Leoluca Bagarella is a Sicilian member of Cosa Nostra from Corleone who was convicted in Palermo, Florence and elsewhere of a series of murders and of the 1993 attacks in Rome, Florence and Milan. Italian courts gave him life sentences; by March 2026 he was serving thirteen. He was arrested in Palermo on June 24, 1995 after four years as a fugitive and has been in custody since. In a separate proceeding, the trial over the contacts between the State and Cosa Nostra, he was sentenced in 2018 to 28 years, a term reduced to 27 years on appeal and then annulled in 2023 because the offense had become time-barred.
His convictions come from several trials spread over three decades, in different cities, and they concern separate events.
Bagarella came from Corleone, the town in the province of Palermo that gave its name to the faction, the Corleonesi, which took control of Cosa Nostra in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was aged 84 in March 2026.
The first conviction that comes from this period concerns 1977, in San Cipirello, a town in the province of Palermo. On July 1, 2009 the fourth section of the Corte d'assise di Palermo gave him a further life sentence, together with Giuseppe Agrigento, for the double murder of Simone Lo Manto and Raimondo Mule. The court also ordered both men to pay damages to the victims' families. The case rested on statements from cooperating former members of the organization, among them Giovanni Brusca. The killings were thirty-two years old when the court ruled.
Boris Giuliano was killed in Palermo on July 21, 1979. In 1995 Bagarella was convicted of the murder, and other leaders of the Corleonesi were convicted as the people who had ordered it.
Bagarella was jailed in 1979 and was released some years later when the limits on pretrial detention expired. From 1991 he was a fugitive.
The Direzione Investigativa Antimafia arrested him in Palermo on June 24, 1995, after he had been a fugitive since 1991. The operation was led by Francesco Gratteri, the head of the agency's operational centre in Rome, with a team drawn from Rome and Palermo.
After the arrest of Salvatore Riina in 1993, Bagarella was regarded as the effective leader of the organization and of its armed groups. His arrest in June 1995 removed him from that position, and his trials followed.
Between May and July 1993 a series of attacks struck Rome, Florence and Milan. On May 14, 1993 an attack in Rome injured 24 people. On May 27, 1993 an attack in the via dei Georgofili in Florence killed five people, two of them children. On July 27, 1993 an attack in the via Palestro in Milan killed Carlo La Catena, Sergio Pasotto, Stefano Picerno, Alessandro Ferrari and Moussafir Driss. Two further attacks in Rome later that week injured 22 people.
The Florence prosecutors, led by Piero Luigi Vigna, brought the main case. The first trial before the Corte d'Assise di Firenze began on November 12, 1996 and ended on June 6, 1998. The judgment of that day, sentenza n. 3, was issued against "Bagarella Leoluca Biagio and twenty-five other defendants," and the parliamentary antimafia commission refers to it as the "Bagarella judgment" after its lead defendant. Bagarella was among the defendants charged with the offense of strage (article 422 of the penal code) in the indictment's section E, which listed the attacks in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993 and one in Formello in April 1994. The trial ended with 14 life sentences, and Bagarella was among those sentenced, together with Matteo Messina Denaro and Gaspare Spatuzza. Bernardo Provenzano was also sentenced to life in that trial while a fugitive.
Proceedings against Salvatore Riina and Giuseppe Graviano were separated from the main trial. A second trial began on February 3, 1999 and ended on January 21, 2000 with life sentences for both, upheld on appeal the following year. In the whole Florence series of proceedings the Court of Cassation confirmed 19 life sentences for leaders and members of Cosa Nostra, as organizers and perpetrators.
Giuseppe Di Matteo died on January 11, 1996. Bagarella was convicted of murder, with other charges, in the case, and received a life sentence. Giovanni Brusca, Matteo Messina Denaro, Giuseppe Graviano, Salvatore Benigno, Francesco Giuliano and Luigi Giacalone also received life sentences for the case, Gaspare Spatuzza received 12 years, Giuseppe Monticciolo 20 years, Vincenzo Chiodo 21 years and Enzo Brusca 30 years, a term that also covers other murders. The Corte d'assise d'appello of Palermo confirmed five of the life sentences on March 18, 2013, among them those of Messina Denaro, who was then a fugitive, and Graviano.
The Corte d'Assise di Palermo sentenced Giovanni Brusca and Bagarella to life imprisonment for the murder of Ignazio Salvo.
The most publicized proceeding against Bagarella concerned a different charge: not a killing but the threat to the political body of the State. Prosecutors alleged that between 1992 and 1994 the leadership of Cosa Nostra tried to put pressure on the governments of Amato, Ciampi and Berlusconi through threats, linking the continuing attacks to changes in prison treatment for convicted members and to other measures favouring the organization. The offense is article 338 of the penal code.
Charges against 12 people were brought on July 24, 2012, and the first pre-trial hearing before Judge Piero Morosini followed on October 29, 2012. On March 7, 2013 the pre-trial judge approved indictments against 11 people. The trial before the Assize Court in Palermo, with a panel chaired by Alfredo Montalto, lasted five years and six months. The verdict was given on April 20, 2018. Bagarella received 28 years. Antonino Cina received 12 years, as did the former senator Marcello Dell'Utri and two former Carabinieri officers, Mario Mori and Antonio Subranni; Giuseppe De Donno received eight years. Massimo Ciancimino received eight years for slander of the former police chief Gianni De Gennaro and for complicity in mafia association, and the former interior minister Nicola Mancino was acquitted of false testimony. Giovanni Brusca's offenses were held to be beyond the statute of limitations.
The appeal began on April 29, 2019. On September 23, 2021 the Corte d'assise d'appello of Palermo, sitting in the Pagliarelli courtroom, acquitted Mori, Subranni and De Donno because the act did not constitute an offense, and acquitted Dell'Utri for not having committed the act. It upheld Cina's 12-year sentence. For Bagarella it reduced the sentence from 28 to 27 years, treating the threat against the Berlusconi government as attempted only and finding the other charges partially time-barred.
On April 27, 2023 the Sixth Criminal Section of the Court of Cassation gave the final ruling. It reclassified the offense as attempted threat to the political body of the State, annulled the appeal decision without referral for Bagarella and Cina because the offense had become time-barred, and excluded the responsibility of the three former officers. No prison term in this case remains in force against Bagarella.
Bagarella is in custody under the 41-bis regime in Sardinia. In December 2021 his life sentences were described as final convictions of the kind that bars early release. On March 31, 2026 the court in Sassari convicted him of resisting arrest over an incident in 2022; the prosecutor had asked for one year. He was then aged 84 and was serving thirteen life sentences.
Murder and massacre cases in Italy of this kind go before a Corte d'assise, a court of assize, in first instance. A Corte d'assise d'appello hears appeals, and the Court of Cassation reviews points of law and can annul a decision without sending it back, as it did for Bagarella in 2023. The statute of limitations also applies in Italian criminal law: in the state-threat case the Court of Cassation applied it after reclassifying the offense as attempted. The life sentence for offenses linked to the organization is the ergastolo, and the form known as ergastolo ostativo bars early release; 41-bis is the custody regime under which he is held.
Bagarella was acquitted, for insufficient evidence, in the first-instance trial before the Corte di Assise of Reggio Calabria, First Section, of the murder of Cesare Terranova. In the same trial the court convicted seven others, among them Michele Greco and Salvatore Riina, who received life sentences.
A judgment of the Corte di Assise di Palermo, presided over by Leonardo Guarnotta, in the case against Salvatore Riina and nine others found it established that Bagarella took part in the murder of Mario Francese in 1979.
The state-threat conviction did not survive: the Court of Cassation annulled it on April 27, 2023 as time-barred.
1977: Simone Lo Manto and Raimondo Mule die in San Cipirello.
July 21, 1979: Boris Giuliano is killed in Palermo.
1979: Bagarella is jailed; he is later released when the pretrial detention limits expire.
1991: he becomes a fugitive.
1993: the attacks in Rome (May 14), Florence (May 27), Milan and Rome (27 and July 28).
June 24, 1995: Bagarella is arrested in Palermo by the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia.
1995: he is convicted of the murder of Boris Giuliano.
January 11, 1996: Giuseppe Di Matteo dies.
November 12, 1996: the first Florence trial begins.
June 6, 1998: the Florence Assize Court issues its judgment; 14 life sentences, Bagarella among them.
July 1, 2009: life sentence in Palermo for the murders of Lo Manto and Mule.
July 24, 2012: charges brought in the state-threat case.
March 7, 2013: indictments approved.
April 20, 2018: sentenced to 28 years in the state-threat case.
September 23, 2021: sentence reduced to 27 years on appeal.
April 27, 2023: Court of Cassation annuls the sentence without referral, time-barred.
March 31, 2026: convicted in Sassari of resisting arrest.