Antonino Scopelliti – prosecuting magistrate

Shocking killing of judge remains unpunished

Scopelliti was a highly respected and experienced
prosecutor who had worked on many major cases

The murder of Antonino Scopelliti, a prosecutor in the Italian Supreme Court, is alleged to have been carried out by the ‘Ndrangheta on this day in 1991 in Piale, a frazione of Villa San Giovanni in the region of Calabria.

Scopelliti was thought to have been killed by ’Ndrangheta members who were acting on behalf of the Sicilian Mafia. The 'Ndrangheta is a powerful mafia-type criminal organization, which originated in Calabria in the 19th century. 

The judge was on holiday at the time, visiting his family, when he was ambushed on a road. At the time of his murder, he was preparing to argue the Italian Government’s case against Cosa Nostra - the Sicilian Mafia - in the final appeal in the ‘Maxi Trial’ in the Supreme Court.

It is believed the reason for killing him was to hold up the trial so that the legal terms of detention for the mafia bosses would expire, and they would be freed. The murder has never been solved and therefore no one has been convicted for carrying out the assassination.

Scopelliti was 56 at the time of his death. Born in Campo Calabro, near Reggio Calabria in the south of the region, he had returned to the area where he grew up, to spend his summer holiday away from work. He was killed as he was going home, having enjoyed a day at the seaside.

He had experienced an exceptionally successful career since entering the judiciary at the age of 24, becoming the number one Italian Deputy Prosecutor General at the Court of Cassation, which is the highest court of last resort for criminal matters, and is based in Rome.

Giovanni Falcone attended the
funeral held for Scopelliti

Scopelliti had handled major trials, involving mafia and terrorism. He had represented the prosecution in the Aldo Moro case during the first trial, in the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, in the Piazza Fontana massacre, and in the Rapido 904 massacre. 

On the day of his murder, having spent the day at the beach, he was intercepted by his assassins, thought to be two people on a motorcycle, who were stationed by the road along which he was travelling. The ambush occurred at a bend, just before the straight road leading to the town of Campo Calabro. 

The killers shot him with 12-gauge shotguns. Scopelliti was struck by two shots to the head fired in rapid succession and was instantly killed. The car, which went out of control, ended up in an embankment, which is why it was initially thought to have been a road accident. 

When Scopelliti was murdered, he was preparing to reject the appeals filed by the defence lawyers on behalf of the most dangerous mafia members convicted in the first Cosa Nostra maxi-trial. According to 'Ndrangheta informants, it was the Sicilian Mafia that had asked the 'Ndrangheta to kill Scopelliti for them as ‘a favour’.

Two trials for his murder were held at the Court of Reggio Calabria. One was against Salvatore Riina and seven other mafia bosses, and the second was against Bernardo Provenzano and six other bosses. They were all convicted in the first instance, but subsequently acquitted in the Court of Appeal on the grounds of conflicting evidence. 

After years of judicial stalemate, in 2012, during a hearing against the 'Ndrangheta in Reggio Calabria, an informer asserted that the judge's murder was carried out by two men from Reggio Calabria at the request of Cosa Nostra, without, however, naming the alleged killers. 

The murder of Scopelliti has therefore remained unsolved, but the authorities are convinced that he was killed because he was doing his job well and maintaining high standards. He was so well thought of that the judge and prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, who was himself assassinated the following year, attended his funeral to show his respect for him.

Cosa Nostra boss Bernardo Provenzano was
suspected of involvement in Scopelliti's murder

In 2007, Scopelliti’s daughter, Rosanna, established the Ammazzateci Tutti movement (Kill Us All) in his memory, an anti-mafia social movement against the ‘Ndrangheta. Since then, the national anti-mafia meeting, Legalitàlia, has been held every year in Reggio Calabria, on the anniversary of the judge’s murder, promoted by the Ammazzateci Tutti movement and the Scopelliti Foundation. 

The Puglia branch of Ammazzateci Tutti have organised the naming of a street in Bari after Scopelliti.

A garden in Mucinasso, a hamlet in the municipality of Piacenza, and a square in Casalgrande, both in Emilia-Romagna, have also been named in his memory. 

In 2012, the bunker courtroom in Palmi and a square in Polistena, both in Reggio Calabria, were named after Scopelliti. In 2014, a square in Miglierina, in the province of Catanzaro in Calabria, was named after him during the first Legalitàlia Day. 

Last year, 34 years after Scopelliti’s murder, police returned to the scene of the shooting to look for new evidence, following ballistic investigations that had been carried out on the weapon they believed was used to kill the judge.

Today, on the 35th anniversary of the Judge’s killing, the case remains unsolved, but the investigation is still active and ongoing.

Campo Calabro offers extraordinary
views over the Strait of Messina

Travel tip:

Campo Calabro, where Antonino Scopelliti was born, is a municipality in the province of Reggio Calabria in the region of Calabria, located about 110km (68 miles) southwest of Catanzaro, the regional capital, and about 12km (7 miles) north of Reggio Calabria. A street in Campo Calabro, and one in neighbouring Villa San Giovanni have been named after Antonino Scopelliti. The town, which has a population of roughly 4,450 residents, sits 138m (453ft) above sea level, its position on the hills above the Strait Of Messina offering wide sea views, as well as proximity to the foothills of the Aspromonte massif. The beaches at Villa San Giovanni are less than 3km (1.8 miles) away. There is evidence of a Roman settlement in the area, which had strategic importance in the Byzantine and Norman eras. Campo Calabro maintains strong Calabrian southern dialect traditions, with linguistic traces of Greek and Latin. The town’s patron saint, to whom the parish church is dedicated, is Santa Maria Maddalena, whose feast is celebrated on 22 July each year.

Villa San Giovanni hotels from Expedia

Travel tip: 

Reggio Calabria, the largest city in Calabria although not the regional capital, is located on the "toe" of the Italian peninsula and is separated from the island of Sicily by the Strait of Messina. It is situated on the slopes of the Aspromonte, a long, craggy mountain range that runs up through the centre of the region. Since 2007, the national anti-mafia meeting "Legalitàlia" has been held annually in Reggio Calabria on the anniversary of Scopelliti’s murder, promoted by the Ammazzateci Tutti movement and the Scopelliti Foundation.  The city is also the oldest city in Calabria, the most important in what became known as Magna Graecia - Great Greece - after settlers began to arrive in the eighth century BC.  Much of its heritage was destroyed in the massive earthquake that struck the area in 1908, killing at least 25,000 residents. The rebuilt city, which suffered again at the hands of the Allies in World War Two, is notable for its fine Liberty buildings and its linear plan.  The best of what could be salvaged of the Greek remains after the earthquake can be seen in the National Archaeological Museum of Magna Graecia, housed in Palazzo Piacentini. Reggio Calabria's seafront promenade, Lungomare Falcomatà, is  regarded as one of the most beautiful in Italy.

Stay in Reggio Calabria with Hotels.com

More reading:

Giovanni Falcone, the street kid from Palermo who became an anti-Mafia crusader

Paolo Borsellino, the judge who was murdered 57 days after colleague and friend Giovanni Falcone 

Bernardo Provenzano, Mafia boss who evaded police for 43 years

Also on this day:

1173: Work starts the Pisa bell tower that would become world famous

1919: The birth of painter Emilio Vedova

1939: The birth of politician Romano Prodi

1973: The birth of footballer and coach Filippo Inzaghi

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Giuseppe Ayala – politician and magistrate

Judge who was part of struggle against the Mafia

Giuseppe Ayala was a prosecutor at the
Maxi Trial of 1987

Anti-Mafia prosecutor Giuseppe Ayala was born on this day in 1945 in Caltanissetta in Sicily.

Ayala became well known as an anti-Mafia magistrate and anti-Mafia judge. He was a prosecutor at the so-called Maxi Trial in Palermo in 1987, which resulted in the conviction of 342 Mafiosi.

He has continually raised doubts about whether it was the Mafia working alone who were responsible for the killing of his fellow anti-Mafia investigator Giovanni Falcone in 1992.

The deaths of Falcone and another prominent anti-Mafia magistrate, Paolo Borsellino, also murdered by the Mafia, came a few months after the killing of Christian Democrat politician, Salvatore Lima, who was thought to be the Mafia’s man on the inside in Rome and had close links with Italy’s three-times prime minister, Giulio Andreotti.

There was speculation that it suited senior figures in the Italian government that the two magistrates were killed because they knew too much about corruption at the highest level.

Ayala studied at the University of Palermo and obtained a degree in jurisprudence. Afterwards he worked as a public prosecutor.

Ayala participated actively in the Tangentopoli trials and became a member of both the Democratic Alliance and the Italian Republican party in the 1990s. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1992 and served as under-secretary for justice in the governments of Romano Prodi and Massimo D’Alema.

Ayala (right) with his friend and colleague Giovanni
Falcone, who was murdered by the Mafia in 1992

In 1993 he published a book, La guerra dei giusti: I giudici, la mafia, la politica (The war of the righteous: The judges, the mafia, politics).

Ayala joined the Democratici di Sinistra - Democrats of the Left - a social-democratic political party, after it was formed in place of the Democratic Party of the Left and the Italian Communist Party.

During his time serving in the pool of anti-Mafia judges in Sicily, along with Falcone and Borsellino, Ayala constantly had to have armed bodyguards with him.

Now living in Palermo, Ayala had to be rushed to hospital there in April 2018 after he was involved in a car accident in the city. He had been out driving on his own, when his car was in collision with a Fiat Punto being driven by an elderly person. Ayala suffered a fractured femur as a result.

The Cathedral of Santa Maria la Nova is one of the main
buildings in the town of Caltanisetta

Travel tip:

Caltanissetta, where Giuseppe Ayala was born, is a town in the centre of Sicily and is also the capital of the province of Caltanissette. It is the sixth highest municipality in Italy by elevation, at 568m (1,864ft) above sea level, and the second highest in Sicily after the city of Etna. The inhabitants of the are known as Nisseni. One of the main sights in Caltanissette is the Cathedral of Santa Maria la Nova, which was built in Piazza Garibaldi, the main square, between the years 1560 and 1620 in late Renaissance style. The interior is decorated with a series of frescoes by the Flemish painter, Guglielmo Borremans.

The church of San Cataldo in Piazza Bellini in Palermo is
an example of the city's fusion of architectural styles

Travel tip:

The vibrant city of Palermo, where Giuseppe Ayala lives now, is the capital of Sicily, and has a wealth of beautiful architecture, plenty of shops and markets to browse in, and an opera house, the Teatro Massimo, which is the largest theatre in Italy.  The city’s architecture reflects a history of northern European and Arabian influences.  The church of San Cataldo on Piazza Bellini is a good example of the fusion of Norman and Arabic architectural styles, having a bell tower typical of those common in northern France but with three spherical red domes on the roof.

More reading:

How Giovanni Falcone became an anti-Mafia crusader

Did murdered magistrate Paolo Borsellino know too much?

Was Salvatore Lima the Mafia's insider in government?

Also on this day:

1551: The death of Sienese painter Domenico di Pace Beccafumi

1892: The birth of opera singer and Broadway star Ezio Pinza

1939: The birth of anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone

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Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Greco - Mafia executioner

Notorious hitman thought to have committed at least 80 murders

Giuseppe 'Pino' Greco was one of the
Sicilian Mafia's most notorious killers

The notorious Mafia hitman Giuseppe Greco, who was convicted posthumously on 58 counts of murder but whose victims possibly ran into hundreds, was born on this day in 1952 in Ciaculli, a town on the outskirts of Palermo in Sicily.

More often known as ‘Pino’, or by his nickname Scarpuzzedda - meaning ‘little shoe’ - Greco is considered one of the most prolific killers in the history of organised crime.

The nephew of Michele Greco, who lived on an estate just outside Ciaculli and rose to be head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission - a body set up to settle disputes between rival clans - Pino Greco is generally accepted to have been responsible for 80 deaths, although some students of Cosa Nostra history believe he could have committed more than 300 killings.

Most of Greco’s victims were fellow criminals, the majority of them killed during the Second Mafia War, which began in 1978 and intensified between 1981 and 1983 with more than 1,000 homicides, as rival clans fought each other and against the state, with judges, prosecutors and politicians prominent in the fight against organised crime themselves becoming targets.

Greco, in fact, was convicted at the so-called Maxi Trial in the late 1980s of the murder of General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, Italy’s counter-terrorism chief, who was shot to death in his car in Palermo in 1982 after being sent to Sicily with a brief to end the conflict.

General Carlo Alberto dalla was Greco's most high-profile
victim among the scores of murders he committed

In 1983, also in Palermo, he planted and detonated the car bomb that killed magistrate Rocco Chinnici, his two carabinieri escorts and the porter of the building where Chinnici lived.

As a young man, Greco was academically bright, excelling in the study of Latin and Greek, but his family background meant that his life in crime was effectively preordained. His father was also a contract killer, whose nickname Scarpa - ‘shoe’ - gave rise to Giuseppe’s nom de guerre.

The exact point at which he became part of the Mafia is not known but by 1979 he was sitting alongside his uncle, Michele, on the Commission, as the Ciaculli clans formed a powerful alliance with the Corleonesi, led by Salvatore 'Toto' Riina and Bernardo Provenzano.

It was on behalf of Riina and Provenzano, who instigated the internecine conflict that was to prove so deadly, that Pino carried out his reign of terror, working closely in particular with Filippo Marchese, a notorious Corleonesi hitman who ran the so-called Room of Death, an apartment in Palermo where victims would be taken to meet their fate.

Giuseppe Lucchese, who for a
time was Greco's partner in crime

Such was the nature of Greco’s work, however, that within days of organising with Marchese a massacre of nine gangsters invited to a barbecue at his uncle’s estate, Greco was ordered by Riina to kill Marchese, who was perceived as becoming too powerful.

Unfortunately for Greco, that fate would soon enough be his own, Riina’s craving for ultimate power brooking no sentiment. Greco's ‘mistake’ was to assume control of the Ciaculli mob on behalf of his uncle, who was in hiding.

Riina decided he had to reduce the strength of the Ciaculli, who lost eight members in a massacre in the Piazza Scaffa in central Palermo, and had decided that Greco had to go even as his erstwhile chief henchman was arranging the killing of another identified ‘enemy’ in police investigator Antonino Cassarà.

In September 1985, Greco invited two supposed friends, Vincenzo Puccio and Giuseppe Lucchese, into his villa outside Bagheria, about 20km (12 miles) east of Palermo, only for the pair to draw their weapons and shoot him dead. His body was never found and his death not confirmed until 1989 by an informant, Francesco Marino Mannoia, whose brother had also been in Greco’s house at the time of the killing.

By that time, the Maxi Trial, the extraordinary event spanning six years that saw the conviction of 360 defendants following the investigations led by Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, had handed Greco a life sentence in absentia, along with Marchese, Riina and Provenzano among others.

The sandy beach at Mondello, the pretty resort just
along the coast from Palermo

Travel tip:

Palermo has plenty of attractions in the heart of the city, but there are also some good beaches nearby, the closest of which is at Mondello, about 10km (6 miles) out of town to the north. The former fishing village has a nice sweeping bay enclosing turquoise water and a beach of fine sand and a promenade lined with beautiful villas, many built in Liberty style at the start of the 20th century as summer retreats for the wealthier residents of the city.  The nature reserve of Capo Gallo, with its white rocks and clear water, is within walking distance of Mondello.

The Villa Palagonia in Bagheria reflected the town's
wealth in the early 18th century

Travel tip:

Bagheria, a town of around 55,000 inhabitants, became prosperous under Savoyard and Habsburg rule in the early 18th century, when the first of many grand villas were built in the town.  The two most striking baroque residences, Villa Valguarnera and Villa Palagonia, were designed by the architect Tommaso Maria Napoli and have echoes of architecture in Rome and Vienna, where he had worked previously.  Villa Palagonia is renowned for its complex external staircase, curved façades, and marble.  The town is the home of the film director Giuseppe Tornatore, most famous for Cinema Paradiso, and some of the location shooting took place there.


More reading:

How Bernardo Provenzano evaded the police for 43 years

Giovanni Falcone's lifelong crusade against the Mafia

Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia 'pentito' who put hundreds behind bars

Also on this day:

1710: The birth of 'opera buffa' composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

1881: The birth of Gaetano Merola, founder of the San Francisco Opera

1975: The death of Carlo Levi, author of Christ Stopped at Eboli


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