On 19 January 2024, the day on which Paolo Borsellino would have turned 84, the “Borsellino Museum” was inaugurated in Marsala on an initiative promoted and shared by the ANM Subsection of Marsala.
The exhibition space was created in the office of the old Palace of Justice which from 4 August 1986 to 5 March 1992 was intended for the Prosecutor Borsellino: his room and the anteroom were used, recovering the furnishings of the time – armchair, desk , sofas, bookcases, photos on the walls and even the packets of his ever-present cigarettes – together with the original folders of some criminal proceedings brought by him in Marsala.
It is precisely among these papers placed on the desk in the museum room that the attentive visitor will be able to find the measure of personal and financial prevention which, in January 1990, was proposed under the signature of the Public Prosecutor against Francesco Messina Denaro, Matteo’s father. This is one of the first applications of the anti-mafia legislation on the subject, testimony to the new investigative attention towards organized crime that the arrival of Paolo Borsellino would have brought about in that area.
Paolo Borsellino takes office at the Marsala Prosecutor’s Office once his experience at the Pool of the Education Office of Palermo has concluded, where, with Giovanni Falcone, he had prepared and signed the ordinance-sentence against “Abbate Giovanni + 706” which gave birth at the great “Cosa Nostra” trial – unique and unrepeatable in Italian judicial history – which went down in history as the Maxitrial due to the very high number – 475 – of defendants on various charges including that of mafia-style criminal association.
His “being a magistrate” was immediately characterized by its revolutionary attitude with respect to the context, both internal and external to the judiciary of the time: pool, mafia organisation, economic crime, bank investigations, corroboration of incriminatory statements and professional sharing were not terms usually used already inside the Palaces of Justice.
Paolo Borsellino – as well as Rocco Chinnici, and all those who composed the anti-mafia pool with him, Giovanni Falcone, Leonardo Guarnotta and Giuseppe Di Lello – were true innovators for the entire judiciary, capable of establishing ethical rather than professional rules, to make the WE prevail over the I, thus overcoming jealousy, protagonism, victimism and above all, to carry out the activity with investigative curiosity and necessary feedback, in the name of a culture of investigation where the evidence dominates the culture of suspicion or pre- judgment.
And it is with this spirit that investigative activities are enriched, through the exchange of news and information, both within the office and with other prosecutor’s offices, adopting a method which, especially in areas of obstinate criminal phenomena and criminal organizations that operate without distinction of skills and/or territories, becomes the key to success by affirming the principle that processes and investigations do not belong to the individual Public Prosecutor or to the individual magistrate, but are (or should be) a common heritage.
The example that Prosecutor Borsellino provided to the Marsala Prosecutor’s Office – witnessed last January 19th by the precious and moving memories of Alessandra Camassa, Giuseppe Salvo and Luciano Costantini among the protagonists of the Marsala group of that period – invites us to reject the role of the magistrate -bureaucrat, wait-and-see and superficial, limited to the formal respect of working hours or of “papers in order” (today, “numbers and statistical data in order”!) or of the magistrate isolated in his ivory tower or on the contrary, of that who competes in a scenic arena encouraging fans, forgetting that he “is” a servant of the State.
He carried out the role of Prosecutor, coordinator of investigations, without shielding himself behind formalisms or respect for the “quiet life”, working to protect his colleagues and, at the same time, with the authority derived from his professionalism and ethical commitment in absolute compliance with the rules on the organizational and structural structure of the Prosecutor’s Office, identifying investigative itineraries that respect the rules and the necessary coordination between the various investigative bodies, without interference or stress tests of a corporate nature on the correct development of the investigations.
His actions were characterized by the way he approached investigations: investigating “no ifs or buts”, penetrating the criminal circuit thanks to the regulatory tools of the trial and criminal law, bringing to light criminal phenomena that were not easy and immediate to acquire; in fact, he investigated where others did not investigate in compliance with the principle of autonomy and independence of the judiciary, recognized constitutionally not as a prerogative and privilege of freedom from constraints, but, rather, as a principle that distinguishes and delimits its competences and roles compared to other powers of the state.
Thus Paolo Borsellino was at the service of the State and Justice, the undisputed and authoritative protagonist of our judicial history without writing books on investigations carried out, nor exhibiting or flaunting his service; without establishing relationships with powers outside the judiciary in search of empty consensus or perks and positions; he carried out the investigations in compliance with the law, without hesitation or personalism, revealing pockets of impunity and bringing to light protection networks or clientele, without tactics or hesitations, worries or second thoughts.
He acquired credibility, authority and recognition only by wearing the robe to enter the halls of Justice; he did not resort to shortcuts, recommendations, relationships to assert his “being” a magistrate.
Paolo Borsellino did all this while always maintaining that welcoming and transparent smile that he shows in the photos displayed in the Museum, a place of dutiful memory, open to students, Marsala residents, citizens and all those who want to “see” the places of this illustrious history, to recover and better understand the value that these Offices represent not for (or at least not only for) statistics, good practices, monitoring – more easily referable to company productivity – but, rather, for the ability to conduct and develop investigations which, in compliance with criminal and procedural rules and in the face of verified evidence, constitute a crime hypothesis without sacrificing the real needs of the person subjected to the investigation and of the injured person to be subjected to scrutiny by the Judge in the cross-examination between the parties.
Paolo Borsellino was a manager in love with the prosecuting function in a historical moment in which this figure was beginning to be at the center of stormy controversies which degenerated into unjust and unreasonable delegitimizations, since there have been and continue to be many attempts to subject the Public Prosecutor’s Office to purpose of exercising powers of control and conditioning or worse, of inducing forms of obedience.
Today, what arouses the greatest concerns are the announced basic lines of the criminal justice reform project which aim to involve (or perhaps, to upset) the constitutional structure that belongs to the Public Prosecutor by obsessively proposing the separation of judging and judicial careers. investigators, the establishment of two distinct CSMs, the increase in the percentage of the non-registered component in both to the detriment of the professional component, the psycho-aptitude test, the introduction of a new disciplinary mechanism, a different relationship between the judicial police and the public prosecutor, at the mercy of a frenetic and at the same time contradictory legislator because it is always oriented towards sanctioning exclusively in criminal matters – with widespread delegation to the PM and the Criminal Judge – every event deemed illegitimate or in conflict with democratic rules.
In this way, the role of the Public Prosecutor is debased by pointing it out as the evil of all the problems of the Justice value, sadly affirming a clear mistrust in its work with the desire to delegitimize it.
The Museum dedicated to Paolo Borsellino, echoing the Proustian belief according to which “memory is the only tool capable of capturing the transformations that time causes to things and people; preserving memory, therefore, means preserving identity” helps us to recover the real meaning of the function of the Prosecutor’s Office: rich, passionate, capable of intervening in favor of the victim and respecting the person under investigation, affirming his identity according to the principle of an action of the investigating judiciary carried out within the culture of jurisdiction and evidence, distant and extraneous – for the good of the community – to any form of control and influence, other than the physiological ones of the rules of the Trial.
The hope is that the Museum will also become, in this sense, a place of careful reflection, where, through objects of memory, one can grasp the essence of “being a magistrate” of a Public Prosecutor’s Office which, in its apparently simple everyday life, hides effort, commitment, passion, managing to achieve results that can help us “to feel the beauty of the fresh scent of freedom which contrasts with the stench of moral compromise, indifference, contiguity and therefore complicity”.
