Men of Honour: the Truth about the Mafia

"Falcone was a Sicilian judge who did a tremendous amount of effective investigative work on the Mafia, with a level of knowledge, competence and energy that had not been seen before. And although he was then ultimately assassinated by the Mafia, he did manage to shift entirely the attitude of the Italian state towards the Mafia. So while it’s sad that he was assassinated, he most certainly did not die in vain. One thing Falcone tried to change, was to say: “We can’t continue to investigate this phenomenon by looking at each individual crime. We have to understand that the way in which the judiciary is organized in Italy – where each crime is investigated within the judicial district in which it occurs – doesn’t really fit well with this phenomenon, because this is an organization and we have to centralize the investigation, link the crimes across districts and we have to convict people simply because they belong to this organization.” Which is a difficult thing to say, from a liberal point of view. But given the situation, it was virtually the only effective solution that the Italian state could take. And that has become the practice now. Because the last thing Falcone did was to create a central anti-Mafia agency, which is still functioning today and has had a devastating effect on the Mafia. Most of the big Mafiosi are now in jail or dead. There is a sentence in Falcone’s book that I particularly liked. He says: “We have to learn to think about the methods of Cosa Nostra calmly and with an open mind.” And that’s exactly what he did. He tried to understand the entity. And he managed to persuade Tommaso Buscetta, the first big Mafioso to turn state witness, to speak. Up to that point many people, including scholars, didn’t believe the Mafia existed as a formal organization. Falcone managed to understand how it functioned, the importance of language, the role of violence, the role of internal norms. Also, the fact it was – or what remains of it still is – a very well organized institution. It has lasted more than 150 years – so after the Catholic Church it’s the longest-lasting institution in Italy!"

"Giovanni Falcone was an epoch-making figure in the history of the Italian mafia. He was a prosecuting magistrate who—assisted by his close colleague Paolo Borsellino, who was also murdered in 1992— developed a new method for investigating the mafia. It was based around, in the first instance, following the money trail. They then assembled the prosecution case in the most important mafia trial of all time—the Maxi trial in Palermo—which ran from 1986 to 1987. It was a massive trial that saw more than 400 mafiosi charged established a legal precedent for the existence of the Sicilian mafia. As I mentioned before, Italy did not recognise the existence of the mafia until the Maxi trial. In fact, it did not formally recognise the existence of the Sicilian mafia until January 1992, when Italy’s supreme court issued a ruling approving the verdict of the Maxi trial. It’s no coincidence that Falcone and Borsellino were murdered within weeks of that ruling—they had proved the mafia existed and the mafia reacted by killing them. “He famously says that the mafia is a human creation and like all human creations it has a beginning and will have an end” Falcone also did something very important which is often forgotten. In the last phase of his career, when he was working in Rome, he set up the national coordinating structures for investigating and prosecuting mafia crime based on his methods. Everybody today who is involved in fighting the mafia now works according to the Falcone method. It’s based on an interview with a French journalist a few weeks before Falcone was blown up on 23 May 1992. It’s basically a theme-by-theme account of what the Cosa Nostra is and how it works, by somebody who knew it better than anybody else. You get a sense of the man’s extraordinary lucidity and humanity in the way he describes it. He famously says that the mafia is a human creation and like all human creations it has a beginning and will have an end. So he certainly didn’t subscribe to the theory that the mafia was hardwired into the Sicilian psyche and couldn’t be separated out and defeated. That’s principally because he was the first magistrate who actually took seriously the testimonies of mafia defectors—seriously in the sense that he didn’t just want to take bits and pieces of their evidence that he could use, but he wanted to find out about the whole mafia system, its way of thinking and the rules that governed its internal behaviour. A lot of what he learns comes from Tommaso Buscetta, who in his own way made history just as much as Giovanni Falcone. Buscetta turned state’s evidence in July 1984 after most of his family was murdered by his mafia enemies. It was Falcone’s debriefing of Buscetta that set the Maxi trial in motion and gave Falcone a real grasp of the human reality within Cosa Nostra. He said Buscetta was like an interpreter who allowed him to finally speak and understand the language of the mafia. Falcone shows in this book that he really was the first non-mafioso to master that language."