Roberto Saviano, the man targeted by the Mafia, remembers Judge Falcone

2023-11-29 20:50:54

There was a before and after for the story of Italia in it assassination in 1992 of judge Giovanni Falcone, the lonely and brave fighter against Mafia. What came next is not a happy story, but at least it made the Cosa Nostra He had to change his strategy and not base his modus operandi on bloodshed, because public opinion was no longer going to forgive him. That is what he explains through videoconference the man in the target of the Mafiathe author of ‘Gomorrah‘, a universal best-seller that made us understand even a little the tangled ins and outs of the ‘Honorable Society’.

Roberto Saviano (Naples, 1979) tells the life of Falcone between two explosions: the one that almost killed Totó Riina, the ‘capo de tutti capi’ when his family manipulated one of the bombs that the North American troops left in Sicily after the landing , and the one that definitively killed Falcone and his wife on the way to Palermo. And the circle closes if we take into account that it was Riina who had Falcone murdered, to shore up his power among the clans. Saviano tells it in ‘The brave are alone’ (Anagram), a fictionalized biography of the ill-fated judge, which has a whopping 60 pages of bibliography in case anyone thinks he has invented something.

‘Judge Giovanni Falcone, in 1990’ EPC

“The novel form allowed me to reconstruct dialogues and explain feelings and emotions from within. Everything is based on evidence and if I launch a hypothesis it is because there is prior evidence,” explains the journalist who awakens all kinds of sensitivities in his country. Proof of this is the censorship he suffered when RAI canceled his program last summer. ‘Insider’ for alleged breach of the ethical code, while the author faces defamation complaints from President Giorgia Meloni and her Prime Minister and Lega leader, Matteo Salvini.

Postmortem Loas

Not all threats have come from the extreme right, a left without power and less combative is also skeptical of the writer and that seems like one more detail to establish. the parallelism between the martyr Falcone and the threatened Saviano, which the author himself does not shy away from. “Falcone was left alone, he was a defeated man who only received praise after his death. That is a very Italian custom” and he launches into explaining an episode that portrays that attitude. “When they planted a bomb on the judge in Palermo that did not explode, the most important newspapers in Italy even insinuated that it was Falcone himself who had placed it there. Many years later I spoke with the mobster who planted the bomb and he told me that it was then that in the Cosa Nostra knew they had carte blanche to put an end to it.”

Two months after Falcone died, another bomb took out the magistrate Paolo Borsellino, collaborator of that. “It was Borsellino who said that Italy was a very beautiful and unhappy land and that precisely because he loved it he criticized it and wanted to transform it. I follow that path and in my country they consider me a slanderer who makes the English, French and Spanish consider us shit. They would prefer that I limit myself to commenting on how good the pizza is, the beauty of the cities and what excellent lovers we are.”

Andreotti’s shadow

The collusion of the Christian Democrats with the Mafia is already a very publicized issue and at the time Falcone was accused of not targeting it. Saviano, who has also faced political power, exonerates him: “He was very careful with the forms, not just the substance, that is why he was very careful when accusing politicians because he knew that other judges were going to accuse them.” acquit due to lack of evidence, as really happened with Giulio Andreotti years later”.

Attack against judge Giovanni Falcone, on the way to Palermo, in 1992. ARCHIVE

What remains of that mafia culture in the 21st century? Although Italy today has the best anti-mafia jurisprudence of the worldthere are no more deaths and there is a very strong public opinion against it but, according to the writer, the country continues to have a mafia culture as deep-rooted as it is invisible. “It is criminal capitalism. In economic terms, contracts and concessions follow the mafia logic protected by a powerful man. The economic power of criminal organizations continues to be important and they have the disinterest of Europe as an ally.”

Since 2006, when a then unknown journalist named Roberto Saviano was directly threatened by Cosa Nostra for having ignored the ‘omertá’, the law that requires silence, and having aired criminal practices in ‘Gomorrah’, the author he is forced to take an escort. There is no turning back. The curse has made him world famous: “If I could I would tell the 26-year-old Roberto that he was then not to publish that. The book destroyed me, turned me into something I couldn’t imagine then. I am brave? Courage is a choice, it is not something that comes to you at birth.”