Giovanni Falcone

Falcone was born in 1939 to a middle-class family in the Via Castrofilippo near the seaport district La Kalsa, a neighbourhood of central Palermo that suffered extensive destruction by aerial attacks during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. His father, Arturo Falcone, the director of a provincial chemical laboratory, was married to Luisa Bentivegna. Giovanni had two older sisters, Anna and Maria. Falcone's parents emphasised the importance of hard work, bravery and patriotism; he later said they 'expected the maximum' from him. At school, Falcone would get into fights with bigger children if he thought his friends were being picked on.
The Mafia was present in the area but quiescent; Tommaso Spadaro, a boy with whom he played ping-pong in the neighbourhood Catholic Action recreation centre, would later become a notorious Mafia smuggler and killer, but mafiosi were not a major presence in his childhood. As boys, Falcone and Borsellino, who were born in the same neighbourhood, played soccer together on the Piazza Magione. Both had classmates who ended up as mafiosi. Falcone grew up at a time when Sicilians did not acknowledge the existence of the Mafia as a coherent organised group; assertions to the contrary by other Italians were often seen as 'attacks from the north'.
After a classical education, Falcone studied law at the University of Palermo following a brief period of study at Livorno's naval academy. Falcone and Borsellino met again at Palermo University. While Falcone drifted away from his parents' middle-class conservative Catholicism towards communism, Borsellino was religious and conservative; in his youth, he had been a member of the Fronte Universitario d'Azione Nazionale (FUAN), a right-wing university organisation affiliated with the neo-fascist MSI…

In early 1980, Falcone joined the ‘Office of Instruction’ (Ufficio istruzione), the investigative branch of the Prosecution Office of Palermo. He started to work at a particularly tense moment. Judge Cesare Terranova, a former parliamentary deputy and Antimafia reformer who had been the main prosecutor of the Mafia in the 1960s, was to have headed this office, but he was killed on 25 September 1979. Only two months earlier, on 21 July 1979, Boris Giuliano had been assassinated; he headed the police investigation squad investigating heroin trafficking by the Mafia headed by Rosario Spatola and Salvatore Inzerillo. Taking Terranova's place was Rocco Chinnici, who was murdered by the Mafia in July 1983.
On 5 May 1980, Giuliano's successor in investigating the heroin network, Carabinieri captain Emanuele Basile, was killed. The next day, the prosecuting judge Gaetano Costa signed 55 arrest warrants against the heroin-trafficking network of the Spatola-Inzerillo-Gambino clan. From Sicily, heroin was moved to the Gambino crime family in New York, who were related to the Inzerillos. Chinnici appointed Falcone to investigate the case, one of the biggest Antimafia operations in more than a decade. Costa signed the indictments after virtually all of the other prosecutors in his office had declined to do so – a fact that leaked out of the office and eventually cost him his life: he was murdered on 6 August 1980, on the orders of Inzerillo. Falcone was given bodyguards the next day.
In this tense atmosphere, Falcone introduced an innovative investigative technique in the Spatola investigation, seizing bank records to follow "the money trail" created by heroin deals to build his case, applying the skills he had learned unravelling bankruptcies. He was probably among the first…

Falcone was plagued by a chronic lack of resources in his capacity as a magistrate. A law to create a new offence of Mafia conspiracy and to confiscate Mafia assets was introduced by Pio La Torre, but it had been stalled in parliament for two years before La Torre was murdered on 30 April 1982. In May 1982, the Italian government sent Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a general of the Italian Carabinieri, to Sicily with orders to crush the Mafia. However, not long after arriving, on 3 September 1982, the General was gunned down in the city centre, his young wife by his side. Sicilians rose up in outrage. Outside the church, the politicians who attended were jeered and spat on, and blamed by Sicilians for tolerating the Mafia for so long. In response, the Italian government finally offered investigators the backing they needed, and Pio La Torre's law was passed 10 days later.
Falcone's responsibilities as a magistrate put tremendous strain on his personal life. In May 1986, he married his fiancée, Francesca Morvillo; Falcone had Mayor Leoluca Orlando himself conduct the private ceremony.
He became part of Palermo's informal Antimafia Pool, created by Judge Rocco Chinnici. This was a group of investigating magistrates who worked closely together, sharing information and developing new investigative and prosecutorial strategies. Most importantly, they assumed collective responsibility for carrying Mafia prosecutions forward: all the members of the pool signed prosecutorial orders to avoid exposing any one of them to particular risk, such as the one that had cost judge Gaetano Costa his life. Along with Falcone, the group included Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta.

The Antimafia pool laid the groundwork for the Maxi Trial against the Sicilian Mafia at the preliminary investigative phase. Following Chinnici's murder in July 1983, Antonino Caponnetto headed the pool. Falcone's friend, Antonio Cassara (who headed the police squad hunting fugitives), was murdered in 1985. Falcone led the prosecution for the trial, which began on 10 February 1986 and ended on 16 December 1987. Of the 475 defendants—both those present and those tried in absentia—338 were convicted. A total of 2,665 years of prison sentences was shared out between the guilty, not including the life sentences handed to the 19 leading Mafia bosses and killers, including Michele Greco, Giuseppe Marchese and—in absentia—Salvatore Riina, Giuseppe Lucchese and Bernardo Provenzano.
One of the most important factors in the trial was the testimony of Tommaso Buscetta, the first-ever Sicilian Mafiosi boss to become an informant (pentito). His assertion that the Mafia was not a collection of separate gangs but a single organisation led some magistrates and detectives to question his credibility. After an interview, Falcone became convinced that Buscetta was genuine and treated him with respect. Buscetta's key revelation was that a governing council, known as the Commission or Cupula headed a collective structure, thereby establishing that the top tier of Mafia members were complicit in all the organisation's crimes. This premise became known as the Buscetta theorem.