Alba Terrasi, who had to marry Rocco Dicillo, declines the invitation to any comment with a polite messenger like her: “I don’t feel like giving voice to any individual to this individual.” Maria Falcone said: «As a citizen and as a sister, I cannot hide the pain and deep bitterness that this moment inevitably reopens. But as a woman of the institutions I also feel the duty to forcefully affirm that this is the law. A law, the one on the collaborators of justice, wanted by Giovanni ».
The news that Giovanni Brusca, u verru, the pig, one of the most bloodthirsty mafia, collaborator of justice, returns free, even if far from Sicily and under a false name, hidden, having discounted the penalties imposed according to law, scratches the soul of those who have suffered their enormous wrongdoings on the skin. And it could not be otherwise.
Citizenship solidarizes. The questions are many. But it is true that the law on collaborators that Falcone had wanted to serve to take his killers too.
Fausto Cardella, a retired magistrate, crossed Giovanni Brusca three times in his professional path, seeing his criminal thickness in full: the first investigating the Capaci massacre in Caltanissettathe investigation served to prove that Brusca was the one who pressed the remote control that triggered the Capaci bomb; the second Like the prosecutor of the Pecorelli trial in Perugiain which Brusca made statements; the third as an extensor judge of the sentence that made the condemnation of Brusca definitive for the seizure of the little Giuseppe Di Matteothen killed and dissolved in the brusque acid, a crime for which he was sentenced in a different process. The revenge of Brusca for the collaboration of the child’s father, Santino di Matteo, put to the grip by the state precisely following a DNA levy arranged by Cardella during the investigation into Capaci.
Doctor Cardella where do we start from?
“From the memory of the moment when Ilda Boccassini and I, owners of the investigation, we went to Rome to deliver the order of precautionary custody issued by the investigating judge and to distribute the capture orders, including the one for Brusca, then captured further on, to the law enforcement agencies that had to perform them: there were mobile team, carabinieri dei Ros, I also believe Carabinieri of the territorial, all together in a room, to which they had dealt with, and zero Mugugni, zero jealousies. Here is that room returned to me at that moment the feeling of the united state, cohesive ».
How did you understand that she had been Brusca to press the remote control?
“There were two, plus one. The first was the inspection: there had already been one immediately after the massacre of Capaci, by the scientific police and the carabinieri, in which cigarette butts had been collected from a point above the highway where it was thought to have been affected to trigger the explosion. In November 1992 when we arrived Ilda Boccassini and I, temporarily transferred from Perugia she from Milan, had not been made particular investigations into those elements. With the police we rebuilt the inspection: Arnaldo La Barbera brought us up there, showed us the point where the Merit buttings had been found, the trees cut as if they wanted to do some targets, to aim the highway and understand when to trigger the bomb with the remote control. We requested the appraisals for the DNA on the butts, then since elements of investigation led us to believe that Santino di Matteo, already in prison for anything else, should be there, touched me to write the forced sample order of his DNA, to compare him with those found on the butt. At the time, the jurisprudence oscillated: at certain moments it could be imposed on it in others not, at that moment it was possible. When the Ris of Parma and the scientific police, they went to pick up a biological sample for the DNA, Matteo understood that he was stuck, because the DNA felt his presence on the place of the application, and chose to collaborate. He spoke first with Caselli in Palermo, who investigated for mafia -type criminal association. Caselli spread a summary report and referred it to us who had in Caltanissetta the competence on the massacres. After him other collaborators arrived: Zeta, Omega, Cangemi … Ferrante ».
How to understand if they said the truth?
“The certain data, the discovery of the cicche, was there. We had the trajectory that he had to calculate who was to press the remote control which then discovered to be abrupt, we had already found in hand and therefore while one was talking we were able to contest the statements, we already knew if he was telling us reliable things or not. All‘Start Cangemi led the Can for L‘Aia, but when it started to tell the truth we immediately understood why the cottage coincided, the place where the explosive bins were crammed as well. We did not start from the statements of the collaborators and then found, we already had the elements in hand to understand if one led. The role of Brusca came out with the declarations found of the collaborators ».
Did you talk about a third element?
“Yes, even if I know it indirectly because it was an investigation made by the Dia in Palermo for mafia association in 1993. They had placed a microspia under a bed in an apartment in via Ughetti in Palermo in use in Nino Gioè and understood a conversation in which an unequivocal reference was made to Capaci and thecare».
From ordinary people it happens to ask yourself how one trusts one who has admitted hundreds of murders, how not to fear that it is still a danger after such a curriculum.
“The company is right, in the sense that absolute certainty that it guarantees that a criminal goes on the right way, if it can say so, is not there. But do we have to think differently: was the collaboration useful, necessary? This collaboration has a price that has been agreed by the state in a contract according to law. The state must be serious, the word must also be maintained towards the mafia. If you don’t like the discourse of seriousness, we can talk about utility. It does not fulfill the pact means jeopardizing the possibility that others collaborate: it means that on the basis of an uncertain fear (the pact with the mafia for the brusque on duty is now broken) we risk leaving people who have committed crimes around and can continue to commit them, certainly dangerous people. If the Corleonese mafia ended up in prison, it is also because this pact was useful ».
Often when it comes to “repentant”, the Tortora case is evoked, what has changed?
“At the time of Tortora there was the old code of procedure and for the jurisprudence of the Cassation it was enough that the declarations of two collaborators crossed to have a probative clue. Then we discovered the circularity of the information, today it is necessary to demonstrate that the two do not have the same source, that they could not agree and further finds are needed. Legislation and rules refine over time, learning from errors is the progress of humanity. It makes no sense to judge the present with the mistakes of a past no longer current. I don’t want to say that we have reached the goal, we can improve, and it is desirable that the intentions are common, I appeal to politics: leave the disputes that have nothing to do with these issues ».
She also wrote, later by the Cassation judge, the sentence that was definitively condemned Brusca for the seizure of the Piccolo di Matteo and met him as a witness. What idea did this left figure be made?
«I have the moment of his testimony well: he was of a mafia family, it was understood that he was the son of that world. I thought about it when I read this morning that on one occasion he said: “If at ten years my father had not taken me from school to look after the sheep, if someone from the municipality had brought me back to school I perhaps would not be brusque today”. I don’t know if this is true, but do we want to do a reflection? ».
Returning to us, how do you trust?
«Many defenses repeat it to you: is it a criminal how do you trust? As a magistrate he says: if a collaborator is really repentant, it is not something that I will ever be able to ascertain, if he will see it with the Padreno if he believes, with the conscience he has one. I am interested in what it says is true and useful, in this sense only what is found is used for me. Otherwise it is not said that it is false, but processing is not worth anything ».
