said she would be staying put. I want to be an anti-mafia prosecutor, she wrote. I want to put gangsters behind bars.
It was to pursue her ambition that in 1987, at the age of nineteen, Alessandra took the train north to become a law student. Pulling into Rome’s central station the next day, she found herself in a different nation. But Alessandra quickly assimilated. She graduated from Milan University in 1990, qualified as a magistrate in 1997 and quickly became a specialist in organised crime. Over the next twelve years, she investigated the ’Ndrangheta’s expansion across northern Italy, assisted the prosecution of billion-euro tax evasion in the art world, sat as a judge in a high-profile terrorist recruitment case and, on a quiet weekend, married a rising anti-mafia carabinieri officer.3
No one was surprised that Alessandra married into the job. Few outsiders would tolerate the life of a mafia prosecutor’s spouse. The wide autonomy Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors enjoyed in their investigations was about the only freedom they possessed. The constant threat to her life required Alessandra to exist in isolation behind a wall of steel – literally, in the case of her office door and her armour-plated car – and for her to be escorted by four bodyguards twenty-four hours a day. Spontaneity was out of the question; all her movements were planned a day in advance. A normal life – meeting friends and family, eating out, shopping – was next to impossible. ‘We go nowhere with crowds because of the risk to others,’ said Alessandra. For the same reason, she and her husband – whose identity she kept secret – had long ago decided against children. ‘I would have to fear for them,’ she said. ‘As we are, I have no fear for me or my husband.’
Alessandra didn’t relish the sacrifices the job demanded. But she had come to accept them as useful to developing the character she needed to face the mafia. Her response to the mafia’s romanticism and glamour remained what it had been in Messina: an insistence on the facts. To some, Alessandra knew, she could seem cold and aloof, living a grey half-life ruled by procedure, discipline and evidence. She told herself she needed this distance – from mafiosi, from their victims, even from life – to preserve her perspective. Passion and blood and family and tragedy – that was the mafia, and the mafia was enemy. She had to be the opposite: intellectual, forensic and dispassionate.
By forty-one, what once had been girlish obstinacy had matured into poise, stoicism and self-possession. In her office in the Palace of Justice, Alessandra kept her desk clear and her office spartan. Besides a photograph of the legendary Sicilian prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, she hung only a graphite drawing of Lady Justice and a pastel of the Straits of Messina. Among her staff, the young female prosecutor’s icy focus was a favourite topic of discussion. She wasn’t scared or emotional, as some of the men had predicted. Rather, she was unwavering, scrupulous and unnervingly calm – legale, they said – her rebukes all the more crushing for their dispassion, her smiles all the more disarming for their unexpectedness.
Inside this narrow, monotone life, Alessandra permitted herself a few indulgences. Every August she and her husband took off on a foreign holiday without their bodyguards, telling no one where they were going – ‘the only time I can be free,’ she said. On a shelf in her office, she kept a collection of snow globes sent to her by friends from their travels in Europe. Alessandra also liked to dress well. To court, she wore slim dark suits over a plain white blouse. To the office, she wore woollen winter shawls with leather boots, or stretch jeans with a biker’s jacket, or heels with a sleeveless summer dress, her toes and fingernails painted chocolate in winter and tangerine in summer. This was not about looking good to the world. Anti-mafia prosecutors were rarely seen by anyone. Rather, this was about freedom. To do her job and not be defined by it, to accept its restrictions and not be beaten by them, to face the threats of ten thousand mafiosi and respond with a woman’s grace and elegance – that was true style and, in a world of male brutality, a display of adamant and unyielding femininity.
Throughout her time in the north, Alessandra had kept a close watch on the southern battle against the mafia. It had been a long and bloody fight. After the state intervened to try to stem la mattanza in the 1980s, judges, policemen, carabinieri, politicians and prosecutors became targets too. On 23 May 1992, the mafia detonated half a ton of explosives under an elevated highway outside the city on which Giovanni Falcone, Italy’s most celebrated anti-mafia prosecutor, was driving with his wife and three police bodyguards. The explosion was so big it registered on Sicily’s earthquake monitors. Hearing the news of Falcone’s assassination, his co-prosecutor Paolo Borsellino, who had grown up in the same Palermo neighbourhood and had always been somewhat in Falcone’s shadow, remarked, ‘Giovanni beat me again.’ Two months later, Borsellino and five policemen were killed by a car bomb outside the home of Borsellino’s mother in Palermo. Six houses were levelled and fifty-one cars, vans and trucks set on fire.
Falcone’s death was to Italians what President John F. Kennedy’s was to Americans: everyone can remember where they were when they heard the news. To the tight group of Sicilians like Alessandra who had taken up the fight against Cosa Nostra, the loss of their two champions was deeply personal. At the time, Alessandra was a twenty-four-year-old law graduate in Rome who had just begun training to be a magistrate. Falcone’s and Borsellino’s sacrifice only made the two prosecutors seem more heroic. ‘They were the inspiration for a generation,’ she said. ‘Their deaths made us stronger.’ To this day, the two prosecutors remain the titans against whom all Italian prosecutors measure themselves. A picture of either Falcone or Borsellino, and generally both, hangs on the wall of every anti-mafia prosecutor’s office in Italy, often accompanied by a famous Falcone one-liner. ‘The mafia is a human phenomenon and, like all human phenomena, it had a beginning, an evolution and will also have an end,’ was one favourite. ‘He who doesn’t fear death dies only once,’ was another.
In time, even Cosa Nostra would acknowledge that the murders had been a miscalculation. They gave the prosecutors’ political masters no choice but to abandon attempts to negotiate a peace with the mafia and try to crush it instead. Tens of thousands of soldiers were dispatched to Sicily. The two prosecutors’ deaths also prompted renewed appreciation of their achievements. The chief accomplishment of Falcone, Borsellino and their two fellow prosecutors, Giuseppe di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta, was finally to disprove the grand Sicilian lie. After decades of denial, Cosa Nostra was exposed not as a myth or a movie but a global criminal organisation, headquartered in Sicily, with extensive links to business and politics in Italy and around the world. The climax of their investigations, the Maxi Trial, saw 475 mafiosi in court, accused of offences ranging from extortion to drug smuggling to 120 murders.
How had Falcone and Borsellino succeeded? Many of their accomplishments hinged on a new 1982 law, the crime of mafia association, which outlawed a mere relationship with the mafia, even without evidence of a criminal act. That effectively made it a crime just to be born into a mafia family and was aimed squarely at the omertà and close blood relations on which the mafia was built. The new legislation worked. First a handful, then scores, then hundreds of mafiosi turned pentiti (literally ‘penitents’). A host of otherwise innocent family members did the same. From their evidence, Italy’s prosecutors were able to construct a picture of Cosa Nostra’s internal structure for the first time.
The Sicilians’ other innovation was to abandon the mercurial autonomy traditionally enjoyed by individual prosecutors. Independence from political masters, who were often the target of anti-mafia investigations, remained essential. But prosecutors’ habitual individualism had often found expression in less helpful fashion, such as fighting each other for position. By contrast, Palermo’s anti-mafia prosecutors worked as an indivisible team, the ‘anti-mafia pool’, as they called themselves, which shared information, diffused responsibility and co-signed all warrants. In that way, they ensured their work was coordinated and efficient, and never depended on the continuing good health of any one of them.
So it was that in the months after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, other prosecutors – first Gian Carlo Caselli; then the Sicilians Piero Grasso, Giuseppe
