PALERMO, Sicily (CN) — What did the magistrate Paolo Borsellino reveal in his famous “agenda rossa”?
Under a scorching sun on Wednesday, as happens each year since Borsellino's 1992 assassination, Palermitans descended by the thousands to Via D'Amelio and demanded just that:
“What's in those red notebooks!” banners and speakers blared. “What's the truth?” “No to the Mafia State!”
Commemorations for Borsellino began Wednesday with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni laying a wreath at the magistrate's tomb in Santa Maria di Gesù, a leafy cemetery where noble families have long been buried at a Saint Benedictine monastery overlooking the city and surrounding valley from the east.
Later in the morning, Meloni laid a wreath at a stone monument at a police caserma dedicated to officers killed in the same car blast that ended Borsellino's life.
The main event though took place — as it does every July 19 — on Via D'Amelio, the longtime residential street of Borsellino's mother. This year, the highlight was Elly Schlein, the new 36-year-old Jewish-Swiss-Italian leader of the Partito Democratico, Italy's oldest mainstay on the left. She spoke to a roused crowd and left Via D'Amelio, swarmed by television cameras and adoring crowds. She bowed out after attending the minute of silence held each year 4:58 pm, the time of his assassination.
“I was a child when it happened,” recalled Samuele Abbate, a 41-year-old university student studying education who was 10 at the time. “I was in the car with my papà looking out the window when I heard this huge roar.”
For this year's July 19 events, Abbate donned a bright-red T-shirt with the image of Peppino Impastato on it. Impastato, like Borsellino, is one of Sicily's anti-mafia heroes. Impastato was killed too: crushed to death in 1978 on rail lines mafiosi had lashed him to.
Abbate, a self-described political activist, is in Via D'Amelio religiously every year. He attentively listens to the political speeches, the poetry, the remembrances of Borsellino — a man beloved for his deep culture, refinement and twinkle in his eyes.
Borsellino was killed at age 52, two months after his colleague, Giovanni Falcone, was killed on May 23, 1992 in a massive car bomb on the Palermo airport highway.
Borsellino was having his hair cut when a call came in telling him about the explosion targeting Falcone in Capaci. He rushed to the hospital; Falcone died in his arms. The two men were not only Sicily's most legendary mafia slayers, they were also boyhood friends.
It didn't take long for Borsellino, a mastermind detective, to figure out what came next. The light went out in his eyes. He was doomed to die.
Borsellino was Falcone's right-hand man during Italy's biggest-ever mafia trials in the 1980s. The two magistrates won most of their cases and finished off several top mafia crime families. At the time, they were hailed as heroes who'd transformed Palermo for the better.
Sicilian school children to this day are taught the story of Falcone and Borsellino, and their images, especially a photograph showing the two men head-to-head, are iconic. In Sicily, the magistrates come close to being treated like religious figures.
After figuring he was going to be killed just like Falcone had been, Borsellino started telling friends and associates about the secrets he and Falcone knew. He also began writing down his findings — links between the mafiosi in Sicily and the nation's leading politicians in Rome — in a red notebook, or agenda rossa, as he called it. He kept the notebook with him at all times in a safe place.
In the chaotic aftermath of the deadly explosion on Via D'Amelio, the agenda rossa disappeared. Subsequent investigations made links to the notebook's disappearance and Italy's intelligence services.
So, amid the heat of Sicily, Sicilians by the thousands come to reflect on what took place precisely at 4:58:20 pm, July 19, 1992.
It's precisely at that moment the crowds hold an emotional minute of silence for Borsellino.
4:58 pm July 19 was the exact time mafioso Giuseppe Graviano pushed a button and triggered a car bomb wired inside a recently-stolen orange Fiat 126 parked outside Borsellino's mother's apartment block.
The blast was so powerful human remains were found stuck four-stories high on parts of surrounding apartment blocks.
In Sicily and other poorer parts of Italy's south, despite all the work done by Falcone and Borsellino, the fight against corruption, waste and mafia-state interests remains a fact of life, but it's far better today than the dark years when the mafia ruled with numerous killings, thefts, bribes and protection rackets.
“We need to have the courage to denounce,” said Ignazio Maiorana, the director and founder of L'Obiettivo, a long-time newspaper he runs in Castelbuono, a mountain town near Palermo.
“We need to denunciare, denunciare, denunciare,” Maiorana said in a telephone interview Wednesday, using an Italian word to describe calling out crimes to the authorities.
“We have to thank the examples of the people who were killed” in the fight against the mafia, he said.
“We need to combat the system,” he said, and spoke of the dangers that arise when corrupt connections and self-interests are not denounced in politics and society. “Many people have lost their lives to have a just state.”
Back on Via D'Amelio, Abbate stood with his arms folded and remembered that hot summer day when Borsellino was killed:
“After we heard this explosion, we turned on the radio; it was the only way to quickly find out about things that happened like that.”
Turning, he looked back at the street crossing Via D'Amelio near where Borsellino and his police escorts were blown up.
“We came by here about 20 minutes later. It looked just like a war scene. Like it was the war in Ukraine. Everything was destroyed; cars were on fire; all the buildings were destroyed.”
From that day on, Italy was rocked to its core.
Following the assassinations, trials looking into parliament were held, exposing deep state corruption and leading to mass departures from parliament and numerous convictions.
The magistrates' killings were a watershed moment for Italy and helped bring to an end a post-World War II political system dominated by two deeply-corrupt parties, the Christian Democrats on the right and the Socialists on the left.
With the disappearance of these political dinosaurs, a new period was born, one known in Italian political jargon as the “third republic.” Italians demanded a cleaner, corruption-free government.
But into this vacuum came a new face: That of Silvio Berlusconi, a former cruise ship crooner and Milan real estate developer with suspected ties to the mafia.
He came to dominate Italian politics for the next decade, and his governments kept the agenda rossa a secret.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
Follow @cainburdeau
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