“Here is the name of the killer” –

An A4 sheet of paper with seven lines. Dry. Written on the computer. In which an anonymous person, as Adnkronos has learned, writes the name of the alleged killer of the former President of the Sicilian Region, Piersanti Mattarella, killed on January 6, 1980, under his home in Palermo. The children of the former President of the Region have delivered the letter to the investigators, awaiting developments. It will now be the Palermo Public Prosecutor’s Office, led by Maurizio de Lucia, to try to shed light on this anonymous person. The work of a mythomaniac, or does that name lead to a new line of investigation? It is still too early to know. The only certainty, so far, is that 44 years later, the names of the killers who killed Piersanti Mattarella, the President “with all the papers in order”, brother of the current Head of State, Sergio Mattarella, are still unknown. Only the names of the instigators are known. At least those of Cosa Nostra.

But what is written in the anonymous letter seen by Adnkronos? Here it is: “Hood on his head, ice-blue eyes, waddling, swaying step. This is the description of Piersanti’s killer. There is a black militant boy, at the time called (…) for his ice-blue eyes in right-wing circles. His name is (…) and he corresponds to the textual description and the images. He looks a lot like the identikit. After the murder he moved to (… )”. The writer has deliberately omitted the name, nickname and even the place cited by the anonymous person to allow investigators to carry out their work peacefully. The day he was killed, Piersanti Mattarella was without an escort. He had just gotten into the car with his wife, Irma Chiazzese, and his children Bernardo and Maria, he 21 and she just 18, with whom he was going to mass. That year, Epiphany fell on a Sunday and the President of the Sicilian Region on holidays used to release the men who protected him, so that they might be with their families. This was Piersanti Mattarella, the man who wanted a region “with its papers in order” with respect to the State and the other Italian regions.

The judicial affair on the Mattarella murder has been long and complex. And not definitive. The bosses of the Cosa Nostra commission, from Totò Riina to Michele Greco, with the other members of the dome, from Bernardo Provenzano to Bernardo Brusca, Pippo Calò, Francesco Madonia and Antonino Geraci, were sentenced to life in prison as the instigators. The investigation, however, was unable to identify either the hitmen or the alleged external instigators, whom Judge Giovanni Falcone thought he had identified as Giusva Fioravanti and Gilberto Cavallini, both of whom were later acquitted. But other killers have never been identified, and the mystery remains. The anonymous letter also includes the identitikt that had been created and which is part of the investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office. A photofit, in black and white, one with glasses and one without. “Aged approximately 22-24, height 1.65 m, light brown hair, regular mouth and nose.” A photographic reconstruction of the face of the man who allegedly killed Piersanti Mattarella. The trail of young extremists hired by the Sicilian mafia through the Banda della Magliana was spotted early by Giovanni Falcone, who investigated Valerio “Giusva” Fioravanti for murder. It was confirmed by Piersanti’s wife, Irma Chiazzese, who recognized Fioravanti as the man “with the ice-cold eyes” who had approached the window of the Fiat 132 driven by Piersanti and killed him. A theory that had been reiterated by right-wing multiple murderer Angelo Izzo, the monster of Circeo. But the real revealer of the fascist perpetrators and the first accuser of his brother Giusva was Cristiano Fioravanti. To several prosecutors, from Rovigo, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Palermo, and in several interrogations, he said: “My brother committed a political murder in Palermo, in the presence of the politician’s wife, between January and March 1980”. He will detail: «My brother and Gilberto Cavallini committed that murder to obtain favors for Concutelli’s escape from the Ucciardone prison». Finally, freeing himself: «It was Valerio who told me that they had killed a Sicilian politician…». Only to then not confirm it in the subsequent trial phases.

In 2018, the Palermo prosecutor’s office reopened the investigation into the murder of the President of the Republic’s brother. New investigations through complex comparisons between ballistic evidence. One of the evidence from the trial held in Palermo, the license plate of a commando car, was apparently split in two by the perpetrators of the theft and a part was later found in a hideout of the neo-fascist terrorist organization NAR. Today, the investigation, still at a standstill, is coordinated by the Prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia and the assistant Marzia Sabella. The President’s children have never spoken regarding the investigation. It was his grandchildren who did it, like Piersanti Mattarella, namesake of his grandfather, who some time ago told Adnkronos: “We have never known anything regarding the state of the investigations, so many years following the murder, despite the fact that on January 6th there are cyclical press reports or indiscretions regarding alleged news on the investigations into my grandfather’s murder, in addition to this cyclical repetition, almost commemorative rather than relative news regarding the investigations, we have no news from the Prosecutor’s Office, despite the fact that the press knows that the investigations are still open”. During the funeral homily, the then bishop of Palermo Salvatore Pappalardo, speaking of Piersanti Mattarella’s murder, said that it was impossible for the crime to be attributed only to the mafia, because “there must be other occult forces”. Two days following the crime, on January 8, 1980, the then Minister of the Interior, Virginio Rognoni, spoke of an “operational complicity between organized crime and terrorism”. The same vision was expressed in the subsequent debate by Pio La Torre.

An approach also followed by Giovanni Falcone, who conducted his last major investigation precisely on the Mattarella murder and other political crimes. He said that these were crimes of mafia origin but the motive “was certainly not or exclusively mafia”. A light on what happened might come from the establishment of a commission of inquiry, as the deputy attorney general at the Court of Cassation and former president of the Palermo Tribunal, Antonio Balsamo, has long hoped for: “I believe that the time may be ripe. Above all for the shared historical reconstruction of this dramatic season of mafia terrorism. A season that, fortunately, belongs to the past but that it is nevertheless important to reconstruct completely, because there are vast grey areas on which it would be essential to shed full light. All this might be the work of a commission, which might go beyond the limits that are inherent to the criminal process. And it might be an important tool for building a shared memory capable of shedding light on a period in which some of the most important representatives of the institutions fell in Sicily, such as Piersanti Mattarella, who had been able to change the consideration of Sicily in the European and international context, managing to oppose with extraordinary courage the designs of Cosa Nostra in the most difficult period”. Now the sending of the anonymous letter that is now in the hands of the investigators. Could it be a turning point?