Theresa Maggio

Trump fires the people investigating him. In Sicily, with the complicity of politicians, the mafia kills them. RIP Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three body guards who were blown up with him 25 years ago today. Read "Excellent Cadavers" by Alexander Stille.

From The Guardian:

A mafia boss has been gunned down while riding his bicycle in Sicily, in what appeared to have been the sort of mob killing that has become rarer in recent years as dangerous figures have been locked up.

Giuseppe Dainotti, 67, was shot in the head as he cycled along a street in Palermo, almost 25 years to the day since anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone was killed in a bomb blast on a motorway on the Italian island.

Photographs of Monday’s crime scene evoked decades of violence in the Sicilian capital, showing Dainotti’s body covered by a sheet, only his shoes on show, and the white bicycle he was riding lying where it fell. Read More 

Thousands of students from all over Italy converged on Palermo to commemorate the death, by murder, of anti Mafia Judge Giovanni Falcone who gave his life in the fight against the Mafia. He was killed in Capaci on the road from the airport, with his wife and police escort, by a bomb planted on  Read More 

Rest in Peace.

Chilling headlines in La Repubblica today.
Through spy cameras and microphones hidden all over the city, Sicilian police learned that the oldest mafia clan in Palermo, of Santa Maria del Gesu` on the city's east side, had just elected a new boss. The brief, intense election season was a sign to police that the  Read More 

Stefano LoVerso,, for years the chauffeur of Mafia kingpin Bernardo Provenzano, turned state's evidence and was put into the government's witness protection program in a city in northern Italy. LoVerso had to leave his family behind in Ficarizzi. He said in this exclusive interview with a La Repubblica reporter that if the Mafia can't get you, they will get at the family you left behind. He has a wife and children and he decided to come back to Sicily to live with and protect them until he meets his own death, which he fully expects. The protection program cannot protect you if you come back to Sicily. LoVerso says it is the bosses who should be exiled. He knows they will get him, he just doesn't know when. "The mafia doesn't forgive," he says. Imagine the stress and ulcers of living like that! Interview in Italian.


[Sigh. Working on getting the embed code to work. Meantime, here's the link to copy and paste:]
http://video.repubblica.it/edizione/palermo/il-pentito-in-bicicletta-che-sfida-la-mafia--non-lascio-la-sicilia-se-ne-vadano-i-boss/217730/216926
 Read More 

The text is from Judge Paolo Borsellino's red diary, the "agenda rossa" which he never showed to others and which he always kept on his person. It disappeared from the site of the bombing in Via D'Amelio which left Borsellino's corpse limbless. It says:
"They will kill me but it won't be by mafia vendetta, the mafia doesn't indulge in revenge. Maybe it will be mafiosi who physically kill me, but the ones who will have wanted me dead will be others." Read More 

A ten-year-old diabetic girl escaping war in Syria boarded a wooden vessel with her father, who has a degree in economics, and her sisters, headed for the Italian coast. They were 320 people squashed together like sardines. The traffickers made more room by throwing the little girl's day pack into the sea. It contained vials of insulin  Read More 

860 refugees reached land at Palermo, another 548 at Trapani. Many are already looking for a ticket to nortern Europe. Over the weekend 5,851 people were saved from the Mediterraneaean Sea. According to souces in Rome the number of immigrants landing since the beginning of the year are ten percent more than in the same time period  Read More 

Giovanni Falcone and his escort , Francesca Morvillo, Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro, were blown up by the mafia by 500 kilos of explosives on the highway between the Palermo airport and town. I had just returned to the states from Palermo and had been on that road after reporting on that spring's Favignana  Read More 

Some of the survivors of the raft that sank 80 miles off the coast of Libya, killing 400 by drowning, said that their traffickers had beaten several of their fellow travelers to death with clubs because they did not obey. One man was beaten to death at the farm where the refugees are stockpiled until setting  Read More