Story of a hero

Giovanni Falcone was born in Palermo on May 18, 1939 and died in Palermo on May 23, 1992.

Giovanni Falcone was born into a wealthy family. Falcone went to a classical high school. At the oratory he always played with the ball. It was at the oratory that he met Paolo Borsellino, his future colleague. Giovanni decides to continue his studies a the Naval Academy of Livorno, but after a while he abandoned his studies to return to the city and dedicate to jurisprudence. In 1964 it was that in the Italian judiciary he began to get passionate about the mafia. In 1979 Falcone began working in the institutional office of the penal section of Palermo together with Rocco Chinnici. Falcone invented a new way of working. Prosecuting magistrates should join in a team, called ‘a pool’. The official reason for this was to share, and to keep secret, information during complicate investigations on Mafia’s national and international connections. An unofficial reason was to allow the continuation of the investigating work even if one of the magistrates was murdered.

He was a very important magistrate in the fight against the mafia, for this reason in 1992 on May 23 He was unjustly killed by Cosa Nostra together his wife and three police escort agents. Giovanni Falcone was a creature of habit. During the years he spent in Rome, working with the Italian Ministry of Justice, one of his preferred habits was to travel to Palermo during the weekend. So On May 23, 1992, Falcone was driving his car on the A29 coastal motorway from Punta Raisi airport (now named after him and his colleague Paolo Borsellino), when Giovanni Brusca detonated half a ton of explosives placed in a culvert under the motorway.

Many things will remember us this great man but among these things there are his words that will remain in our memory – “men pass ideas, their moral tensions remain and will continue to walk on the legs of other men”.