“Those who criticise Falcone today are the heirs of those who persecuted him whilst he was alive,” says former Minister of Justice Martelli

“Travaglio is a professional defamer, Ranucci a wind-up. To speak so ill of Giovanni Falcone in 2026 means you must have nothing left to say.” Former Minister of Justice Claudio Martelli remembers everything about when the magistrate arrived in Rome. “I rang him after being sworn in as Minister of Justice to enshrine the experience of his anti-Mafia task force in Palermo into law. And that is what we did,” he tells Il Foglio. It was 1991; Falcone had already survived an assassination attempt and had left Palermo to take up the post of Director of Criminal Affairs in Via Arenula. “His time in Rome was his happiest period. Those who criticise him today are following in the footsteps of those who, even back then, were casting doubt on him.” 

“Giovanni Falcone began to be targeted by fellow magistrates and politicians long before he arrived in Rome,” says the former member of the Italian Socialist Party, quoting the words spoken by Paolo Borsellino about a month after the Capaci massacre: “The judiciary, which is perhaps more to blame than anyone else, began to kill Falcone in January 1988. When the High Council of the Judiciary rejected his candidacy to head the Palermo Investigation Office.” That is to say, at the time, the very forefront of the fight against the Mafia. This was due to the discontent that Falcone’s astute yet simple strategy – that of following ‘the money’ – was causing in Sicily at the time. “The then Public Prosecutor of Palermo, Giovanni Pizzillo, said: ‘Falcone must stop. He cannot ruin the Sicilian economy by interfering in the business dealings of the leading figures in the commercial world’,” the former minister recalls. “And that proves just how serious those investigations conducted by Falcone were. By December 1987, he had become the most famous magistrate in the world, having secured several convictions against Riina and Provenzano at the Maxi-trial.” So why, then, was he denied that crucial role in Palermo? “Because in Sicily, the majority of the judiciary, the police, the Carabinieri and the political establishment had by then become accustomed to co-existing with the Mafia. Falcone and other courageous magistrates, on the other hand, were investigating them.”

The decision by which the CSM denied him the post of head of the institutional office, he says, “is an act of persecution. He himself had realised this. That was a message to the Mafia: ‘Not even my own people want me’”. Martelli emphasises several times how, from Palermo right through to Rome, Falcone suffered nothing but persecution at the hands of his colleagues. “He’d become somewhat hardened to it, but he was also disgusted by it. He’d lost a great deal of trust in them.” The list of criticisms, accusations, malicious insinuations and suspicions levelled against Falcone is enormous. It came as much from the political sphere (the accusations by the mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, regarding Falcone’s alleged ‘drawers’ containing evidence against politicians with Mafia links), to the National Magistrates’ Association (ANM), with the strike on 3 December 1991 organised against the then Head of State Francesco Cossiga and against the establishment of the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor’s Office, branded by the former president of the ANM, Raffaele Bertoni, as ‘yet another Mafia leadership for which there is absolutely no need’. “That was a despicable remark,” says Martelli. “The ANM, which today behaves like a political party and interferes in the lives of magistrates, has never apologised. And to think that today, becoming the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor is seen as the crowning achievement of a magistrate’s career.” Decades after his tragic death, the framework devised by Falcone has helped to strengthen and reorganise the state’s anti-Mafia efforts more efficiently, though he paid the price for his commitment on 23 May 1992. “It was the worst day of my life,” recalls Martelli.

Today, thirty-four years after the massacre, not even the memory of a martyr can escape the remark steeped in suspicion and the acrobatic comparison. “In Falcone’s final days, there has been a great deal of inappropriate talk about him,” says the former Minister of Justice with disgust. In response to the dismay of Falcone’s family and the comments made to "Il Foglio" by former magistrates such as Luciano Violante, Pietro Grasso and Giuseppe Ayala – who stated that “Falcone would never have had dinner with Lavitola” – the editor of "Il Fatto Quotidiano", Marco Travaglio, retorted sarcastically that Falcone would have done even worse, given that “he worked exclusively with the Andreotti government”. The presenter of Report, on the other hand, saw fit to compare himself to the public prosecutor, as well as to other victims of the Mafia and Red Brigade terrorism such as Piersanti Mattarella and Aldo Moro. “Marco Travaglio is a professional defamer, a repeat offender. I don’t know Sigfrido Ranucci, but it seems to me he’s let it go to his head a bit. Not just now, but for some time,” says the former Minister of Justice, according to whom those who go so far as to pull the magistrate’s strings today, sowing yet more baseless doubts, are merely following in the wake of those shameful attacks that took place thirty years ago. “They are the heirs and successors to that campaign to discredit him that we saw whilst he was still alive. And let’s be honest: if people are still badmouthing Falcone in 2026, they’ve clearly run out of arguments. There’s not much left to say.”