PAOLO BORSELLINO: THE ANTIMAFIA EXAMPLE

Paolo Borsellino was an Italian magistrate who, together with his friend and colleague Giovanni Falcone, led numerous prosecutions against the Sicilian mafia, including the "Maxiprocesso di Palermo" in 1986. Here is part of his story.

Paolo Borsellino, an anti-mafia worker.

On July 19, 1992, anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino was having lunch with his wife Agnese and their children, Manfredi and Lucia, in a seaside town between Terrasini and Capaci. After the family gathering, Paolo set off to keep an appointment he had arranged just minutes earlier with his mother. He had told her he would visit her that afternoon at her home on Via Mariano d'Amelio 21, a dead-end street that mainly serves as a parking lot for local residents. In that apartment—supposedly protected by security forces due to the high risk involved in being a relative of the mafia’s top enemy—the mafia, in collusion with corrupt elements of the Italian secret services (who at the time were negotiating with the Cosa Nostra to put an end to the massacres), had parked a Fiat 126 loaded with hundreds of kilograms of trinitrotoluene (TNT) several days earlier. Paolo arrived in a convoy of three cars, accompanied by his six bodyguards. Among them was Emanuela Loi, a very young police officer of only twenty-four years. When she was first assigned to his security detail, Paolo had responded to her nervous and respectful introduction with a mix of surprise, admiration, and warmth: "And she’s supposed to protect me? I should be protecting her." When Paolo got out of the car, his escort followed, and together they walked toward the building entrance. At 4:58 p.m., a remote control—though some versions still suggest the explosives were connected to his mother’s intercom buzzer—detonated the bomb hidden in the Fiat 126 parked for days on that dead-end street, right in front of the home of the mafia’s primary target’s mother. The explosion annihilated and tore apart the bodies of Paolo and five of his six escorts: Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina, and Claudio Traina. In addition to taking the lives of six State officials, injuring twenty-four people, destroying building façades, and incinerating dozens of nearby vehicles, the blast also extinguished what little hope remained among a large portion of the Italian—especially Sicilian—people who believed in justice and in the men and women who upheld the rule of law. In physics, in politics, and in human emotions, voids are naturally filled by something else. The hope that vanished in the smoke of that bomb was soon replaced by a powerful, solid anger—an outrage and fury that can, at times, serve as a far more explosive and mobilizing force than more culturally accepted, genuine feelings. Sicilians took to the balconies, the streets, and the cathedral, demanding the mafia be expelled from the very core of the State.

Paolo Emanuele Borsellino was born on January 19, 1940. He was the second child in a middle-class family that would grow to include three more children: Adele (two years older), Salvatore (three years younger), and Rita (five years younger). The Borsellino family lived in Palermo, in the populous Kalsa neighborhood, known for its Arab roots. Tall and slim for his age, with a neatly styled quiff slightly falling over his forehead, Paolo attended primary school in the mornings, and in the afternoons, he shared time and space with the boy who, through work, friendship, and the shared risk of assassination, would become almost like a fourth brother—future magistrate Giovanni Falcone.

June 27, 1962: Paolo Borsellino becomes Italy's youngest magistrate.

In high school, Paolo attended the Liceo Giovanni Meli, where he directed the school newspaper Ágora and began to engage directly with the political issues of the time, which were deeply influenced by postwar themes. After finishing school in the late 1950s, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Palermo, where he was not only an excellent student but also continued to deepen his political involvement. He quickly joined the National University Action Front (FUAN)—the student organization affiliated with the Italian Social Movement (MSI)—and soon became a prominent regional leader. His involvement with the MSI, a party on the fringes of the political spectrum that openly saw itself as the guardian of Italy’s fascist legacy, stemmed from a family tradition aligned with classical right-wing politics. The political fervor of those years and the clashes between student groups were not always settled diplomatically; they often ended in brawls and physical altercations, which frequently led to arrests and court appearances. In one of those many scuffles, Paolo ended up before magistrate Cesare Terranova—the future pioneer of modern judicial strategies in the fight against the mafia—who ruled that Paolo bore no responsibility for the incident.

On December 23, 1968, Paolo and Agnese married shortly after beginning their relationship.

In 1962, at just twenty-two years old, Paolo Borsellino graduated with honors in law, earning top marks. However, the promising legal career that awaited him had to be put on hold due to the sudden death of his father. This event compelled him to take over the family business—a pharmacy—until his younger sister Rita completed her degree in pharmacy and could take over its management. While ensuring his family’s well-being, Borsellino passed the Italian judiciary entrance exam in 1963, becoming the youngest magistrate in the history of the country. His judicial career took him across the Salso River, beginning in the central and impenetrable region of Enna in 1965. Two years later, he moved to Trapani province, in the city of Mazara del Vallo, where he began his judicial involvement in mafia-related investigations. It was also in that region where he met his future wife, Agnese Piraino Leto, a young university student and daughter of Angelo Piraino Leto, president of the Palermo Court. They fell in love quickly—Paolo was twenty-eight, Agnese twenty-five. Soon after they began dating, they decided to get married. In 1960s Italy—especially in Sicily, in Trapani—a relationship that moved so swiftly toward marriage inevitably sparked all kinds of speculation, which quickly turned into rumors of pregnancy or “modern ideas.” The couple lived in Palermo, and every day Paolo would take the first train in the morning to reach his office in Mazara del Vallo, more than 120 kilometers away. They married in 1968. Paolo was deeply fulfilled by the love Agnese gave him and the constant support he could always count on. He knew that she could have fallen in love with someone else—someone who could offer her a comfortable, luxurious life more in line with the expectations for the daughter of a prominent Italian judge. Paolo would laugh and say, “You’re with me because I stimulate you, I challenge you, I bring you the good news hidden in the many stories of everyday life. I’ll tell you all the stories you want. That way, ours will be a novel that never ends, as long as I live.” Paolo’s commitment to anti-mafia investigations—at a time when the ancient mafia was undergoing one of its many metamorphoses, venturing into large-scale drug trafficking and money laundering through the real estate business—advanced his career, requiring him to change offices, buildings, and regions frequently. In 1969, he was appointed magistrate in Monreale, much closer to Palermo, and therefore, in an area with significant mafia presence. There, police officials such as Emanuele Basile, captain of the Carabinieri, and Boris Giuliano, chief of Palermo’s Mobile Squad, were leading investigations into mafia families that controlled heroin trafficking to the United States and Europe.

Rocco Chinnici and Paolo Borsellino.

Cesare Terranova, the same magistrate who once faced a young Paolo in court for fighting with leftist groups during his university days, was leading several legal cases against Cosa Nostra. He prosecuted more than a hundred mafiosi involved in the First Mafia War, investigated Sicilian Christian Democratic Party leaders and their ties to the mafia—particularly the faction that concentrated power around Palermo until the 1980s—and collaborated with Pio La Torre, a deputy and trade unionist, in drafting a new anti-mafia law while both were serving as members of parliament for the Communist Party. As soon as his time in national politics ended, Terranova requested to return to the judiciary and was appointed chief investigating judge of the Palermo Court, the same place where Paolo had been working for the previous four years. But the mafia had begun implementing a new tactic: eliminating State officials who stood in its way. In July 1979, Boris Giuliano, chief of Palermo's Mobile Squad, was murdered at the Lux Bar, and in September, the mafia—asserting what it saw as its dominion by right of violence and tradition—refused to tolerate the return of an independent judge to its territory. Terranova, having spent seven years in the capital and returning with more connections than when he had left, was seen as a threat. On September 25, Cesare Terranova was assassinated along with his escort and friend, Lenin Mancuso. When he returned to Palermo, Terranova had tried to reassure his wife, saying the mafia would never dare touch judges. He would become the first in a long line of magistrates assassinated by the mafia. Just a few months later, on May 4, 1980, Carabinieri Captain Emanuele Basile was killed, and on August 6, Prosecutor Gaetano Costa was also assassinated.

As the danger to State officials confronting the mafia grew daily, police escorts were increasingly assigned as a standard precaution. Paolo, his wife, and their three children were no exception. Despite the mafia’s advances, Judge Rocco Chinnici formed a special task force of magistrates and police officers dedicated exclusively to prosecuting mafia organizations. The anti-mafia pool, led by Chinnici and made up of Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, Gioacchino Natoli, Giuseppe Di Lello, and Leonardo Guarnotta, began gathering and processing police reports and judicial cases that had previously seemed disconnected, aiming to centralize information on Cosa Nostra, which they had begun to recognize as a highly structured, hierarchical organization. The group was made up of committed experts—true public servants who understood their work as a profound responsibility. They also shared a deep sense of mutual respect, trust, and personal affection. So much so that Rocco Chinnici entrusted his daughter, a young lawyer, to Paolo’s guidance and protection. While this new working structure was starting to show results, Cosa Nostra continued its killing spree: in 1982, Pio La Torre—legislative partner of Cesare Terranova—and his colleague Rosario Di Salvo were gunned down. A few months later, General and Palermo Prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, along with his wife, was murdered. In 1983, Rocco Chinnici himself was assassinated.

The leadership of the anti-mafia pool was then passed to Florentine judge Antonino Caponnetto, who focused their efforts on building a massive criminal case, based on testimony from two pentiti -mafia turncoats-, as well as on financial and banking records tracing the assets of mafiosi, their associates, and complicit politicians. By the early 1980s, a faction of mafiosi from the small town of Corleone had violently seized power within Cosa Nostra, ousting the previous leadership that had prevailed during the First Mafia War. Under Salvatore Riina, the Corleonesi issued orders to kill entire extended families, up to the twentieth degree of relation, if they couldn’t reach their main target. One of the greatest personal tragedies of that internal war was suffered by Tommaso Buscetta, a high-ranking associate of the Porta Nuova mafia clan. In just a few years, hitmen from the new Cosa Nostra leadership murdered eleven members of his family, including two sons, a brother, a nephew, a son-in-law, and four other nephews. Buscetta had once been one of the many teenagers who, four decades earlier, shared playgrounds and street corners with Paolo and Giovanni Falcone in the Kalsa neighborhood. At that time, he was a fugitive from Italian justice. Under the alias Paolo Roberto Felici, he had taken refuge in Brazil, hiding both from law enforcement and the Corleonesi. On October 23, 1983, he was arrested in São Paulo at a mansion where he was staying with his wife, four children, and the son of another mafioso. Following his arrest, he was transferred to Brasília, where for over a year, he received multiple visits from Italian judicial officials—including Giovanni Falcone—who tried to persuade him to become a collaborator with justice, a “pentito,” which in mafia culture also meant becoming an infamous traitor. He politely but firmly rejected all offers and benefits. At one point, he even tried to commit suicide to avoid being extradited to Italy—but failed.

Giuseppe Di Lello, Paolo Borsellino, Leonardo Guarnotta, Giovanni Falcone and Antonino Caponnetto. Photo by Franco Zecchin.

That firm stance taken by Buscetta began to waver when he arrived in Rome, escorted by Italian security forces, covering his handcuffed wrists with a blanket. He was eventually housed at Police Headquarters in Rome. Immediately after his extradition, he agreed to collaborate with the anti-mafia pool, particularly with Giovanni Falcone—the man he had briefly met when both were teenagers, and with whom he had never crossed paths again until that moment, each having chosen completely opposite life paths. The investigation into Cosa Nostra continued, now bolstered by the testimony of another pentito—or infamous traitor, depending on one's viewpoint—Salvatore Contorno, who corroborated Buscetta’s declarations and gave the inquiry a renewed momentum. The mounting pressure from the judiciary and law enforcement provoked a reaction from the leaders of Cosa Nostra. In 1985, they ordered a new wave of assassinations. In July, police officer Beppe Montana was murdered. When Paolo arrived at the scene of the crime together with police chief Ninni Cassarà, the latter told him: “Let’s convince ourselves that we are walking corpses.” A phrase loaded with quiet despair and chilling foresight, which proved prophetic just one month later—in August—when Ninni Cassarà and Roberto Antiochia were killed. Three of the closest collaborators of the anti-mafia pool were assassinated in the span of two months, and rumors began circulating on the streets of Palermo and through the corridors of the Palace of Justice: Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone would be Cosa Nostra’s next targets. Given the extreme threat to their lives, and in order to complete the indictment that would bring more than 700 mafiosi to trial on charges of being part of or aiding Cosa Nostra, the two friends and colleagues—Paolo and Giovanni—along with their families, were relocated to the high-security prison of Asinara, on the island of Sardinia. They all lived together for over a month, behind reinforced walls, bars, and fences. Paolo was burdened with guilt over having brought his family into such a hostile, sterile, and depressing environment—particularly due to the eating disorder suffered by his sixteen-year-old daughter Lucia, brought on by the constant stress, fear, and sense of death that surrounded them. Finally, on November 8, 1985, when both magistrates completed the indictment titled "Abbate, Giovanni + 706", they left the island and returned to their lives on another island: Sicily. A month later, Paolo and Giovanni were charged 415,000 lire to cover the lodging and meals for themselves and their families during their stay at the prison. Such were the peculiarities of the anti-mafia struggle.

The judge was on vacation with two of his three children in the Abruzzo National Park. After May 4, 1980, the entire Borsellino family began living under surveillance.

On February 10, 1986, the mega-trial against Cosa Nostra began. It was called the Maxiprocesso of Palermo, a term that would be used and repeated every time a mafia trial involving a significant number of defendants took place. To hold the trial, 36 billion lire were invested in the construction of a special courtroom. It looked more like a bunker than a courtroom. In fact, it was a bunker—equipped with a defense system and walls resistant to rocket or missile attacks. The courtroom included built-in holding cells, and 850 square meters of bulletproof glass, making it even more secure than Palermo’s Ucciardone prison, where the courtroom was actually built. On December 16, 1987, after 21 months, 638 days, and 349 hearings, the Maxiprocesso of Palermo, which had begun with 475 defendants accused of 120 murders, drug trafficking, extortion, and mafia association, concluded with 339 convictions, including 19 life sentences, a total of 2,665 years in prison, and 11.5 billion lire in fines. The Maxiprocesso had become a true political, judicial, and cultural milestone. It marked a turning point in the fight against the mafia. Immediately after the trial concluded, defense attorneys began preparing appeals, and much of the political establishment focused—not on supporting ongoing investigations—but rather on shutting down those inquiries that posed a threat to their past and vested interests. Paolo Borsellino requested to be appointed as chief prosecutor in Marsala, the most populous city in the province of Trapani. At the same time, Antonino Caponnetto was awaiting the order to return to Florence and hoped to leave his post to Giovanni Falcone. However, under pressure, political influence, and internal rivalries, the High Council of the Judiciary instead appointed Antonino Meli, a veteran magistrate. Once in office, Meli began dismantling what remained of the anti-mafia pool, overloaded its former members with fragmented tasks, and dismantled the collaborative investigative method that had proven so effective against complex criminal organizations. Paolo was one of the first to raise his voice and publicly criticize these decisions made within the Palermo judiciary. In a series of interviews, he openly challenged Meli’s actions, which led to an internal disciplinary proceeding against him—a file that remained open for several years.

Paolo and his daughter Fiammetta.

As chief prosecutor in Marsala, Paolo handled various cases against the mafia, but he was also assigned to investigate the Ustica massacre—the downing, explosion, or crash of an airplane into the Tyrrhenian Sea—as well as the murder of three young girls, a case Paolo continued trying to solve eighteen years later. In 1991, he also had the opportunity to meet Rita Atria, a seventeen-year-old girl, daughter of a murdered mafioso from Partanna, and sister of another mafioso who had been killed while trying to avenge their father’s death. Following the example of her sister-in-law, who had decided to cooperate with the justice system in pursuit of Justice instead of revenge, Rita became the youngest collaborating witness in history. Paolo became a father figure for the young picciridda who had been forced to leave her town, and a mother who, before being a mother, was a widow loyal to the mafia, and who arrived in Rome with more emotional scars than gestures of affection. Paolo tried to encourage Rita to maintain contact with her mother, even though her mother, from a distance and with increasing bitterness, despised her daughter for becoming a collaborator with the justice system. In moments of crisis, Paolo would console her: “Rituzza, I know how hard this is for you. But try to bear with it—after all, she’s still your mother.” Paolo’s fatherly role was not only grounded in his position as an honest and respected magistrate, but also in the fact that, like Rita’s father once had, he could silence her mother’s insults. Paolo was her hero, and Rita felt that, through her commitment and the information she had provided, she had become his right-hand ally. Meanwhile, the stalling of anti-mafia investigations, caused by the obstructions from certain sectors of the political and judicial class, led Falcone to move to Rome, where he accepted the position of Director of Penal Affairs at the Ministry of Justice.

A historic image for the Italian people that became a mural, a stamp, and flags: Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

In March 1992, Paolo transferred from Marsala to Palermo as Deputy Prosecutor. He sought to close ongoing investigations that had begun thanks to the collaboration of Vincenzo Calcara, a detained mafioso who, in addition to revealing information about Cosa Nostra and Sicilian politicians, confessed that he had been tasked with assassinating Paolo himself. Meanwhile, in Rome, Giovanni Falcone was facing renewed criticism for promoting a new package of laws aimed at centralizing anti-mafia investigations, toughening penalties for mafia-related crimes, and allowing for the dissolution of municipalities infiltrated by the mafia. Magistrates and politicians who had long opposed Falcone resumed their public attacks, accusing him of trying to concentrate anti-mafia power in his own hands through this legal reform. The surprise came when Paolo also opposed the proposal, though his objections had nothing to do with the arguments made by others. Paolo’s position stemmed solely from strategic legal differences with his friend Giovanni.

Paolo next to the coffin of his friend Giovanni Falcone.

Falcone and his wife, Judge Francesca Morvillo, often traveled from Rome to Sicily. When their plane landed, his assigned security detail was already waiting for him on the tarmac. On May 23, 1992, this routine continued. As their convoy approached the entrance to the city of Capaci, at the A29 motorway exit toward Palermo, the earth split open, and hell erupted. At 5:57 PM, at the height of Capaci, the first car in the convoy exploded directly over the bomb. It was launched over 200 meters into a field of olive and lemon trees near the highway. All passengers died instantly. The second car crashed head-on into a concrete block raised by the destroyed road. The third car managed to stop, colliding with the second, but all its occupants survived. The bodyguard and driver of the second car—who was serving only as a bodyguard that day—managed to exit the vehicle on his own. Francesca was trapped in the vehicle and rescued by the few people who had come close to the scene. Giovanni, however, had to wait for firefighters to free him. His unconscious body was slumped over the steering wheel, pinned inside the wreckage. After both were rescued from the twisted metal, Giovanni and Francesca were taken to two different hospitals. Their conditions were extremely critical, with multiple fractures, contusions, and internal bleeding complicating the prognosis. Giovanni was admitted to the Civic Hospital of Palermo, where he suffered repeated cardiac arrests for over an hour. Despite all efforts, doctors were unable to save him. Giovanni Falcone died at 7:05 PM on May 23, 1992, in the presence of his friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino, who, upon hearing of the attack, had immediately rushed to the scene.

Two days later, a joint state funeral was held for all the victims at the Church of San Domenico, on Via Roma in Palermo. Giovanni, Francesca, Vito, Rocco, and Antonio were honored. On May 25, 1992, a crowd of Sicilians gathered outside the church to pay tribute and farewell to their State heroes—their heroes. But instead, they found themselves face to face with the very officials who had criticized, slandered, and abandoned Giovanni Falcone in his fight against the mafia. When the crowd recognized the presence of these politicians, they reacted violently, shouting and attacking them until they fled, fearing they might be lynched. Paolo was there, but distant. His vacant gaze followed every movement made by the people during the funeral. He was present but elsewhere, never straying far from the coffin holding the body of his friend and colleague. Perhaps even in that very moment, he had begun to think he would be next, that it would be his family who would have to endure a similar tragedy.

The last photo of Paolo taken 13 days earlier in the company of friends in an attempt to regain the normalcy lost after the murder of his friend and colleague Giovanni Falcone.

Paolo would often say that he didn’t have much time left: "when they kill me"—as a walking corpse, he had to move quickly and try to lose by just a little against time. He continued working on the investigations already underway, but he became deeply involved in trying to clarify the attack against Giovanni, and he tried to put pressure on political authorities: “... the country, the State, the judiciary—which may be the most guilty of all—began to let him (Falcone) die precisely on January 1, 1988... That’s when the race began for the succession to the Palermo Court’s investigating office. Falcone entered the competition, but immediately some Judas made a mockery of it, and on my birthday, the Superior Council of the Judiciary gave us this gift: they chose Antonino Meli.” Immediately after the attack, the Italian State implemented a strict isolation regime for mafia convicts in prison—Article 41-bis—which led the leadership of Cosa Nostra to intensify its attacks on the State. Amid all this, Paolo was informed of conversations between corrupt sectors of the State—politicians, intelligence services, law enforcement, and mafiosi—aimed at stopping the massacres in Sicily. The media began to compare the situation in Palermo to the Lebanese civil war, which had just ended after fifteen years. Paolo trusted no one. The news that negotiations were taking place after the assassination of the greatest symbol in the fight against the mafia struck him deeply. It began killing him slowly, over the course of 57 days. The so-called "trattativa" (negotiation) between the mafia and the State—as was later judicially proven many years later—was an attempt by Cosa Nostra to improve prison conditions, shut down ongoing investigations, and halt the bombings and murders in exchange for these concessions. Paolo learned key details about these negotiations and grew increasingly suspicious of those around him. His wife, Agnese, would later recount a few conversations they had in July 1992. While smoking on their balcony, Paolo told her: “I’ve seen the Mafia face to face. They told me that General Subranni is punciutu”—a punciutu being someone who has undergone the mafia initiation ritual. Antonio Subranni was the commander of the ROS, the Special Operations Group, part of the Carabinieri. Another conversation—which Agnese remembered even more vividly—took place on July 18, early in the morning, while they were walking alone along the beach, without bodyguards, just the two of them as when they first met at 28 and 25 years old, walking along the beaches of Mazara del Vallo: “It won’t be the Mafia that kills me. It will be others. And it will happen because someone will allow it to happen—and among them, there will also be a colleague.”

The rage of Sicilians after the attack on Paolo Borsellino and his bodyguards.

On July 19, 1992, at 4:58 PM, everything ended. These were the words of Magistrate Antonino Caponnetto, minutes after the attack that killed Paolo, Emanuela, Agostino, Vincenzo, Walter, and Claudio. Shaken and confused, Caponnetto staggered as he tried to get into a car, and was questioned by a journalist—his grief overwhelming him once again. In the days following what came to be known as the Via D’Amelio massacre, the families of the murdered bodyguards held a joint funeral in Palermo’s Cathedral. Images from that day spread around the world: Palermitans filled the streets and overwhelmed the 4,000 police officers guarding the site. The crowd jumped fences, pushed back officers, and confronted the State officials who had come to the funeral. The shouts and insults were many, but over time, anger guided the crowd toward a single chant: "Take the Mafia out of the State!" On July 24, Paolo’s funeral was held at Santa Maria Luisa de Marillac Church. His family had rejected a State funeral, choosing instead something intimate and private, excluding the politicians who had authorized or allowed Paolo’s murder. But more than ten thousand citizens—stripped of hope, yet filled with rage—came to the church to say goodbye to the man they already saw as a hero.

Paolo’s assassination has always been surrounded by a sea of suspicions regarding the direct involvement of corrupt sectors of the State. Years later, repentant members of Cosa Nostra, who turned State witnesses, declared that during the preparation of the Fiat 126 car bomb, at least one person was present whom they didn’t know at all—possibly a spy. To this day, judicial investigations continue to uncover the complicity and collusion between certain State officials and the Mafia. The anti-mafia culture and movement, which is deeply rooted in Italian society and has brought real benefits, lives on thanks to the work and dedication of people like Paolo—and many others. Numerous schools and associations bear his name. So does the Punta Raisi Airport in Palermo, as well as many streets, avenues, classrooms, and monuments.