X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Giovanni Falcone


Fabrizio Miccoli

During a taped phone conversation, Miccoli was quoted calling the slain anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone "fango", or dirt.

Giovanni Falcone

The Mafia was present in the area but quiescent; Tommaso Spadaro, a boy with whom he played ping-pong in the neighborhood Catholic Action recreation center, would later become a notorious Mafia smuggler and killer, but mafiosi were not a major presence in his childhood.

In The Best of Youth (La Meglio Gioventù, 2003) part of the movie happens against the backdrop of Falcone's death.

Tommaso Geraci

Works include the 1.9 m (6 ft) diameter bronze plaque at Palermo International Airport in memory of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and a 9 m high statue of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina at Poggio Maria, Cefalù.


2012 Brindisi school bombing

The school is named after Giovanni Falcone, an Italian prosecuting magistrate killed, along with his wife, Francesca Morvillo, by the Corleonesi Mafia in May 1992, on the motorway near the town of Capaci, Sicily.

Bruno Contrada

Contrada had initially come under suspicion when the first pentito, Tommaso Buscetta warned the anti-Mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Falcone that in 1984, Contrada was thought to protect certain bosses, tipping them off about possible police raids.

Gaspare Mutolo

Mutolo’s declarations led to the arrest of Bruno Contrada, the deputy director of the civil intelligence service SISDE, contributed to the indictment of Giulio Andreotti and to an understanding of the context of the 1992 murders of Salvo Lima, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Gaspare Spatuzza

He was also sentenced for the murder the young son of state witness Santo Di Matteo, Giuseppe, who had been kidnapped and killed after 779 days in a failed attempt to force the father to retract his testimony on the killing of Antimafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

Michele Greco

The Maxi Trial was largely undone by notoriously generous appeals, mostly thanks to Corrado Carnevale, who would release Mafiosi on the slightest of pretexts, much to the frustration of the Maxi Trial's architects, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.


see also

Excellent Cadavers

Stille's 1995 book Excellent Cadavers was made into a television movie in 1999, starring Chazz Palminteri as Giovanni Falcone and F. Murray Abraham as informant Tommaso Buscetta.