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Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. the Idea Was Suggested by Pat Conway, for Which I Am Grateful

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Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. the Idea Was Suggested by Pat Conway, for Which I Am Grateful Dear friends, This week I am writing about the two Sicilian judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The idea was suggested by Pat Conway, for which I am grateful. In order to put their stories into context I need to explain the circumstances which led to their assassinations. Owing to the length of this account it is the only subject in this issue. I hope to resume a more usual form next week. As Giovanni Falcone took the initial lead in the collection of evidence about mafia activities, there is more reference to him but in fact he shared most of the important work of the investigations with Paolo Borsellino and other team members. I hope that we may watch together a film named Paolo Borsellino: The 57 Days in due course. Giovanni Falcone was born on the 18th May 1939 and died (or was assassinated) on 23rd May 1992. He and his great friend and colleague, Paolo Borsellino, are perhaps the best- known Sicilians in the fight against the Mafia. Others, not all of them judges or magistrates like Falcone and Borsellino, will be introduced in due course. He was born in Palermo, north-western Sicily, and he studied law at the University of Palermo. His family lived in central Palermo near the sea-side district. His father was a chemist and director of a chemical laboratory and he and his wife, Luisa Bentivegna, were middle-class conservative Catholics. Giovanni drifted away from religion and developed an interest in communism - the other predominant ‘philosophy’ of Italy. At school and in the youth clubs, Falcone would have associated with boys from his area who subsequently would be recruited into the Mafia, although many Sicilians of that time - for various reasons - would have denied that there was an organised crime society by that name and some claimed it was a fable created and spread by the North. Falcone graduated in 1961 and had been appointed a judge in 1964. He would have been appointed at the lowest judicial level and begun the climb up the system learning by experience and practice. He gravitated towards penal law after serving as a district magistrate. He was assigned to the prosecutor's office in Trapani and Marsala and then in 1978 to the bankruptcy court in Palermo. This was to be a significant experience assisting his eventual battle against the Mafia. Paolo Borsellino was born on 19th January 1940 in the same district of Palermo as Falcone, Kalsa was an area with some residual elegance but which had seen better days. His father was a pharmacist and his wife ran the pharmacy attached to their home. The area had suffered from aerial attacks by the allied invasion of Sicily in WWII and eventually the family house was declared unsafe and they moved from it in 1956, although the pharmacy remained. Like his friend, Giovanni Falcone, he would play football with their classmates on the Piazza Magione. However, unlike Falcone, Borsellino stayed close to his religion and at university became a member of the Fronte Universitario d'Azione Nazionale (FUAN), a right-wing university organization. Notwithstanding their different political affiliations, he and Falcone reconnected at university and cemented their friendship, which became a lifelong one. They shared a sense of duty to their country, instilled by their families’ patriotic feelings towards their relatively newly united country. He graduated with a law degree in 1962 and passed his judiciary examinations in 1963 and began to work within the judicial system: Enna (until 1965), Mazara del Vallo (until 1967), Monreale (until 1969). He married in 1968 and in 1975 he transferred to Palermo, together with Rocco Chinnici (of whom more later), where he became involved in investigations into the Mafia. .
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