia from a distance, in the nation's capital. To be near him, Francesca requested her own transfer to Rome, joining the Examining Commission for the Judicial Entry Exams. The relatively peaceful time in Rome for Giovanni and Francesca was abruptly interrupted on August 9, 1991, when Judge Antonino Scopelliti — who had supported Giovanni’s legal arguments before the Court of Cassation — was murdered. At his colleague’s funeral, Giovanni was once again made aware of the deadly consequences of his mission and vocation. He understood that no matter how far he moved from Sicily, Sicily would always be there. “If they’ve decided, they won’t stop. Now I’m next,” he said. And he was right. A team of assassins, led by Matteo Messina Denaro, the so-called prince of the mafia, reached Rome and attempted to kill Giovanni, TV host Maurizio Costanzo — who had mocked the mafia — and the Minister of Justice, Claudio Martelli.

Francesca’s last professional duty took place on May 22, 1992, at the Ergife Palace Hotel in Rome, as part of the commission examining candidates for the judiciary. Although she was fully aware of the life-threatening risks involved in staying by her husband’s side, Francesca refused to change her lifestyle. She constantly encouraged Giovanni to keep fighting the mafia. Francesca was a serene and discreet woman, but her role in Giovanni’s life was so vital that many of the couple’s friends later claimed that the Falcone we came to know might not have had such strength and determination without her. On May 23, 1992, Giovanni and Francesca arrived in Palermo. He sat in the driver's seat and the woman he loved — and who loved him — sat beside him. In the back seat was Giuseppe Costanza, the chauffeur-bodyguard assigned to drive the couple. At 5:57 p.m., their vehicle, accompanied by two others, was driving along Highway A29, near the Capaci exit, just outside Palermo. One minute later, at exactly 5:58 p.m., a 500-kilogram TNT bomb hidden in a drainage tunnel under the highway was detonated.

Mural in tribute to Francesca Morvillo in the city of Corleone.

The first car in the convoy, a brown Fiat Croma, was hit directly by the explosion and thrown off the highway, instantly killing agents Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani, and Rocco Dicillo. The second car — a white Croma driven by Giovanni — crashed into the wall of asphalt and rubble suddenly raised by the blast. The couple was thrown violently against the windshield. Giuseppe Costanza, the driver who had once again given the wheel to Giovanni, survived. The three agents in the third car — Paolo Capuzza, Gaspare Cervelló, and Angelo Corbo, in the blue Croma — were injured but also survived. After the immediate chaos, the three surviving officers lined up to protect Giovanni and Francesca, fearing that the killers would arrive to deliver the final blow.

Giovanni and Francesca were still alive, thanks to locals who rushed to the scene. Francesca was pulled through the car window. But to free Giovanni from the mangled wreckage, the firefighters had to be called. Giovanni died at 7:05 p.m., in the arms of his friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino, after suffering numerous cardiac arrests. Francesca was taken to Cervelló Hospital, then transferred to Palermo’s Civic Hospital, where she died around 10 p.m. from the severity of her internal injuries. While still conscious in her hospital bed, she uttered her last words: “Where is Giovanni?” Judge Francesca Morvillo died at 46 years old. Francesca's love knew no bounds. She was a strong-willed woman, with her own life, her own personality, who had chosen a difficult love — one that, due to risk and security, could never be lived as she truly wished. Together with her husband, they had been condemned by the mafia never to be alone, to share every intimate moment with the agents that formed their security detail — even in the moment of death.

Francesca was buried next to Giovanni in the Falcone family chapel in Sant'Orsola Cemetery, Palermo. After June 3, 2015, when Giovanni’s remains were moved to Palermo’s Pantheon — the Church of San Domenico — Francesca was moved by decision of the Palermo City Council to a chapel in the Santa Maria dei Rotoli Cemetery. What life had tried to separate day by day, only the living — after death — succeeded in parting. The Falcone Foundation ended up dividing the couple’s eternal rest, assigning them different fates. Fortunately, human decisions do not affect souls.

Every year, on May 23, a long series of commemorative events are held in Palermo and Capaci to honor the lives of Judge Giovanni Falcone, Judge Francesca Morvillo, and escort agents Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo, and Antonio Montinaro. Francesca was awarded the Gold Medal for Civil Valor. She has been honored with the naming of the First Reception Center for Minors in Palermo, a plaque by the students of Malaspina, and a memorial plaque in the Agrigento Court. The volunteer group of the Libera association in Genoa also bears her name. Several properties confiscated from the mafia now carry her name as well. Francesca Morvillo is the only female judge on that long list of people who have sacrificed their lives to help free society from the violence of organized crime. The gentleness of this remarkable woman — beautiful, professionally accomplished, and close to a brilliant “loser” who was ahead of his time — is a virtue that invites reflection on the sacrifice made by her and by the many martyrs of Italian history, who carried out their work with the sole intention of upholding justice and legality.