AP=MAFIA ?

[nobody@huge.cajones.com (Huge Cajones Remailer)]

 Italy remembers murdered anti-Mafia judge

   ROME (May 23, 1997 3:43 p.m. EDT) - Italy on Friday mourned the judge
   whose ground-breaking Mafia investigations led to his murder five
   years ago.
   
   On Thursday, prosecutors in Sicily requested life jail terms for more
   than 30 bosses charged with the murder.
   
   Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and three
   bodyguards were blown up on May 23, 1992, on a motorway outside the
   Sicilian capital Palermo.
   
   "Institutions and citizens have a duty not to forget," the speaker of
   the Chamber of Deputies (lower house), Luciano Violante, said in an
   anniversary message to the families of the victims.
   
   He called on Italians "to avoid the rhetoric of commemorations (and
   to) work with determination in the fight against the Mafia to defend
   those values of civility and legality" for which Falcone worked.
   
   Crimefighters including FBI director Louis Freeh, in Palermo for a
   memorial service, drove in convoy along the motorway. They stopped to
   pay tribute at the point where explosives packed under the road were
   detonated by remote control as Falcone's car passed.
   
   "We are not just honouring the memory of a single man but of many
   policemen, prosecutors and investigators which he represents," Freeh
   said.
   
   Prosecutors in the central Sicilian city of Caltanissetta requested
   life sentences on Thursday for 32 Mafiosi, including Cosa Nostra's
   jailed boss of bosses Salvatore Riina and some of his key lieutenants,
   who are charged with masterminding the murder.
   
   For Giovanni Brusca, the most senior member of the Mob to be captured
   in the past year, prosecutors sought a 30-year jail term. They cited
   mitigating circumstances since Brusca has admitted using the remote
   control device that triggered the blast.
   
   The trial was halted for five minutes on Friday as a mark of respect.
   The defence is expected to sum up late next month. A verdict is
   expected late this year.
   
   On Friday night thousands of Sicilians gathered for a pop concert held
   in Falcone's memory on an undeveloped tract of land in the city's
   outskirts near a villa where Riina spent part of his 23 years at large
   before his arrest in 1993.
   
   Falcone, a Sicilian, revolutionised Italy's war on the Mafia by
   tracking financial records that revealed the extent of the Mob's
   criminal activities and resources, and by persuading captured Mafioso
   to turn state's evidence.
   
   Testimony from "Men of Honour," who are sworn on pain of death to a
   code of silence or "omerta" when they are initiated into the Mafia,
   gave unprecedented insight into the feared society and led to the
   arrest of Riina and other bosses.
   
   The murder of Falcone, and two months later of his friend and
   colleague Paolo Borsellino in a car-bomb attack, horrified Italy and
   galvanised efforts to crack the Mafia and end the reign of terror
   imposed by Riina and his bloody Corleone clan.
   
   Palermo's chief prosecutor Giancarlo Caselli cautioned on Friday that
   Italy now risked slipping into complacency.
   
   "The Mafia seems to have become a second division problem, or even a
   non-problem, because people think...that police successes in the last
   few years are leading to a definitive solution of the problem.
   
   "That is not so," Caselli said in a radio interview. "The Mafia is
   still an extremely robust and highly dangerous beast."
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