Paolo Borsellino - Murder Trial Re-opened

Murder Trial Re-opened

After several trials, the truth about who is behind the murder of Borsellino, and fellow judge Giovanni Falcone, remains elusive. The Prosecution Office in Caltanissetta has reopened the investigations into lingering suspicions that members of the Italian intelligence services may have played a role in the July 1992 plot to kill Borsellino. The prosecutor reopened investigations after Gaspare Spatuzza, a Mafia killer turned state witness (pentito) in the summer of 2008, admitted to have stolen the Fiat 126 used for the car bomb in the Via D’Amelio attack. His admission contradicted the declarations of Vincenzo Scarantino, a thug with loose Mafia associations who had confessed earlier to stealing the car and whose testimony was among the main evidence in the previous trials. When confronted with Spatuzza’s statement, Scarantino admitted that he had repeated what some investigating officers had forced him to tell the magistrates. Spatuzza's declaration led to the re-opening of the trial on Borsellino’s murder, which had been concluded in 2003.

Spatuzza claims that his boss, Giuseppe Graviano, told him in 1994 that future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was bargaining with the Mafia, concerning a political-electoral agreement between Cosa Nostra and Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia, in exchange for certain guarantees – such as to stop the 1993 Mafia bomb terror campaign, to force state institutions to moderate their crackdown against the Mafia after the murders of Antimafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellino. Berlusconi had entered politics and won his first term as Prime Minister in 1994. Berlusconi’s right-hand man Marcello Dell'Utri was the intermediary, according to Spatuzza. Dell'Utri has dismissed Spatuzza's allegations as "nonsense".

Spatuzza’s assertions back up previous statements of the pentito Antonino Giuffrè, who said that the Graviano brothers were the intermediaries between Cosa Nostra and Berlusconi. Cosa Nostra decided to back Berlusconi's Forza Italia party from its foundation in 1993, in exchange for help in resolving the Mafia's judicial problems. The Mafia turned to Forza Italia when its traditional contacts in the discredited Christian Democrat party proved unable to protect its members from the rigours of the law. "The statements given by Spatuzza about prime minister Berlusconi are baseless and can be in no way verified," according to Berlusconi’s lawyer and MP for the People of Freedom party (Il Popolo della Libertà, PdL), Niccolò Ghedini.

The alleged negotiations between Dell’Utri and the Mafia followed an earlier attempt with Vito Ciancimino, the local political link for the Corleonesi clan, who supposedly had contacted government officials after the killing of Falcone to negotiate a stop to the killing spree. Borsellino apparently had been informed of the machinations. Two former colleagues of Borsellino have told investigators about a meeting with Borsellino in Palermo shortly before his death during which he broke down in tears saying, "A friend has betrayed me, a friend has betrayed me." One of the mysteries around Borsellino’s death involves his red agenda, where he used to take all his notes. Right after the attack Via d’Amelio it disappeared from the crime scene and was never found. "My brother’s death was a State murder," Paolo’s brother Salvatore Borsellino claims. "My brother knew about the negotiations between the Mafia and the state, and this is why he was killed."