There was a time when prosecutor Giuseppe Ayala (CALTANISSETTA, Italy, 1945) had reasons to fear that, to the point where, seen the fatal destiny that some of his companions had run, he had to resign himself to live escorted . A time when fear was the order of the day because Ayala, along with other colleagues who effectively paid the feat with their life, Headed the pulse of the Italian state with the thing Nostra and won it. Now, almost forty years later, the Italian prosecutor reviews that time that culminated with the imprisonment of 360 mafia and confesses, in conversation with conversation with 20 minuteswhich is aging “without the old fear of not getting old.”
The interview takes place as a result of the publication of his work ‘Who is afraid dies daily’ (Catopardo)which will be in the bookstores of Spain this February 24. The memories narrate the feat of a few judges and prosecutors who decided to fight against the Nostra thing with an unprecedented eagerness and seriousness. The culmination of that is known as ‘The Maxiprocess’: a trial that laid 475 mafia on the bench and ended with the life sentence for 19 capos of the Nostra thing.
It was an unpublished blow to a criminal organization that at that time enjoyed an enviable state of health and infiltrated its tentacles in the Italian state gears. A judicial process narrated by Ayala in this book, which resonates as a tribute to his fallen companions and a reminder that “the mafia is condemned to have an end” but “we still have enough”.
At 28 years, Giuseppe Ayala had “eager to take sudden in favor of the sicily that fought against the mafia” and decided to leave his lawyer to become a prosecutor. He arrived at the Prosecutor’s Office in Palermo in 1981. He still did not know, but he was going to witness and get involved in a radical transformation in the judicial investigation that Judge Giovanni Falcone would boost, with whom Ayala would work an intimate friendship. Sicily’s relationship with the mafia would change forever with the maxiprocess.
In Ayala’s words, it was about using “the usual tools” offered by law, “but adapting them to a new conception of the phenomenon” of organized crime. Judge Falcone realized that the Italian courts were chasing an international organization investigating isolated facts and without leaving the national territory, which led him to ask the million dollar question: “Was it enough to investigate in Palermo, in Sicily, in Italy?”
Falcone concluded that “if the heroin ends in the United States and is paid in dollars, there is no choice but to look for where those dollars end.” This meant two novel approaches: investigating beyond the border and not limited to pursuing the drug, also follow “the money trail.” The bank proceedings became the axis of the investigations.
Although there were colleagues, such as Giuseppe Ayala, who hugged the “Falcone Method” revolution, many others ridiculed it to the point of accusing the magistrate of making “judicial tourism.” As the prosecutor Ayala explains throughout the work, the criticisms of the colleagues themselves also reproduced in certain media that loaded the inks against that group of magistrates who was changing the way of doing things.
The challenge was tremendous, the workload was unassumable and there was a maximum that should be respected, as Ayala remembers today: “The State, in this battle, cannot play without respecting the strict rules of law.”
He pool Antimapia, the team devised by Rocco Chinnici who took over the investigation, was composed of Falcone, Ayala and the magistrates Paolo Brosellino, Leonardo Guizotta, Peppino Di Lello, Gioacchino Natoli, Ignazio de Fancisci and Giacomo Conte. They carried out an arduous research work in strict secretism until on September 29, 1984, with a sudden urgency that obeyed the fear of an imminent filtration, they ordered 366 criminals. Two and a half months of preparation had preceded the “raid of San Michele”, to which Ayala describes as “the most important antimaphia operation of the twentieth century.”
What followed was another titanic task, consisting of interrogating the hundreds of detainees within 15 days. The security around Ayala and the others multiplied from that moment, as the prosecutor recounts: “The men of the escort were now six and went with the weapons drawn and the usual bulletproof vests.” When he arrived at his house, at the end of the interrogations, Ayala found himself “a armor in front of the main door”, and “not a single car on a radius of at least one hundred meters.” They would be a total of 18 years and six months surrounded by escort, who saved him, but not many of his companions.
After the San Michele raid, more arrests and more interrogations occurred, until it was time to write the accusation brief, which lasted for about two months of work materialized in 4,000 folios, half of those who finally brought together the summary of the summary of The cause, which had 475 defendants.
If the complexity of what had to be judged had no precedents, they did not have the security measures in the trial: a bunker had to be built that would house the view room, full of mafia, lawyers and international press. There were 349 sessions, 1,820 hours and 666,000 folios of documentation. Once the views and 35 days of subsequent deliberation, on December 16, 1987, the sentence arrived: the sentence came: 2,665 years in jail were decreed in total.
He pool Antimaphia had clearly won the battle, but he had not finished the war. Months before trial, the key witness had launched a dark prophecy that was later fulfilled in part. This is the gangster Paolo Buscetta, who predicted, addressing Falcone and Ayala: “You are intended for them to kill you, but during the maxiprocess they will do nothing for fear of the reaction of the State.”
It was, indeed, once the trial was over, when in 1992 the mafia managed to end Falcone’s life. It happened while the magistrate was traveling from Rome to Palermo, making a car jump through the air in which Ayala himself would have also been, if not for a change of last minute plans. “At 17.59 on that Saturday, five hundred kilos of Trilita Segaron five lives and the dignity of this country. I should have been there, “reads the lines of ‘who is afraid dies daily’.
There were no two months from that tragic attack when Ayala had to contemplate the following attack, of which Judge Paolo Borsellino was a victim, just 200 meters from the domicile of the prosecutor. Decades have passed and, according to Ayala to this newspaper, “unfortunately, the infiltration of the mafia in sectors of politics, public administration and business remains a reality.” A “less intense than before” reality is true, but as the prosecutor describes, “the party is still rigged.”
This February, the Sicilian mafia was the subject of the most important raid since the time of Giovanni Falcone: More than 1,200 agents arrested 183 people in one night In an operation that has shed light on the darkness in which the organization has been protected in recent decades. In allusion to this matter, Ayala comments that Nostra thing is no longer “enjoying good health”, “mafia terrorism” has been abandoned and the organization has returned to “traditional clandestinity.”
The predominant place that previously occupied the Sicilian mafia now corresponds to the ‘Ndragheta, Calabresa criminal organization, and although the situation is not the same as that of the lead years, the extinction of organized crime in Italy seems distant. Ayala explains it with this metaphor: “Relations between state institutions and mafia resemble A football match that has not been won by the simple reason that it has never been seriously playedbecause the color of the shirts does not even allow clearly differentiating between the forces faced. ”
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