Giuseppe Graviano headed the Brancaccio district organisation of Cosa Nostra in Palermo in the early 1990s. Italian courts have sentenced him to life imprisonment several times over: for the series of attacks in Florence, Milan and Rome in 1993 that killed ten people, for ordering the murder of the parish priest Father Pino Puglisi in September 1993, and for a murder with other charges. He was arrested in Milan on January 27, 1994 and has been in custody since. A further life sentence, for ordering the killing of two Carabinieri in Calabria in January 1994, has been through the highest court once, was annulled in December 2024 and was imposed again at a retrial in July 2026.
Graviano has never cooperated with the authorities. The matters against him are separate events tried in different courts over more than thirty years: the mainland attacks, the killing of a priest, the murder of a boy, and the Calabrian killings. Some verdicts are final and some are not.
Brancaccio is a district of Palermo. In the early 1990s the district organisation was run by Giuseppe Graviano and his co-defendant Filippo Graviano. A court that later examined the Puglisi murder found it "proven, in a certain and incontrovertible manner" that the two led the organisation at the time. The court described them as the undisputed controllers of the territory. Giuseppe was formally the head of the mandamento, but the court found that the two held equal power; collaborators of justice described Giuseppe as the first in rank.
The first-instance judges in the Puglisi trial found that Giuseppe led the operational group of the organisation and handled strategy. They found that both men kept their influence while they were fugitives and later in custody. Both had previously been convicted of mafia-type association under Article 416-bis of the Italian penal code in the Palermo maxi-trials, and those rulings are irrevocable.
Graviano's convictions include the two attacks of 1992 in Sicily that killed the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and the officers escorting them: Capaci on May 23, 1992 and via D'Amelio in Palermo on July 19, 1992. By December 2024 he had been sentenced to life six times: for Capaci and via D'Amelio, for the attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan, and for the Puglisi murder.
The campaign on the mainland began in the spring of 1993. On May 14 an attack in Rome injured 24 people and killed no one. On May 27 an attack in Florence killed five people, among them children, and injured 40. On July 27 an attack in Milan killed five. In the last hours of July 27 and the first of July 28 two further attacks in Rome, at two churches, injured 22 people and caused no deaths. In all there were seven attacks in eleven months, ten dead and 95 injured.
The investigation of all of these attacks was concentrated in Florence, where the first of them with fatal results had taken place. The charge was massacre aggravated by terrorism and by the aim of subverting the democratic order. The Florence Court of Assizes sentenced several defendants to life imprisonment, among them Salvatore Riina, Bernardo Provenzano, Giuseppe Graviano, Filippo Graviano and Matteo Messina Denaro. The court found a single criminal design, a step up from the Sicilian massacres of the year before. Prosecutors held that the leaders were organisers of a campaign meant to force the State to negotiate over the strict custody regime for mafia detainees and over the law on collaborators of justice. On May 6, 2002 the Court of Cassation made fifteen life sentences for the campaign final. Giovanni Brusca, who had cooperated, received a sentence of 20 years.
In February 2017 the Court of Cassation upheld the life sentence of another mafia member, Francesco Tagliavia, for his part in the Florence attack.
Pino Puglisi had been parish priest in Brancaccio since 1990. He was killed on September 15, 1993 in Palermo, in the district where he served. Investigators turned at once to the Graviano organisation, and the court that heard the case found that the two men were the leading suspects from the start.
The courts attributed the murder to the Brancaccio group led by Giuseppe Graviano and found that this group was already operating before the arrests of January 1994. The first-instance judges reasoned that Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano alone held the supreme power to give the order for the killing, "and no one else". Giuseppe Graviano and his co-defendant Filippo Graviano were sentenced to life imprisonment as the men who ordered the murder. Four members of the organisation who took part also received life sentences, almost five years after the killing. Puglisi was beatified in Palermo on May 25, 2013.
Giuseppe Graviano has maintained that he had no involvement in the murder.
Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano were wanted men who had been living in northern Italy. The Carabinieri arrested both in Milan on January 27, 1994. The campaign of attacks on the mainland had run from the spring of 1993 until the first weeks of 1994 and stopped around the time of the arrests.
Graviano was also tried for a murder, with other charges, of a boy. The Palermo Court of Assizes sentenced him to life imprisonment on January 16, 2012. The Palermo Court of Assizes of Appeal confirmed the sentence on March 18, 2013, together with life sentences for several co-defendants. The Court of Cassation, Second Criminal Section, rejected his appeal; its judgment was published on February 25, 2014.
On January 18, 1994 two Carabinieri, Antonino Fava and Vincenzo Garofalo, were killed on the motorway near Scilla, in the province of Reggio Calabria. Other Carabinieri were the target of attempted murders in the last months of 1993 and in early 1994. Two men, Consolato Villani and Giuseppe Calabro, were convicted of carrying out the killing of the two officers.
The Reggio Calabria anti-mafia prosecutors, led by Giuseppe Lombardo, treated these attacks as part of a national plan carried out in close coordination between Cosa Nostra and the Calabrian 'ndrangheta. On July 26, 2017 warrants were served on Giuseppe Graviano, who was already in custody, and on Rocco Santo Filippone, then aged 77, a man linked to the Piromalli clan of Gioia Tauro. The two were charged with having ordered the attacks. The investigation, which prosecutors called 'ndrangheta stragista, had run for four years. Statements by the cooperating witness Gaspare Spatuzza in other trials were described as decisive for the arrests.
In July 2020 the Reggio Calabria Court of Assizes sentenced both men to life imprisonment. The Court of Assizes of Appeal in the same city, presided over by Bruno Muscolo Campagna, confirmed the sentences on March 25, 2023 after about seven hours of deliberation. It had delayed its verdict from March 10 after an intercepted conversation from another investigation was added to the record. The appeal court's reasons, running to about 1,400 pages, described a convergent picture of involvement of the 'ndrangheta in a strategy shared with Cosa Nostra.
On December 16, 2024 the Sixth Section of the Court of Cassation annulled the life sentences, with remand for a new appeal trial before a different section of the Reggio Calabria court. This covered the murder of the two Carabinieri and the attempted murders of two pairs of Carabinieri in late 1993. Filippone's conviction for mafia-type association was the one charge left standing, and his sentence of 18 years for it became final. The Court of Cassation's reasons, published in April 2025, upheld the finding of a joint strategy between the 'ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra, with Carabinieri as targets. They held, however, that the role of Graviano and Filippone as instigators of the killing of January 18, 1994 had not been adequately proven. The difficulty lay in the evidence of two collaborators, Antonino Lo Giudice and Consolato Villani, each of whom said he had learned the information from the other. The Court of Cassation called this an irreconcilable contradiction.
On July 10, 2026 the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Reggio Calabria, presided over by Angelina Bandiera, again sentenced Graviano and Filippone to life imprisonment, accepting the request of the prosecutor general, Giuseppe Lombardo. The reasons were due within 90 days, and the defense was expected to consider a further appeal to the Court of Cassation. Graviano's lawyers had argued in December 2024 that the evidence of the collaborators lacked individual corroboration.
Giuseppe Graviano has been in custody since January 1994 and is held under Article 41-bis, the restrictive custody regime for mafia detainees. In January 2024 the Court of Cassation rejected his appeal against a surveillance court's decision to keep blocking some of his incoming and outgoing letters, on the ground that some of his letters contained ambiguous phrases unrelated to the rest of the text. Under the regime he can still write to his lawyer and to members of parliament.
In August 2026 two applications were expected, one to reopen the final conviction for the via D'Amelio attack and one for the Puglisi murder. He had also asked to be heard by an investigating judge in Caltanissetta in connection with a request to dismiss an inquiry into another man, and a decision on whether to hear him was due on September 14.
Italian trials for mafia murder pass through a Court of Assizes, a Court of Assizes of Appeal and the Court of Cassation. The Court of Cassation reviews points of law and the logic of the reasoning, and when it annuls a judgment "with remand" it sends the case to a different section of the appeal court for a new trial, as happened in December 2024. A judgment is final only when the Court of Cassation has rejected the appeal or the time for appeal has run out.
Article 416-bis of the penal code defines mafia-type association, and Graviano's earlier convictions under it in the Palermo maxi-trials are irrevocable. Article 41-bis of the custody law allows a restrictive regime for mafia detainees, and in the 1990s one of the aims of the 1993 campaign, as the Florence court and the prosecutors described it, was to bring that regime to an end. Cases of this kind are prosecuted by the district anti-mafia directorates, and the Reggio Calabria directorate brought the Calabrian trial. Collaborators of justice, former members who cooperate in exchange for reduced sentences, supplied much of the evidence in all of these trials, which is why the quality of their testimony decided the 2024 annulment.
The life sentence for ordering the Carabinieri killings is the one conviction of Graviano's that the Court of Cassation has annulled. His lawyers' position throughout has been that the collaborators' evidence was contradictory and uncorroborated, and the question may return to the Court of Cassation.
Graviano maintains that he had no part in the via D'Amelio attack or in the Puglisi murder. No court has accepted that position.
Who stood behind the 1993 campaign beyond the convicted Cosa Nostra leaders has been the subject of investigation in Florence for years. A judge in Florence ordered the dismissal of that inquiry against two people investigated as possible outside instigators, in a decree dated January 15, 2026 and made public on June 4, 2026, after finding no concrete evidence of direct contacts. That was the sixth dismissal in the line of inquiry, and the identity of any outside instigators remains an open question.
1990: Pino Puglisi becomes parish priest in Brancaccio.
May 23, 1992: attack at Capaci. July 19, 1992: attack in via D'Amelio, Palermo.
May 14, 1993: attack in Rome, no deaths.
May 27, 1993: attack in Florence, five dead.
July 27, 1993: attack in Milan, five dead; two attacks at churches in Rome, no deaths.
September 15, 1993: Father Pino Puglisi is killed in Palermo.
January 18, 1994: two Carabinieri are killed near Scilla.
January 27, 1994: Giuseppe Graviano and Filippo Graviano are arrested in Milan.
May 6, 2002: Court of Cassation makes fifteen life sentences for the 1993 campaign final.
January 16, 2012: Palermo Court of Assizes sentences Graviano to life for a murder with other charges.
March 18, 2013: Palermo appeal court confirms the sentence.
February 25, 2014: Court of Cassation judgment rejecting his appeal published.
July 26, 2017: warrants served for the Carabinieri killings.
July 2020: Reggio Calabria Court of Assizes sentences Graviano and Filippone to life.
March 25, 2023: Reggio Calabria appeal court confirms the life sentences.
December 16, 2024: Court of Cassation annuls the life sentences and orders a retrial.
January 15, 2026: Florence judge orders dismissal of the inquiry into possible outside instigators.
July 10, 2026: Reggio Calabria appeal court again sentences both men to life.