On the occasion of the anniversary of the Dalla Chiesa murder, let us reflect together: where does the fight against the mafias stand? By Giuseppe Lumia

Many years have passed since the massacre in Via Carini, in Palermo, where the valiant and ingenious General-Prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, his young wife Emanuela Setti Carraro and the trusted escort agent Domenico Russo fell.
Many years have also passed since the launch, again in that historical moment, of an unprecedented phase in the approach to the fight against the mafias in our country, hitherto supine and characterized by the late intervention "the day after".
Of course, a step forward has been taken, but with shortness of breath, emergency and always lagging behind mafia strategies: first they strike and then the state reacts; first they trample on human rights, attacking social, economic and democratic balances, with money laundering, drug trafficking, extortion and control of procurement and public spending, with the exchange of votes and the infiltration of institutions and bureaucratic apparatus, and only then do we run for cover; first we discover collusions and institutional responsibilities and then we try to sew some patches.
The same "Rognoni-La Torre" law, on the recognition of the mafia association with the 416-bis and on the aggression against the wealth of the mafia, so much appreciated also by Dalla Chiesa, was approved only on 13 September by the Parliament, that is, after that year both those who had promoted it, Pio La Torre, on 30 April, and those who had widely supported it, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, precisely on 3 September, were killed.
The same story repeated itself at the beginning of the terrible 90s. The set of rules in which the disruptive intuition of the "double track" is substantiated, proposed by Giovanni Falcone, with the 41-bis, the life imprisonment impediment, the establishment of the Anti-Mafia Districts and the Anti-Mafia Prosecutor's Office and the birth of the DIA, was dismissed by Parliament only after the massacres of Capaci and Via D'Amelio in 1992 took place.
Rarely, along the troubled via crucis of the fight against the mafias, have we known "the Anti-mafia of the day before", the one that knows how to prevent, anticipate and disarticulate the especially collusive power system of the various mafia organizations and therefore obtain results of liberation from mafia conditioning .

An attempt to go in this direction actually took place with the approval of the new Anti-Mafia Code in September 2011, stabilized and made more effective and powerful in October 2017, with adjustments also made recently. In essence, the "double track" has been systematized on a broad spectrum, in the various articulations of the penal and procedural system, of the penitentiary system and of the patrimonial prevention measures, with the seizure and confiscation of assets, disqualification and administrative measures.
Our Anti-Mafia Code is considered, by scholars and the most accredited observers and operators in this field, as the most advanced legislation in the current global context.
It has emerged in various investigations and in the investigative work of the Anti-Mafia Commission that Dalla Chiesa, despite having already started an unprecedented work on a social, preventive and repressive level, known precisely as the "Dalla Chiesa method", did not have these regulatory tools at his disposal . They were promised but denied in practice. Not even many other exceptional state servants had them, sent to the front line and in jeopardy, moreover against a collusive system that easily hit them from behind.
Now the strategy of collusive mafias has changed, they want to disarticulate the "double track" system contained in the Anti-Mafia Code piece by piece. The "refined minds" have convinced the bosses that the strategy of the "crazed bull" in front of the red cloth of the Code is no longer successful. Violence has not disappeared, but it is better left as a last resort. We prefer to act and offend with the same weapons of law: hitting the anti-mafia legislation "with foil" through arguments that apparently have their value. On the "41-bis" and on the "obstative" life sentence, for example, the argument of the violation of human rights and the re-educational value of the sentence is used. But be careful, now the demolishing strategy will expand and will also target the disruptive patrimonial prevention measures and the anti-mafia prohibitions, even deeming them without legal foundation.
Even the undeniable successes of "the day after Anti-Mafia" are used to demolish the legislative instruments that would allow us to finally move on to "the day before". The same extraordinary and positive capture of Matteo Messina Denaro is exploited to declare the substantial end of Cosa Nostra.
Countless surveys, investigations and rigorous studies today show us which are the cornerstones of the current mafias, for which it is necessary more than ever to keep alive the "double track" structured in the Anti-Mafia Code, rather than weaken or demolish it, as some sentences and proposals laws have begun to do.

1. The mafias are a system governed internally by such an associative bond that it resists the capture and death of the leaders. They are one of the few organizations that is able to survive today's drift of "I" leadership present in society and in politics itself. The mafia organization, when it suffers even heavy blows, rearranges itself and reproduces itself, despite the loss of the leader on duty. Not even the boss of bosses can get up in the morning and question the bond of association. The mafioso can leave his clan only with collaboration or with death, unless it is the same mafia organization that expels ("lays down") its associate.
2. The mafias are an integrated and collusive system, a set of violence and intimidation, of economics and finance, of politics and institutional systems, of ways of thinking and behaving. They know how to keep all these articulations standing, bringing out from time to time the most convenient side, such as that of business in areas far from their historical settlement, without however renouncing the strategy of using them as a whole when they find space or it is necessary is useful.
3. The mafias are an integrated system that always maintains two levels of roots, the territorial one and the global one. Thinking of separating these two levels leads to deadly blunders. We need to attack them simultaneously, on the preventive and repressive side, both with the legislation matured up to now and with new profiles to be implemented in the European and international context, putting the global anti-mafia legal space on track.

This is why the intuitions and thoughts of Dalla Chiesa, La Torre and Falcone remain current and should, if anything, be relaunched. Basically, the "double track" is the most suitable regulatory approach to systematically hit the mafias in their strict associative bond, in their deadly apparatus of collusion, in their social, economic and political power, in their devastating way of proceeding locally and global.
Verifying the application of the Anti-Mafia Code, adjusting it gradually to make it more suitable for a "day before" strategy is the most appropriate way not only to challenge but to finally win the power of the mafias.
This is why we need to reflect on those strategies carried out by personalities such as Dalla Chiesa, to make a non-rhetorical memory of their winning ideas and to avoid anti-mafia genericism, thus structuring plans for a decisive attack on the mafias.

of Giuseppe Lumia