The great Sicilian anti-mafia scandal: the “Saguto case” and the management of the assets seized from the bosses

There are dates that cannot be missed in Palermo. Imagine if you are an anti-mafia icon, someone who takes the piss out of mafiosi and who studied at the Palazzaccio school. When it was night in the bunker to write documents and investigations, documents and interrogations. By hand, of course, at the time there was no Internet and it’s not like your colleague could send you his papers by email. Copying and pasting was still in the mind of God and no technological support would have helped you connect the facts, the coincidences, even those simple details that, at times, helped you reconstruct years of investigations by placing every little detail in the right boxes. Like the Rubrik’s cube, that stuff he made us obsessed with when we were kids. Even if today all it takes is a Korean nerd or a teenager from the remote American countryside to solve it in less than five seconds.

Except that finding the evidence to throw a mafioso in jail isn’t as simple as making the right colors appear in six fucking sides of a puzzle. Not to mention that the bosses are slightly more touchy than a kid from Seoul or North Dakota. And in fact some of those bunker masters had lost their lives. And with him also his wife, the doorman of the condominium, perhaps someone who happened to pass by. Not to mention the men and women of escort, blown up with their judges without being able to do anything to defend them.

So on July 19th, even if you have a migraine or need to get waxed, you have to mark those two hours in via D’Amelio in your diary. It’s up to you. They call it “catwalk” and perhaps over the years it has become one, but certainly Doctor Silvana could not be missed. Even though, after the Hyenas’ service and the big mess that had arisen, he would have gladly done without it. And in any case, may the Lord’s will be done, this time too Silvana went to the “Le vele della legalità” demonstration to show off her presence.

Four words of circumstance, those just couldn’t be avoided: “Yesterday during a conference of the National Association of Magistrates they screened a film in which Paolo Borsellino he said: I’m not a hero, I’m just doing my duty. And that’s how it is. We are not heroes, we just do our duty.” Applause, compliments from the mayor, the floor goes to Manfredi and Lucia Borsellino, the children of the magistrate killed in via D’Amelio. He had to listen to them, and then hug them. Do not mention it. But those two didn’t bother her and one of her friends, during a break in the ceremony, had told her without mincing words.

“Manfredi? For goodness sake, a deranged person. Sister Lucia? Precise idiot.”

Nothing, the doctor couldn’t stand the tears. And the fact that a handsome, well-built man, a police commissioner, could still cry for a father killed more than twenty years earlier, she just couldn’t understand.

“But then, Manfredi who is moved, why the fuck are you still moved after all this time. In front of Mattarella, how do you look?”.

Perhaps the figure of someone who has not forgotten his father, disintegrated by the TNT of the beasts. That he will never be able to forget it. For what he was, for what he did, for the courage of those 56 days in the trenches despite the killing of his friend Giovanni, Francesca, and Vito, Antonio and Rocco.

“What the fuck, you need balls… he was talking about his sister who resigned as regional councilor and he was emotional. But fuck it, go. No, I wasn’t wrong when I said it. Since he was a child Manfredi was deranged, he always has been. Not to mention Lucia, she’s a real moron. Anyway, I’ll leave you, they’re about to put up the flower crown and this thing is over for this year too”.

Little did the doctor know that this phone call, along with the others, would end up in a thousand and two hundred page report that the Financial Police was about to complete. She couldn’t even remotely imagine that that Iene service, compared to the tsunami that was about to arrive, was only a grain of sand on a mountain that was about to overwhelm her. And not just her. Even her husband, the engineer Lorenzo. And the trusty Tanino, and Sandokan, the professor from Enna, Walter the boy and his father from the CSM, the closest colleagues of the Prevention Measures, the prefect friend, the colonel of the DIA, even his son Manuele, the one who he had graduated with a thesis whose title he didn’t even remember.

All enlisted in Silvana’s magic circle, all ready to trample on their institutional role in order to please that judge who said of himself: “I am God almighty”. And that perhaps one evening he could find a trolley full of money at the entrance to his house, or he would have the administrators pay for his shopping. When he wasn’t calling directly to have boxes of strawberries and raspberries brought to him, of course. The president who enjoyed, oh how much she enjoyed, when she settled friends and relatives in the seized companies. People she would be grateful for when needed. If only she had known, Silvana would have smashed that cell phone into a thousand pieces. Because everything had emerged from the intercepted phone calls: power and misery, a swamp in which men from the institutions and exponents of the good bourgeoisie of Palermo wallowed. All together, judges, controllers and controlled. And even the “proposed”, or rather some “proposed”, the owners of the seized assets who continued to have close relationships with the directors placed at the helm of their companies. Because, as Walter, the son of the important judge rewarded with several millionaire judicial administrations, said, “it’s not a question of money or anything. Running that office is all about power.”