THE ASSASSINATIONS of GIOVANNI FALCONE and PAOLO BORSELLINO Cyrille Fijnaut Some People Remember It As If It W

TYWENT EARS AGO: THE ASSASSINATIONS OF Giovanni FALCONE AND PAOLO BORSELLINO Cyrille Fijnaut Professor emeritus, Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, the Netherlands Some people remember it as if it were yesterday. Others have only heard stories. Whatever the case, in the spring and summer of 1992, the Sicilian Mafia merci- lessly struck down two prosecuting magistrates who had been waging a major, innovative, and hence successful war against organized crime since the nineteen eighties. On 23 May 1992, Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards were killed by a car bomb near Palermo. A few weeks later, on 19 July 1992, Falcone’s friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino was murdered in the same manner. The assassinations prove beyond a doubt that the Sicilian Mafia is not only capable of controlling legitimate and illegitimate markets – and hence all of society – but is also prepared to use intimidation and brute force against any government that attempts to break its grip.1 As a result of these attacks, the Italian government modernized the weaponry that it used against the Mafia and transformed its battle into a formidable and indeed successful offensive by the Italian State as such. For example, since the early nineties Italy has not only made more use of judicial means (for example the pentiti) to undermine the power of Mafia groups, but it has also deployed administrative weapons to systematically force the Mafia out of legitimate eco- nomic sectors.2 It obviously had more than the Sicilian Mafia in its crosshairs. Other Mafia groups – in particular the Neapolitan Camorra and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta – had been extending their illegal practices, both in type and number, in Italy and abroad since the nineteen sixties, and had also become quite 1 For more information on the life and work of Giovanni Falcone, see V. Delle Donne, Falcone. Die Biographie. Leben und Tod im Kampf gegen die Mafia (Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein, 1993). See also A. Jamieson, “Giovanni Falcone – In Memoriam”, 16 Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (1993) 303–313. 2 A. La Spina, “The Paradox of Effectiveness: Growth, Institutionalization and Evaluation of Anti-Mafia Policies in Italy”, In C. Fijnaut and L. Paoli (eds.), Organized Crime in Europe. Concepts, Patterns and Control Policies in the European Union and Beyond (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), pp. 641–675. 62 cyrille fijnaut powerful.3 Between 1992 and 1994, officials carried out twelve major operations against the ’Ndrangheta. They arrested some 700 suspects and identified the perpetrators of 165 murders.4 The assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino not only had a huge impact on Italy’s policy on organized crime, however. They also drove the European Union to launch more specific efforts to combat organized crime, in line with measures that had already been introduced within the context of the Schengen Agreement or incorporated into the Maastricht Treaty (such as the establishment of Europol). For example, in September 1992 the European Union set up an Ad Hoc Working Group on International Organized Crime. In 1993, the Working Group completed two key (unpublished) reports in which it proposed a range of improved strategies to combat organized crime.5 It took another four years, however, before a more or less coherent policy plan was published in the Official Journal (15 August 1997), i.e. the Action Plan to Combat Organized Crime. Why it took five years for the plan to materialize is not entirely clear. One reason may be that the Member States generally disagreed about how serious the problem of the Italian Mafia was in the territory of the European Union, and therefore about whether the Mafia – and organized crime in general – in fact represented a serious threat to the Member States as a group.6 Was organized crime in the guise of the Mafia not an Italian problem, and was it therefore necessary and even sensible to turn the battle against the Mafia into an EU-wide affair? It took another assassination – the victim this time was journalist Veronica Guerin, who was murdered in Dublin in November 1996 – before the Dublin Summit on 13–14 December 1996 convened a High Level Group of Officials to draft a joint policy leading a few months later to the above-mentioned action plan. This in any event answered the above question: Guerin’s murder showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that organized crime was not simply Italy’s problem. Falcone himself believed that the problem of the Mafia was not confined to Italy, but in fact affected all of Europe, and in particular the European Union. He made his views clear in November 1990 at an international symposium held at the Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden, Germany.7 In essence, he 3 For the history of the ’Ndrangheta in this period, see P. Arlacchi, Mafia, Peasants and Great Estates. Society in Traditional Calabria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Mafia Business. The Mafia Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism. London, Verso, 1986. See also J. Walston, The Mafia and Clientelism. Roads to Rome in post-war Calabria (London: Routledge, 1988), and L. Paoli, Mafia Brotherhoods. Organized Crime, Italian Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4 L. Paoli, “An Underestimated Criminal Phenomenon: The Calabrian ’Ndrangheta”. 2European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice (1994) 212–238. 5 See C. Fijnaut and L. Paoli (eds), op. cit., pp. 633–635. 6 See for example M. Anderson, “The United Kingdom and Organized Crime – the International Dimension”, 1 European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice (1993) 292–308. 7 G. Falcone, “La Criminalité Organisée: Un Problème Mondial. La Mafia Italienne en tant que Modèle pour la Criminalité Organisée Opérant à Niveau International”, 45 Revue Internationale .

Load more