The via D'Amelio bombing (Italian: Strage di via D'Amelio) was a terrorist attack by the Sicilian Mafia, which took place in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, on 19 July 1992.[1] It killed Paolo Borsellino, the anti-Mafia Italian magistrate, and five members of his police escort: Agostino Catalano, Emanuela Loi (the first Italian female member of a police escort and the first to be killed on duty), Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina, and Claudio Traina.[2]
The so-called agenda rossa, the red notebook in which Borsellino used to write down details of his investigations and which he always carried with him, disappeared from the site in the moments after the explosion. A carabinieri officer who was present when the explosion occurred reported he had delivered the notebook to Giuseppe Ayala, the first Palermo magistrate to arrive at the scene. Ayala, who said he had refused to receive it, was later criticized for saying escorts to anti-mafia judges should be reduced, despite evidence of further failed attempts to kill them in subsequent years.[3]
Bombing
The bombing occurred at 16:58 on 19 July 1992, 57 days after the Capaci bombing, in which Borsellino's friend, anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, had been killed with his wife and police escort. The only survivor of the escort in the bombing, Antonino Vullo, said the judge had stayed in his summer residence outside Palermo from 13:30 to around 16:00, when he and the escort drove to Via D'Amelio in the Sicilian capital, where he was to meet his mother. When they arrived, Vullo and the other agents noticed nothing unusual except some parked cars. The car in which Borsellino had been travelling exploded, along with one of the escort cars, while Vullo was sitting in a third car.[4]
The bomb, containing some 100 kilograms (220lb) of TNT, had been placed in a Fiat 126.[5] Normal procedure when Borsellino travelled was to clear the road of cars before his arrival, but this was not allowed by the administration of the comune of Palermo, as reported by another anti-mafia judge, Antonino Caponnetto.[5]Gaspare Spatuzza, a mafioso who later became a pentito, eventually revealed he had stolen the Fiat 126 on the orders of the Graviano and Brancaccio mafia clans.[6]
The bloodbath provoked outrage. The night after, protesters peacefully besieged the prefecture of Palermo. Borsellino's funeral saw vehement protests by the crowd against the participants; the national police chief, Arturo Parisi, was struck while trying to escape. A few days later, questore (local police commander) Vito Plantone and prefetto Mario Jovine were transferred. The chief prosecutor of Palermo, Pietro Giammanco, resigned. Meanwhile, 7,000 soldiers were sent to Sicily to patrol roads and possible locations for attacks.[7]
Aftermath
Borsellino used to carry a red notebook, the so-called agenda rossa, in which he wrote down details of his investigations before making an official record in judicial reports. His colleagues were not given access to the agenda rossa.[citation needed]
Carabinieri officer Rosario Farinella said later that, after recovering the agenda rossa from the car, he gave it to Ayala.[8][pageneeded] Ayala said he was staying in a hotel nearby and rushed to the place after hearing the explosion. He initially stumbled on the corpse of Borsellino without recognizing it, as the body of the dead judge was limbless. Ayala said "an officer in uniform" had offered him the notebook,[3] but that he had refused it because he lacked authority. Carabinieri captain Arcangioli said he was not wearing uniform at the scene.[3] In September 2005, Ayala changed his version, saying he took the agenda rossa while exploring the destroyed car and later gave it to a carabinieri officer who was there. Ayala's subsequent statements speak of an agent alternately in uniform and not in uniform.[3]
On 1 July 1992 Borsellino had held a meeting with Nicola Mancino, who at the time had just been appointed Minister of the Interior. Details of the meeting have never been disclosed, but it is likely that Borsellino had annotated them in his agenda. Mancino, however, always denied having met Borsellino.[3] In a television interview of 24 July 2009, Ayala said, "Mancino himself told me that he had met Borsellino on 1 July 1992. Moreover, Mancino showed me his appointments book, with the name of Borsellino on it."[3] Ayala repudiated this account in an interview in Sette magazine. A video showing Arcangioli holding the agenda rossa while inspecting the bombing area was aired in news on Italian state channel Rai 1 in 2006.[9]
A personal diary in the possession of Borsellino's family has an annotation by the judge that reads: "1 July h 19:30: Mancino".[10] Vittorio Aliquò, another magistrate, later said he had accompanied Borsellino "up to the threshold of the minister's office".[11]
A memorial in Via D'Amelio
Investigations and sentences
In July 2007, the prosecutor's office in Caltanissetta opened an investigation into the possible involvement of agents from SISDE, Italy's civil intelligence service, in the massacre.[12] At the same time, a letter from Borsellino's brother Salvatore was published. Entitled 19 luglio 1992: Una strage di stato ("19 July 1992: A state massacre"), the letter supports the hypothesis that Minister of the Interior Mancino knew the reasons for the magistrate's assassination. Salvatore Borsellino wrote:[13]
I ask senator Mancino, who shed a tear, I remember, during a commemoration of Paolo in Palermo in the years after 1992, to strain his memory to tell us what they talked about in the meeting with Paolo in the days immediately before his death. Or to explain why, after phoning my brother to meet him when he was interrogating Gaspare Mutolo [a mafia pentito] just 48 hours before the massacre, he had him meet Police Chief Parisi and Bruno Contrada [an SISDE officer who was later convicted for leaking details of investigations to mafiosi], a meeting that disturbed Paolo so much that he was seen holding two lit cigarettes at the same time... That meeting surely holds the key to his death and to the massacre of Via D'Amelio.
Investigations held by police telecommunications expert Gioacchino Genchi attested the presence of an undercover SISDE installation in Castello Utveggio, an Art Nouveau castle on Monte Pellegrino, a mountain overlooking Palermo and Via D'Amelio. This was discovered by analyzing the phone calls of mafia boss Gaetano Scotto, who called a SISDE phone in the castle.[14] Scotto's brother Pietro had done maintenance work on phone lines in Via D'Amelio; it was later discovered that Pietro had tapped Borsellino's mother's phone to obtain confirmation of Borsellino's arrival before the massacre. All trace of SISDE disappeared from Castello Utveggio immediately after the assassination. Mafia boss Totò Riina spoke about the presence of the Italian intelligence service on Monte Pellegrino on 22 May 2004, in the trial relating to the Via dei Georgofili bombing.[15] In an interview on the Italian state TV documentary show La storia siamo noi (History is Us), Borsellino's widow said he, in the days before the massacre, had her close the shutters on the windows because "they can observe us from Castello Utveggio".[16]
The first investigations led to the arrest of Vincenzo Scarantino on 26 September 1992, accused by pentiti of having stolen the car used in the explosion. Scarantino later became a pentito himself. The magistrates also discovered the phone of Borsellino's mother had been tapped. A first trial for the massacre ended on 26 January 1996, with Scarantino sentenced to 18 years in prison, while Giuseppe Orofino, Salvatore Profeta and Pietro Scotto, those who prepared the bomb and intercepted the phone, were sentenced to life imprisonment.[17] Scotto and Orofino were acquitted on appeal. A second trial was started in 1999 after Scarantino changed his statements; this time, Salvatore Riina, Pietro Aglieri, Salvatore Biondino, Carlo Greco, Giuseppe Graviano, Gaetano Scotto and Francesco Tagliavia were sentenced to life imprisonment.[18] A third trial in 2002 involved 26 other mafia bosses who had been involved in the massacre in various ways, ending with life sentences for Bernardo Provenzano, Pippo Calò, Michelangelo La Barbera, Raffaele Ganci, Domenico Ganci, Francesco Madonia, Giuseppe Montalto, Filippo Graviano, Cristoforo Cannella, Salvatore Biondo, and another Salvatore Biondo.[17]
In 1992, the Italian political world was shaken by the Mani Pulite (clean hands) corruption scandal, after which most of the parties that had been the traditional political supporters of the mafia would disappear. In 2009, Massimo Ciancimino, son of the mafioso former mayor of Palermo Vito Ciancimino, said the Italian establishment and the mafia had been negotiating a pact in those days. Among other things, the agreement would involve the creation of a new party, Forza Italia, with the help of founder Silvio Berlusconi's chief collaborator, Marcello Dell'Utri, who was later convicted of allegiance to the mafia.[19]
After the new revelations, Sicilian attorneys started new investigations based on the hypothesis that Borsellino knew of the negotiations between the mafia, SISDE and senior politicians, and that he was assassinated because of this knowledge.[20] The existence of negotiations between Italian institutions and the Sicilian mafia was confirmed in 2012 by Caltanissetta prosecutor Nico Gozzo as "by now an established fact".[21]
The prosecutor in Caltanissetta reopened investigations[22] after Gaspare Spatuzza, a Mafia killer who became a state witness (pentito) in 2008, admitted he stole the Fiat 126 used for the car bomb in the Via D’Amelio attack. His admission contradicted the declarations of Vincenzo Scarantino, who had confessed earlier to stealing the car and whose testimony was the main evidence in previous trials. When confronted with Spatuzza’s statement, Scarantino admitted that he had repeated what some investigating officers had forced him to tell the magistrates.[23] Spatuzza's declaration led to the re-opening of the trial on Borsellino’s murder, which had been concluded in 2003.[24]
Spatuzza claims that his boss, Giuseppe Graviano, told him in 1994 that future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was bargaining with the Mafia, concerning a political-electoral agreement between Cosa Nostra and Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia, in exchange for certain guarantees – such as to stop the 1993 Mafia bomb terror campaign, to force state institutions to moderate their crackdown against the Mafia after the murders of Antimafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellino. Berlusconi had entered politics and won his first term as prime minister in 1994. Berlusconi's right-hand man Marcello Dell'Utri was the intermediary, according to Spatuzza. Dell'Utri has dismissed Spatuzza's allegations as "nonsense".[25][26][27]
Spatuzza's assertions back up previous statements of the pentito Antonino Giuffrè, who said that the Graviano brothers were the intermediaries between Cosa Nostra and Berlusconi. Cosa Nostra decided to back Berlusconi's Forza Italia party from its foundation in 1993, in exchange for help in resolving the Mafia's judicial problems. The Mafia turned to Forza Italia when its traditional contacts in the discredited Christian Democrat party proved unable to protect its members from the rigours of the law.[28] "The statements given by Spatuzza about prime minister Berlusconi are baseless and can be in no way verified," according to Berlusconi’s lawyer and MP for the People of Freedom party (Il Popolo della Libertà, PdL), Niccolò Ghedini.[25]
The alleged negotiations between Dell'Utri and the Mafia followed an earlier attempt with Vito Ciancimino, the local political link for the Corleonesi clan, who supposedly had contacted government officials after the killing of Falcone to negotiate a stop to the killing spree. Borsellino apparently had been informed of the machinations.[29][30] Two former colleagues of Borsellino have told investigators about a meeting with Borsellino in Palermo shortly before his death during which he broke down in tears saying, "A friend has betrayed me, a friend has betrayed me."[22] "My brother's death was a State murder," Paolo's brother Salvatore Borsellino claims. "My brother knew about the negotiations between the Mafia and the state, and this is why he was killed."[22]
On 20 October 2020, Matteo Messina Denaro was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Corte d'Assise for having been one of the instigators of the Via D'Amelio bombing.[31] After his capture in January 2023,[32] the sentence was confirmed on 18 July 2023.[33]
Paolo Emanuele Borsellino was an Italian judge and prosecuting magistrate. From his office in the Palace of Justice in Palermo, Sicily, he spent most of his professional life trying to overthrow the power of the Sicilian Mafia. After a long and distinguished career, culminating in the Maxi Trial in 1986–1987, on 19 July 1992, Borsellino was killed by a car bomb in Via D'Amelio, near his mother's house in Palermo.
Bernardo Provenzano was an Italian mobster and chief of the Sicilian Mafia clan known as the Corleonesi, a Mafia faction that originated in the town of Corleone, and de facto the boss of bosses. His nickname was Binnu u tratturi because, in the words of one informant, "he mows people down". Another nickname was il ragioniere, due to his apparently subtle and low-key approach to running his crime empire, at least in contrast to some of his more violent predecessors.
Giovanni Brusca is an Italian mobster and former member of the Corleonesi clan of the Sicilian Mafia. He played a major role in the 1992 murders of Antimafia Commission prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and businessman Ignazio Salvo, and once stated that he had committed between 100 and 200 murders. Brusca had been sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for Mafia association and multiple murder. He was captured in 1996, turned pentito and his sentence reduced to twenty-six years in prison. In 2021, Brusca was released from prison.
The Maxi Trial was a criminal trial against the Sicilian Mafia that took place in Palermo, Sicily. The trial lasted from 10 February 1986 to 30 January 1992, and was held in a bunker-style courthouse specially constructed for this purpose inside the walls of the Ucciardone prison.
Nicola Mancino is an Italian politician who served as president of the Senate of the Republic from 1996 to 2001. He was also president of Campania's regional parliament from 1965 to 1971, governor of Campania from 1971 to 1972 and Minister of the Interior from 1992 to 1994.
Giuseppe "Pippo" Calò is an Italian mobster and member of the Sicilian Mafia in Porta Nuova. He was referred to as the cassiere di Cosa Nostra because he was heavily involved in the financial side of organized crime, primarily money laundering. He was arrested in 1985 and sentenced to 23 years' imprisonment as part of the 1986/87 Maxi Trial. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1989 for organising the 1984 Train 904 bombing and was given several further life sentences between 1995 and 2002. He was also charged with ordering the murder of Roberto Calvi – nicknamed il banchiere di Dio – of the Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, but was acquitted in 2007 due to "insufficient evidence" in a surprise verdict.
Vittorio Mangano was a member of the Sicilian Mafia, also known as La Cosa Nostra. He was well known as the stable keeper at the villa of Silvio Berlusconi in Arcore in the 1970s, and is known as "The Stable Keeper of Arcore". Berlusconi later became Prime Minister of Italy.
Antonino "Nino" Giuffrè is an Italian former mafioso who later became a justice collaborator. The head of the mandamento of Caccamo, he was the second-highest ranked member of Cosa Nostra. He became one of the most important Mafia turncoats, or pentito, after his arrest in April 2002, providing further information about its inner workings.
The Sicilian Mafia Commission, known as Commissione or Cupola, is a body of leading Sicilian Mafia members who decide on important questions concerning the actions of, and settling disputes within the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra. It is composed of representatives of a mandamento who are called capo mandamento or rappresentante. The Commission is not a central government of the Mafia, but a representative mechanism for consultation of independent Mafia families who decide by consensus. Its primary role is to keep the use of violence among families within limits tolerable to the public and political authorities.
Salvatore Cancemi was an Italian mobster and member of the Sicilian Mafia from Palermo. He is the first member of the Sicilian Mafia Commission that turned himself in voluntarily to become a pentito, a collaborator with the Italian judicial authorities. Cancemi made controversial allegations about the collusion of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his right-hand man Marcello Dell'Utri with the Mafia.
Giuseppe Graviano is an Italian mafioso from the Brancaccio quarter in Palermo. He also was one the men of the death squad that murdered Salvatore Contorno's relatives. He is currently serving several life sentences. He and his three siblings became members of the Sicilian Mafia Commission for the Brancaccio-Ciaculli mandamento, substituting Giuseppe Lucchese who was in prison.
Santino Di Matteo, also known as Mezzanasca, is an Italian former member of the Sicilian Mafia from the town of Altofonte in the province of Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
Carlo Palermo is an Italian lawyer and investigative magistrate. He was an assistant prosecutor in Trento from 1975 to 1984 and in Trapani till 1989. Afterwards he resigned from the judiciary.
Raffaele Ganci was a member of the Mafia in Sicily from the Noce neighbourhood in Palermo. He was considered to be the right-hand man of Cosa Nostra boss Totò Riina and sat on the Sicilian Mafia Commission.
Gaspare Spatuzza is a Sicilian mafioso from the Brancaccio quarter in Palermo. He was an assassin for the brothers Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano who headed the Mafia family of Brancaccio. After the arrest of the Gravianos in January 1994, he apparently succeeded them as the regent of the Mafia family. He was arrested in 1997 and started to cooperate with the judicial authorities in 2008. In his testimony, he stated that media tycoon and then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi made a deal with the Sicilian Mafia in 1993 that put the country in the hands of Cosa Nostra.
Salvatore Riina, called Totò, was an Italian mobster and chief of the Sicilian Mafia, known for a ruthless murder campaign that reached a peak in the early 1990s with the assassinations of Antimafia Commission prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, resulting in widespread public outcry, legal change and a major crackdown by the authorities. He was also known by the nicknames la belva and il capo dei capi.
Vincenzo Pipino, also known as Encio, is an Italian thief from Venice whose exploits earned him the nickname "the gentleman thief". He is the first person to successfully steal from the Doge's Palace, and has been responsible for some of the most sensational art thefts in the city.
The Capaci bombing was a terror attack by the Sicilian Mafia that took place on 23 May 1992 on Highway A29, close to the junction of Capaci, Sicily. It killed magistrate Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, and three police escort agents, Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro; agents Paolo Capuzza, Angelo Corbo, Gaspare Bravo and Giuseppe Costanza survived.
The term State-Mafia Pact describes an alleged series of negotiations between important Italian government officials and Cosa Nostra members that began after the period of the 1992 and 1993 terror attacks by the Sicilian Mafia with the aim to reach a deal to stop the attacks; according to other sources and hypotheses, it began even earlier. In summary, the supposed cornerstone of the deal was an end to "the Massacre Season" in return for a reduction in the detention measures provided for Italy's Article 41-bis prison regime. 41-bis was the law by which the Antimafia pool led by Giovanni Falcone had condemned hundreds of mafia members to the "hard prison regime". The negotiation hypothesis has been the subject of long investigations, both by the courts and in the media. In 2021, the Court of Appeal of Palermo acquitted a close associate of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, while upholding the sentences of the mafia bosses. This ruling was confirmed by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation in 2023.
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