Italian State - Mafia Pact

First instance sentence issued by the Palermo Court on 20 April 2018 said between Italian state and mafia in the 1990s a negotiation took place. The purpose was stopping terrorist attacks in Cosa Nostra’s strategy under Totò Riina leadership. In exchange the government would have changed rules for better prison conditions to the bosses sentenced guilty in a life terms. The second trial is underway these days. A very serious wound in Italian democratic life, a tragical agreement in a mixture of politicians and ruthless killers (250,000 mafia workers according to the Police), people ready to kill women and children, blew up the incorruptible anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, generate a business estimated around 5 billion dollars per year.

In Italy there are three degrees of judgment, so the sentence is not final. There is however another sentence of November 4, 2015 in which the Palermo court judge for the preliminary inquiry discharged a former minister, Calogero Mannino, in a parallel trial, which tells another truth: there was no pact between State and mafia, nor was this phantom agreement to accelerate the brutal murder of Paolo Borsellino. According to the accusation, it was Mannino himself who promoted negotiations between State and mafia. With the acquittal of Mannino, the presumed director of the negotiation, the negotiation itself comes back into questions.

At the center of the trials is the so-called “papello” (papeddu in Sicilian language), a sheet of paper on which mobsters would have written their own requests to the State. The document, gave to the judges by the son of the mafia politician Vito Ciancimino, considered false by the judge is very precise in listing all the requests made by mafia to the political authorities. To drive the mafia mad and convince them of having to blackmail the State through terrorist actions It was primary the sentence of the so-called “Maxi-trial” carried out by Falcone and Borsellino, the first to pass all three levels of judgment, making life imprisonment definitive for mafia bosses.