Vendetta
The Mafia, Judge Falcone and the Quest for Justice
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
On 23 May 1992 the Mafia assassinated its 'Number One Enemy', the legendary prosecutor Judge Falcone, with a motorway bomb that also killed his wife Francesca and three bodyguards. Fifty-seven days later, the Mafia killed Falcone's friend and colleague, Judge Paolo Borsellino, with a car bomb outside his mother's home that also killed five bodyguards.
These two murders changed forever how Italy viewed the Mafia. VENDETTA tells the inside story of the assassination plots and the investigation that followed. Follain reveals Borsellino's desperate race against time to find out who killed his friend while knowing he was next on the list and reveals the daring undercover police mission which unmasked the killers.
Based on new and exclusive interviews and the testimony of investigators, Mafia supergrasses, survivors, relatives and friends, VENDETTA recounts the events hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute as the Mafiosi plan and carry out the murders, and as the police hunt them down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To fight the legendary Cosa Nostra syndicate, Judge Giovanni Falcone professed, "you have to learn to live and think like the Mafiosi." Rising from the same crime-infested docks of northern Sicily, Falcone and Salvatore "The Beast" Riina counterbalance one another in Follain's history of the judge's assassination. In this suspense-filled volume, London Times journalist Follain (Mussolini's Island) recalls in impressive detail the Mafiosi's 1992 plans to murder Judge Falcone as well as ex-prosecutor and close friend Paolo Borsellino two months later. Conversations among key family members are reconstructed; particulars of the ambush and coordinated bombings are detailed. But the moments which best capture the stakes and depth of the situation are those concerning Falcone and his personal motivations, his deeply-rooted attachments and unwavering work ethic. Follain's effective depiction of Falcone's psyche the prosecutor had perhaps "a heavy, and typically Sicilian, dose of fatalism in his character" helps readers to empathize further with the judge's life and brutal fate. With b/w photos.
