VIENNA, JUNE 30 – The Italian Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna, Ambassador Alessandro Cortese, addressed today an engaging seminar organized at UNODC to honor the legacy of Italian Judges Giuseppe Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and launch of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s report “Once upon a time in Palermo”: “National law enforcement, international cooperation and civil society engagement are the three pillars of Italy’s strategy against organised crime”, said Cortese.
The report was produced by Roberto Scaturro, an analyst at the GI-TOC, conducting research on the Western Balkans and on Italian mafia-related issues. His main areas of interest and expertise are organized crime in south and south-eastern Europe, with
a specific focus on the history of Cosa Nostra and its ties with other criminal networks across the Mediterranean. The base are 117 pages of minutes declassified last year by Antimafia Commission of the Italian Parliament – established in 1963 to look into the phenomenon of organized crime in Italy and assess the adequacy of existing legislative and administrative measures to counter it – describing a June 1990 meeting in Palermo between the Commission, Judge Falcone, and the other prosecuting magistrates of the so-called ‘Antimafia Pool’ of judges, including Borsellino.
A full unofficial translation of the minutes of the meeting is available at: https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/gitoc-falcone-annex.pdf.
From the initial pages of the minutes – writes Scaturro – it emerges that the 1990 meeting had been convened to discuss the reasons for delays in investigations carried out by the Antimafia Pool. When discussing these delays in the magistrates’ work, however, Falcone went on to disclose what appear to be new details pertaining to the context of the unsolved assassination a decade earlier of Piersanti Mattarella, the Governor of Sicily and brother of the current President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella. (@OnuItalia)
