It has been 33 years since anti-mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino was blown up by Cosa Nostra in front of his mother’s home in Palermo, Sicily. His death on July 19 1992 came 57 days after the murder of his colleague, Giovanni Falcone. This was the peak of Cosa Nostra’s attack on state representatives.
A vital document was lost that day – a red notebook believed to have been in Borsellino’s work bag. This loss has hampered attempts to understand how deep into the Italian state Cosa Nostra’s activities run.
The early 1990s were a turbulent time in Italy. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 broke the Italian party system and wiped out the traditional political parties, which had been based around the opposing forces of the Christian Democrats (supported by the US and the Vatican) and the Communist party.
