Prosecutor Ayala and the reminiscence nonetheless surrounded by mysteries of the nice battle in opposition to the mafia in Italy | Culture | EUROtoday

Talking to the Sicilian prosecutor Giuseppe Ayala, who introduced the accusation in opposition to the nice households of Nostra factor within the first main course of held in Palermo, between 1986 and 1987, is to talk with a survivor, somebody who was not clear that he was going to remain alive. After spending 19 years with an escort, he remembers the primary day they took it away, in 2003. “I didn’t know what to do, free for the first time. I remember that I went to the supermarket, I had not been going to the cinema, or a restaurant for almost 20 years, ”he says at his dwelling in Palermo.

Today he’s 79 years outdated and continues to smoke Dunhill cigarettes, eradicating the filter earlier than. Ayala, Basque surname that comes from Spanish ancestors arriving in Sicily, was a companion and good friend of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the prosecutor who collaborated with them for ten years within the first main judicial campaign in opposition to the Sicilian mafia from 1983. They sat down for the primary time the mafia households on the bench in a historic trial, the so -called Maxiprocess. Falcone and Borsellino paid him with life in 1992, in terrifying assaults that marked the start of an genuine mafia conflict with the State, in full political collapse, which lasted till 1994. Then he turned calmly, mysteriously. It is a interval nonetheless stuffed with enigmas, the place nice secrets and techniques and questions pending response of Italian democracy transfer.

Ayala wrote in 2007 a e-book along with his recollections of these intense and dramatic years, Who is afraid dies each daywhich now publishes in Spain the Editorial Gatopardo with a translation by David Paradela López. It is an efficient cause to go to him at his dwelling in Palermo, bear in mind once more and know what he thinks now, with perspective. He continues to think about a phrase that Falcone informed him, in 1989, when he escaped an try on the assault, explosives positioned on the ocean with the ocean subsequent to the villa the place he summened. “He called me, I went to see him and told me that I saw behind ‘refined minds’ capable of guiding the decisions of Nostra. He was convinced. And I have always taken it on top of the death of Giovanni and Paolo, ”he explains.

The book reflects well the climate of a heroic and extraordinary company, which was born in the Palermo court around Falcone and Borsellino, on whom the story gravitates. In fact it is the subtitle of the book, My years with Falcone and Borsellino. Armored lives, the feeling of being breaking a taboo of centuries and of entering forbidden territory, a work team that was more than work. Ayala went down every afternoon at the end of the day to Falcone’s office, which took a bottle of whiskey from a closet. “The personal bond that joined us was very important, because at first we didn’t know where we would get. We were really a team, beyond work, in the most human sense. Giovanni and I went on vacation together, ”he recalls.

The idea that changed everything in the fight against the mafia, since 1980, was to create a team of magistrates, a poolas it was called in Italy with the usual predilection of this country for the terms in English. He pool of Palermo. In this way it was not a single judge who signed the cars, with the risk of being exposed to Nostra, but a team. Not being alone was essential to fight the mafia. In fact, over time, in the darkest part of this story, Falcone and Borsellino were staying alone, the institutions turned their backs, and that was when the mafia killed them. Falcone’s research method was revolutionary, following money, rebuilding the international drug plots traveling to other countries, working with the FBI.

In the eighties, the rise of the brutal clan of the Corleoneses of Totò Riina was like a coup within the mafia. They were massacrating their opponents and the traditional clans of Palermo. In that climate, with 300 homicides a year, something unthinkable was possible: repentant began to emerge on the loser side. Above all, a history, the Tommaso Buscetta capo, arrested in Brazil in 1984 and who accepted to speak with Falcone. “We had the mosaic pieces, but we didn’t know the drawing and we didn’t know where to put them. Buscetta gave us the drawing of the organization, of the internal rules, ”says Ayala. He found it again in 1993, when Buscetta went to the Antimaphia Parliamentary Commission. “In a pause for a espresso he approached me and mentioned: ‘I do not understand how he’ll take it, however I really feel an awesome must shake his hand, as a result of in his hand, I think about, there may be additionally Falcone’s hand.’ And we set our fingers. ”

He maxiprocess It was a historic second, an awesome bunker was constructed for the trial, with dozens of cells across the defendants, 475 mafia. In his remaining conclusions, Ayala spoke eight classes in a row. “The judge told me that I could sit if I wanted, but I had all those gangsters in front and it seemed to me that I had to do it,” he says. “The day I ended up discovering the importance of adrenaline, which had evidently kept my feet, because when I sat and ended the trial I realized that I could not get up. I waited for the room to stay empty and take me two carabinieriI couldn’t walk. I was happy, he had made an unprecedented accusation. I still give me chilling to think about it and I don’t know how I did. ”

A historic condemnation adopted that was a disaster for the mafia. The Corleonese hoped to have the ability to flip him across the enchantment, however the sentence was remaining in January 1992. By then, the panorama in Palermo had modified lots. He pool He removed after the primary sentence, in 1987, as a result of his accountable, Antonino Caponetto, thought he had already performed his job and retired. It was taken as a right that Falcone would change him, however then the interior mosquty, within the magistracy, within the establishments, and their progressive isolation started. The new boss disassembled the crew. Falcone and Borsellino left, one with public positions in Rome, the opposite modified future in Sicily. Ayala noticed how from at some point to a different they started to depart Mountains of Banal Affairs on the desk. “They completely marginalized me. I was used to finding huge mafia process files and I saw myself there dedicated to fraud in light invoices. ” He ended up leaving the Prosecutor’s Office and entered politics in 1992.

When the nice sentence in opposition to the Mafia was confirmed in January 1992, Nostra started to take revenge, and in addition acted in opposition to those that believed that from the State that they had not fulfilled their pacts with them. Falcone was killed on May 23, 1992, the mafia flew the freeway in its path, when he went from the airport to Palermo. Borsellino, on July 19, with a automobile bomb at his mom’s home, which he was going to go to.

Ayala needed to have taken the flight to Palermo with Falcone that day, however in the long run he modified plan. “If not, I would have gone in that car,” he admits. In addition, he confesses that he dragged an odd feeling of guilt, as a result of he false that day he was driving, typically he did it, and the driving force that day sat down and was saved: “And it was I who started doing that, driving myself, asked the minister and authorized me. And seeing it, Giovanni also asked for it, but I wouldn’t have done it if I don’t. And this weighs me as if it were my fault. ” There are many unanswered questions on this assault: how he knew the mafia that falcon that day was going to Palermo, the place he obtained such an quantity of explosive, who accessed the Justice of the Peace’s pc that evening and erased knowledge.

On Borsellino assault, one of many first to reach on the scene was Ayala, who lived subsequent door. Over time, paradoxically, this has grow to be a controversial situation for him: he had in his fingers the Borsellino briefcase, which had remained in his automobile, the place the well-known pink agenda was wherein every thing identified and, it’s supposed, the secrets and techniques he had found concerning the complicities of mafia and politics. But that agenda disappeared.

Ayala has given discordant variations of what occurred, and this has introduced him criticism, in a case surrounded by very unusual issues. “Look, I have tried to contribute to the truth, and I could have said that I did not remember anything, but the substance of my statement is clear, I had the briefcase for a moment and I gave it to an officer. I don’t remember the details, but I would like to see anyone in my place. Because when I arrived, moments before, I stumbled upon something, and when I saw me I saw that it was the carbonized trunk of a person, without arms, without legs, and I realized that it was Paolo. I would like to know if someone in my place would have a lucid memory. Then about this have been built the usual controversies, the usual poisons. ”

The borsellino assault is one other nice thriller. The culprits had been convicted, however the official model collapsed in 2008 with an unimaginable script. A repentant confessed that he participated within the assault and that the defendants had been harmless. Everything had been a montage. The investigation needed to begin over zero, and nonetheless open in 2025. Ayala is often seen in Palermo with the opposite two judges of the pool They are nonetheless alive, Leonardo Guarnotta and Giuseppe Di Lello. “We tell ourselves that we are survivors, because luckily they stopped.” The horrible 1992 assault chain made a qualitative leap in 1993 with two unpublished components: assaults in opposition to inventive heritage and outdoors Sicily. “This is the confirmation that it was not just the mafia, because it was an absolute novelty, what could care about Totò Riina of an attack in the Uffizi … This 1993 phase is absolutely atypical,” he displays. The mafia all of the sudden stopped in 1994, when your entire Italian political class fell and a brand new one arrived, with Silvio Berlusconi and new video games. “The mafia probably decided to stop to try to establish new relationships with politics, as it has always done,” says Ayala. Will we all know the reality at some point? “We have to believe it, and I hope to be that day, but for biological reasons I am not sure to be.”