Rita Borsellino
Sicilian pharmacist who became a leading anti-mafia campaigner
RITA BORSELLINO, who has died of cancer aged 73, was a leading figure in the crusade against the Mafia.
She had been a pharmacist in the family chemist’s in central Palermo, but when in July 1992 the Sicilian Mafia – Cosa Nostra – murdered her elder brother Paolo, the top anti-mafia investigating magistrate, she dedicated the rest of her life to the organisation’s defeat.
What drove her was justice, not revenge. A collaborator told reporters after her death: “I never heard her utter one word of hatred, bitterness, or vendetta against the Mafia. Ever.”
A devout Catholic, she became convinced that although Cosa Nostra planted the bomb which killed her brother and five members of his police escort outside their mother’s house in Palermo, it had done so in collusion with the powers that be.
Two months earlier, the organisation had murdered her brother’s colleague, Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three members of their police escort, with a remotely detonated bomb hidden in a drainpipe under the road linking Palermo airport to the city.
The two investigating magistrates had been responsible for the first ever successful mass prosecution of Mafiosi in 1987, which led to the conviction of 360 of the 471 put on trial and revealed Cosa Nostra to be an unelected state within the elected state.
Rita Borsellino was born in Palermo on June 2 1945, the daughter of Diego Borsellino, a pharmacist, and his wife Maria Pia. She had an elder sister and two elder brothers.
At Palermo University she read Pharmacy and in 1969 she married Renato Fiore, with whom she had three children.
She had no interest in politics, but after her brother’s assassination she became, as her husband once told reporters, “a whirlwind”, constantly on the move to speak out against the Mafia.
The deaths of her brother and Falcone coincided with a wave of Mafia atrocities on the Italian mainland but also with the nationwide “Mani Pulite” (Clean Hands) judicial revolution which, during the early 1990s, put on trial for corruption virtually an entire generation of Italy’s senior politicians and business people.
Not long after the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi won the 1994 general election, he turned up at her apartment in Palermo, but she refused to let him in. So he asked over the intercom: “What can we do to defeat the Mafia?” She replied: “Everything, because you are the government.”
Like many on the Left, she believed Berlusconi to be in cahoots with the Mafia. Though he has always denied it, in 2014 his former right-hand man Senator Marcello Dell’utri, a Palermo lawyer, was sentenced to seven years in jail for Mafia collaboration.
Rita Borsellino felt that Italy’s only hope lay in persuading young people to reject not just the Mafia but the Mafioso mentality and in 1995 she became founding vice-president of the anti-mafia group Libera – launched by the priest Don Luigi Ciotti to tour schools throughout Italy and Europe – and eventually in 2005 its president.
In 2006 she stood as the Italian Left’s candidate for the presidency of Sicily’s regional parliament, but narrowly lost to the Right’s candidate Salvatore Cuffaro, who was subsequently convicted of being a collaborator of Cosa Nostra and sent to jail.
From 2009 to 2015 she was a euro MP and she wrote several books about the Mafia. These included Paolo’s Smile, a reference to the smile on the face of her dead brother, which had inspired her to take up the struggle against his assassins.
Rita Borsellino was a devoted follower of the cult of Padre Pio, the stigmatist and mystic.
Her husband died earlier this year. She is survived by her two daughters and a son.
Rita Borsellino, born June 2 1945, died August 15 2018