Gaspare Spatuzza belonged to the Cosa Nostra group of Brancaccio, a district of Palermo, and worked there for the brothers Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano. Italian courts convicted him of taking part in the 1993 attacks in Florence, Milan and Rome, which killed ten people, and of the murder of Father Giuseppe Puglisi in Palermo on September 15, 1993. He received life sentences for both. Arrested in July 1997, he spent more than a decade in custody before he told magistrates, on June 26, 2008, that he wished to cooperate. His accounts of the 1992 attacks that killed Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino led Italian courts to revisit cases that had been closed with final verdicts, and they exposed a line of false testimony. Conditional release took effect by March 2023.
Spatuzza was born in Palermo on April 8, 1964. From the 1980s he moved in the orbit of the Brancaccio family, which in the early 1990s was firmly in the hands of the Graviano brothers. A court description of his career records that he became a formally initiated member only after the arrests of Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano on January 27, 1994 and of Antonino Mangano on June 24, 1995. Two collaborators later confirmed that they had attended the initiation. After the arrests he was given the leadership of the Brancaccio district, at the request of Matteo Messina Denaro.
Before that, Spatuzza had been a member of what the courts called the action squad of the Graviano family, the squad that carried out the group's killings. The Italian parliamentary anti-mafia commission, in a later report, noted that in 1993 his rank was not high enough for him to have detailed knowledge of the strategic aims behind the attacks in which he took part. He answered to Giuseppe Graviano, who was in close contact with the leadership of Cosa Nostra.
Father Giuseppe Puglisi, known as Pino, was the parish priest of San Gaetano in Brancaccio. He was killed on September 15, 1993, his 56th birthday, in the district where he lived and worked. The killing was attributed to the Graviano action squad. A cooperating defendant, Salvatore Grigoli, said the Graviano brothers had ordered the murder through Mangano and that he had taken part in carrying it out. He named Spatuzza among the members of the group. A court judgment on the case records that Grigoli described Spatuzza as having helped to organise the killing and as having been involved in its execution, and that other collaborators also named him as a member of the group.
The case went to trial in stages. The first trial dealt with the material executors; with the exception of Grigoli, who had not yet been tried, they were sentenced to life imprisonment, and those sentences became irrevocable. A second trial dealt with people accused of helping the killers. A third, in which the Graviano brothers and Grigoli were the defendants, began with a committal order from a preliminary-hearing judge at the Palermo tribunal on November 21, 1995; Grigoli was a fugitive at that time. The Court of Cassation sentenced Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano, who were accused of ordering the murder, and the action-squad members Gaspare Spatuzza, Cosimo Lo Nigro, Luigi Giacalone and Nino Mangano to life imprisonment, while Grigoli, who became a state witness, received sixteen years.
Spatuzza therefore stands convicted, with final effect, as one of the material perpetrators of the murder of Father Puglisi.
In 1993 Cosa Nostra carried out a series of attacks on the Italian mainland, aimed at heritage sites and churches. Prosecutors and courts linked the campaign to the leadership's wish to pressure the state into easing the special detention regime under Article 41-bis.
The first of the series was in Rome, on May 14, 1993. Many people were injured and no one died. Spatuzza later denied having taken part in it, but the Court of Cassation recorded in 2015 that his participation had been established by an irrevocable judgment.
The second was in Florence, on May 27, 1993. Five people died and about forty were injured; the building and the heritage collections around it were badly damaged. The Florence Assize Court, in its first-instance judgment of June 6, 1998 (no. 3/1998), convicted Spatuzza as one of the material executors of the Florence massacre, together with Giuseppe Barranca. In the Court of Cassation's later words, he was irrevocably convicted for the Georgofili attack. The parliamentary commission records that, as a member of the Brancaccio action squad, he replaced another member of that group for the Florence operation.
The third and fourth attacks followed on July 27, 1993. In Milan five people died and several others were injured. The same night two attacks at churches in Rome injured 22 people and badly damaged both churches; no one died. Ten people in all died in the series: five in Florence and five in Milan.
Spatuzza has also confessed to taking part in a failed attack in Rome in January 1994, in which no one was hurt.
In the main trial, which began in Florence in 1996, life sentences went to Leoluca Bagarella, Filippo Graviano, Matteo Messina Denaro, Bernardo Provenzano, Gaspare Spatuzza and others. Collaborators such as Giovanni Brusca received lighter sentences, and Salvatore Riina and Giuseppe Graviano were sentenced to life in January 2000 at first instance. The Court of Cassation, in a hearing of May 6, 2002, confirmed the general structure of the judgment, annulling a few points of marginal importance and rejecting the objections on territorial jurisdiction and on alternative motives.
Spatuzza was arrested in July 1997, in Palermo, after the arrests of the men above him in the group. He was held under the special regime of Article 41-bis. On June 26, 1998 the national anti-mafia prosecutor Pier Luigi Vigna and his deputy Piero Grasso questioned him in an informal investigative interview, which could not be used at trial. In it he described aspects of the 1992 via D'Amelio attack, including the fact that the vehicle used had been stolen and that a man named in the existing case had not been involved. The information was passed to the competent prosecutors, and nothing followed for about ten years. The interview was transcribed in 2009 and entered the file of the fourth trial concerning the Borsellino murder in 2013.
By his own later account, Spatuzza spent about eleven years under the special regime before deciding to cooperate. During those years he went through a religious conversion.
On June 26, 2008 Spatuzza began to speak to prosecutors in Caltanissetta, Palermo and Florence. Investigators received his account with scepticism, because it contradicted verdicts that had become final more than fifteen years earlier. He confessed to the 1993 attacks and to roles in the 1992 attacks at Capaci and via D'Amelio, for which he had not been a suspect. His statements also led to the trial of Matteo Messina Denaro, who was convicted at first instance for the 1992 attacks. In 2010 a government commission initially rejected a request for a protection programme for him, citing statements made after the six-month deadline that applies to collaborators; the programme was later granted.
The courts that dealt with the 1992 attacks used Spatuzza's account in several proceedings. The judgment of the Caltanissetta court of appeal that reviewed the via D'Amelio case accepted his account of the theft of the vehicle used in that attack. The court noted that he was imprecise about the date on which he received the assignment, treated this as a sign of the genuineness of his statements, and reconstructed the sequence from other evidence.
On November 19, 2014 a preliminary-hearing judge in Caltanissetta, David Salvucci, sentenced Spatuzza to twelve years in a trial under the abbreviated procedure that concerned the 1992 Capaci attack. He received a special mitigating circumstance for his contribution to the investigation. Giuseppe Barranca and Cristoforo Cannella received life sentences and Cosimo D'Amato thirty years; the judge again recognised Spatuzza's credibility as a witness. The attack at Capaci had killed Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo and three members of the escort. In the Capaci-bis case, the Court of Cassation on June 14, 2022 confirmed life sentences for four other men and confirmed the acquittal of a fifth, whom the prosecutor general had wanted retried; she told the court that the appeal judgment was inconsistent in its assessment of Spatuzza's account.
In a separate case, a preliminary-hearing judge in Palermo, Fabio Pilato, convicted Spatuzza on March 3, 2021 of the 1991 murder of Giuseppe Mandalà. The sentence was eight years; the prosecutor, Dario Scaletta, had asked for five years and two months, and the judge did not grant the generic mitigating circumstances. Spatuzza had admitted the killing in his statements to prosecutors.
He has also been reported convicted of a murder, with other charges, in a case in which the victim was a child; the court and the sentence in that case are not on record.
Spatuzza's most consequential statements concerned the 1992 attack in via D'Amelio, Palermo, of July 19, 1992, which killed Paolo Borsellino and members of his escort. An earlier case, built on the testimony of a witness whose account later collapsed, had produced ten convictions. Spatuzza's account contradicted it. A man whom that witness had implicated was sentenced to eighteen years at first instance and nine on appeal and served that sentence in full before Spatuzza's account exonerated him. Seven men sentenced to life imprisonment in that earlier case were acquitted or released after his statements.
The new case, known as Borsellino-quater, ended at the Court of Cassation on October 5, 2021 with final life sentences for Salvatore Madonia and Vittorio Tutino. The court of appeal in Caltanissetta, in its judgment of November 15, 2019, had also convicted two false collaborators, Calogero Pulici and Francesco Andriotta. The Court of Cassation described the attack as of mafia origin, while recognising what it called anomalies and areas of shadow around it. Spatuzza himself admitted taking part in the theft of the vehicle used. He has not been convicted over the via D'Amelio attack.
Spatuzza was called as a witness in the Palermo appeal of Marcello Dell'Utri, which decided on November 20, 2009 to hear him. The court of appeal convicted Dell'Utri on June 29, 2010 of external complicity in a mafia association and sentenced him to seven years, two fewer than at first instance; for acts after 1992 it acquitted him with the formula that the fact does not exist. The Court of Cassation confirmed the seven years on May 9, 2014.
In August 2010 a preliminary-hearing judge in Palermo, Daniela Troja, became the first to recognise Spatuzza's reliability in a verdict, writing that his statements appeared to meet the requirement of reliability, being spontaneous and substantially coherent.
The most careful court assessment of Spatuzza's value as a witness came in the case of the boss Francesco Tagliavia, accused of providing men for the 1993 attacks. The Florence court of appeal upheld a life sentence against him in 2013, relying in part on Spatuzza's account. In 2015 the Court of Cassation annulled the conviction without remand for the attacks other than Florence, because the evidence was insufficient, and sent the Florence charges back for a new assessment. In its reasoning the court recorded problems with Spatuzza as a source: his denial of any part in the May 1993 Rome attack, which a final judgment contradicted; the finding of an earlier ruling against him in the Dell'Utri case; and an error in the date of a Palermo hearing that he described. It held that the fact cannot confirm the source and that several independent sources are needed. A different section of the Florence court of appeal then reviewed the Florence charges, and on February 20, 2017 the Court of Cassation upheld the life sentence for his part in the Florence attack.
Spatuzza had been held at a protected location under domiciliary detention since 2014. The Rome surveillance tribunal refused conditional release in 2022, saying his path was not yet complete and needed to be consolidated, though it described him as on the right path. His lawyer, Valeria Maffei, appealed. On April 21, 2022 the Court of Cassation annulled the refusal and sent the matter back to the tribunal. Conditional release followed, after about 26 years of detention, with favourable opinions from the anti-mafia prosecutors; it was public knowledge by March 10, 2023.
The conditions run for five years. He must not habitually associate with people with criminal records and must not leave his province of residence without the authorisation of the police headquarters. He has said that his cooperation is part of a religious conversion, and he has asked forgiveness of victims and done voluntary work.
Italian law rewards cooperation with a special mitigating circumstance for those who make a significant contribution to an investigation, as Spatuzza received at Capaci, and with protection programmes. The special detention regime of Article 41-bis applies to mafia members, and a life sentence without parole has been the rule for those who do not cooperate. Conditional release is open to those serving life sentences after 26 years. The rule that a cooperating witness must make statements about serious facts within 180 days of deciding to cooperate was the basis of the first refusal of protection for Spatuzza in 2010. A court may not rest a conviction on a collaborator's statements alone without confirmation from other evidence, a principle the Court of Cassation applied to him in 2015.
Spatuzza has also given accounts of what Giuseppe Graviano said to him in Rome in the winter of 1993 to 1994 about contacts between Cosa Nostra and politicians. Those are his claims; they are not findings of a court, and the people he named in this context have not been convicted on that basis. The anti-mafia investigation of those alleged contacts was closed in 1998 and again in 2008, and reopened in Florence in 2017.
Courts have not been uniform about his reliability. First-instance judges in 2010 and 2014 recognised it. The Court of Cassation in 2015 listed concerns, and the prosecutor general in 2022 called an appeal judgment inconsistent in its use of his testimony. The figure of more than forty murders attributed to him is a press count, not a list of court findings.
April 8, 1964: born in Palermo.
1991: the murder of Giuseppe Mandalà, for which he was later convicted.
July 19, 1992: the via D'Amelio attack; he later admitted taking part in the theft of the vehicle used.
May 14, 1993: the first attack, in Rome.
May 27, 1993: the Florence attack.
July 27, 1993: the Milan attack and the two attacks in Rome.
September 15, 1993: the murder of Father Giuseppe Puglisi in Palermo.
January 27, 1994: arrest of Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano.
July 1997: Spatuzza arrested.
June 6, 1998: Florence Assize Court first-instance judgment on the 1993 attacks.
May 6, 2002: Court of Cassation on the 1993 attacks.
June 26, 2008: begins to cooperate with prosecutors.
November 19, 2014: twelve years for the Capaci attack.
2015: Court of Cassation judgment in the Tagliavia case.
March 3, 2021: eight years for the 1991 murder of Giuseppe Mandalà.
October 5, 2021: Court of Cassation confirms the Borsellino-quater life sentences.
April 21, 2022: Court of Cassation annuls the refusal of conditional release.
By March 10, 2023: conditional release in force, with five years of conditions.