Murder of Judge Falcone: The plot that changed Italy

30 years ago today, mafia hunter Giovanni Falcone was killed by a bomb in Sicily. The assassination is burned into Italy’s national memory.

Miraculously, Giuseppe Costanza survived the attack. “They found me passed out in the back seat. They thought I wouldn’t make it either. They had already prepared the coffin for me. But then I woke up.” Giovanni Falcone’s driver is on his way from Palermo airport to Capaci, just like 30 years ago.

At that time, exceptionally, he sat in the back, Judge Falcone drove himself. The Mafia had deposited the bomb in a drain pipe below the street and remotely detonated it around 6 p.m. 500 kilograms of TNT explosive tore a huge crater in the asphalt, the highway was blown away. In addition to Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards died. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra had struck.

There were protests in many places

Nothing was the same for Costanza after May 23. Just like in his native Sicily. People gathered in front of Falcone’s house in Palermo and hung photos, drawings and messages of peace on a fig tree. There were protests in many places, people reacted and became active.

Before that, as the mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, recalls, it was different. In the 1970s and 1980s it wasn’t just the mafia that existed. “The mafia had the face of corrupt bishops, mafia-like ministers, it had the face of people who didn’t speak, couldn’t hear or see and who became allies of the mafia because they gave up their freedom and their dignity.”

A second murder a few weeks later

Falcone had not been dissuaded, he brought hundreds of Mafiosi to the dock. In the so-called Maxi-Trial from the mid-1980s, he worked meticulously and undeterred as an investigating judge. Numerous criminals were sentenced to long prison terms. He worked hand-in-hand with his childhood friend, judge Paolo Borsellino. He too was murdered by the Sicilian Mafia a few weeks after Falcone.

During the investigation, Falcone had a lot to do with US police forces, says Italy’s top mafia hunter, Maurizio Vallone, who heads the anti-mafia agency DIA. From this American experience, Falcone understood the need to centralize work and take the new model to the international level to fight organized crime. This laid the foundation for the Direzione Investigative Antimafia, together with the special Antimafia public prosecutors.

“Follow the Money”

With the assassination of the civil servant Falcone, the fight against the mafia is now a national task, and the whole country seems to have been ripped out of a lethargy. Mayor Orlando, who is himself under police protection for his fight against the mafia, believes that 1992 saw the transition from the isolated struggle of a few prosecutors, a few churchmen, a few politicians and a few businessmen to a people’s struggle.

Italy passed tough anti-mafia laws that arrested bosses and members of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Calabrian N’drangheta or the Neapolitan Camorra. Following Falcone’s motto – “Follow the money” – the investigators reconstruct the origin and destination of money flows and uncover money laundering.

Mafia in the Metaverse

But organized crime has also become modern. The N’drangheta, the most powerful organization, has been paying for drug trafficking with bitcoin and other electronic currencies for more than 15 years, according to DIA director Vallone. “Today, the mafia is more present in the metaverse than in the dark network worlds, some of which are still unknown.

The challenge is therefore to do justice to the players at international level in the face of these high-tech issues. “Because they allow the gangsters to communicate with each other, move money around and launder large sums of money that come from illegal trafficking, especially drug trafficking.”

“The mafia is not invincible”

Mafiosi feel at home in the metaverse, which creates a reality in a digital way. According to Vallone, they graduated from the most important universities in the world, such as MIT near Boston or in London. Now, for example, you could set up a virtual casino in the virtual world and earn electronic money.

The mafia also uses NFTs – non-fungible tokens. These are unique and unchangeable and will be stored on the blockchain. This allows money to be moved without being able to track it immediately. Mafia hunter Vallone is still confident, he reminds of what Falcone always said. “The mafia is not invincible, it is a human factor. And like all human things, it has a beginning and it will have an end.”

30 years after Falcone’s death, his successors, like Vallone, are convinced that the Mafia will end. The question, however, is how quickly that will happen.