The last Godfathers [antikvár]

Prologue: 23 May 1992 Shortly after 4 p.m. on 23 May 1992, a Saturday, Italy's anti-mafia hero Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca and an escort of bodyguards slice their way through Rome's ever-chaotic traffic. Blue warning lights flashing and sirens blaring, the motorcade skirts the Colosseum, decaying monument to man's cruelty, before heading south, bound for the airport and the city where Falcone was born - the Sicilian capital Palermo. After scoring countiess victories as a public prosecutor in Palermo - the biggest a trial which inflicted 19 life sentences and 2,665 years behind bars on no fewer than 338 mafiosi - the stout, mustachioed Falcone had moved to Rome a year earlier to take up the job of director of penal affairs at the justice ministry. With typical determination, the workaholic 5 3-year-old judge set up two new bodies that would coordinate both police and judicial investigations into the brotherhood across Italy. This finally gave the state the tools to tackle the spread of organised crime -assuming it wanted to do so. But there is something spoiling Falcone's latest success. Now, as so many times in his career, the envy of his colleagues and the hostility of those who prefer to quiefly ignore the mafia is causing him concern. His nerves are on edge. A sniping campaign has accused him of creating the new office of national anti-mafia prosecutor, known in the press as a 'super-prosecutor', simply so that he can fill it. A few days earlier, the judge had joked bitterly about his enemies' attacks, telling a colleague: 'After all, for someone like me who knows he's going to be killed, what do you think I care about being a super-prosecutor?'