"Antonino Gioé tells me: gradually. He tells me three times. At the third time I activate the remote control".
It is Giovanni Brusca, placed on the hill overlooking Capaci, who unleashes hell on the highway.
The explosive charge prepared by the blaster Pietro Rampulla and placed under a tunnel makes Giovanni Falcone's car fly.
The judge is crushed with three escort officers: Antonio Montinaro, Rocco Di Cillo and Vito Schifani.
His wife Francesca Morvillo, also a magistrate, died shortly after in the hospital.
The driver Giuseppe Costanza is in the back seat and is saved for this.
Thirty years ago what one of the performers, Gioacchino La Barbera, called "the attacker" closes the accounts with the man who personifies the symbol of the fight against Cosa Nostra.
His inquiries into the mafia and the bosses changed history.
And not just judicial history.
Falcone is the man who, with the help of dozens of collaborators starting with Tommaso Buscetta, has reconstructed the military and top-down structure of the mafia, has identified executors and principals of the great slaughter of Palermo, has widened the links of relations between Cosa ours and power.
With Paolo Borsellino and the other members of Antonino Caponnetto's pool, he instructed the maxi-trial and sent to trial an army of 474 defendants.
In those years, the pool focuses on a new investigative method that leverages the search for mafia money and assets, the terrain in which hierarchies are formed and alliances and new interests are welded.
The power of Cosa Nostra insinuates itself into the productive fabric and into the vital ganglia of the economy while an attack on the state that often takes on a terrorist dimension makes its way.
"We must make war to make peace" is the strategy of Totò Riina which outlines the conditions of a negotiation destined to sanction a principle of impunity.
The mafia thus kills magistrates, journalists, investigators, the president of the Region, Piersanti Mattarella, the prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the regional secretary of the PCI Pio La Torre, promoter of the law that will be approved only after his death:
The maxi trial is the strongest and most emblematic response that the state can put in place.
The accusatory system, strengthened by the revelations of Buscetta and a crowd of collaborators, holds up to the Supreme Court.
The sentence that decrees the defeat of the bloody and ruthless line of the leaders of Cosa Nostra opens the way to the massacre season.
The first terrifying sign is the assassination of the Hon.
Salvo Lima: the Andreottian proconsul in Sicily, the man who, according to the judiciary, was one of the political referents of the mafia is eliminated because he would not have been able to influence the outcome of the maxi-trial.
With his death, the strong candidacy of Giulio Andreotti as head of state is also put out of action.
When the attack on the highway is conceived and organized, Falcone is director of criminal affairs of the Ministry of Justice: a key post from which the lines of the most important anti-Mafia measures are promoted.
Falcone is also the creator of DNA, the anti-mafia prosecutor in which he will never arrive.
He is stopped by the hostile climate that surrounds him ever since he started dealing with the mafia ("Ruins the economy", it is said in the attorney general) after a brief passage to the bankruptcy section of the court.
His itinerary is marked by great judicial results and sensational personal defeats.
Before the CSM prefers him, the elderly Antonino Meli at the head of the education office Falcone is muddied by the letters of the "crow",
who accuses him of having protected the bloody vendettas of Totuccio Contorno, and in June 1989 escapes an attack with still obscure outlines: a powerful explosive charge is placed and fortunately discovered on the cliff of the villa dell'Addaura where he spends the summer.
They were "very refined minds" - so he will call them - the ones who had prepared the bang.
Around it is said that it was he who organized a staging functional to his career.
Ill-willedness and hostility take shape in the "palace of poisons" and will accompany him during his experience in the prosecutor's office (he shares it with Paolo Borsellino) which in February 1991 will end with his passage to the ministry.
"Now the worst is coming", he says after the sentence of the Supreme Court on the maxi-trial.
And he is an easy prophet: 57 days later Falcone will be up to Borsellino: the script was already known.
