“Thirty-nine years after the tragic ambush of September 3, 1982 in Palermo, I pay a moving homage to the memory of the Prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Mrs. Emanuela Setti Carraro and agent Domenico Russo, victims of the mafia ferocity”. With these words, the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella paid homage to the prefect of Palermo, his wife and the escort policeman, who was also a victim of the Cosa Nostra attack. “Their barbaric killing represented one of the most serious moments of the attack by organized crime on the institutions and on the men who impersonated them – continues Mattarella – but at the same time, it ended up accentuating even more an unbridgeable gap between the wounded city and that mafia who continued to want to determine their destinies with intimidation and death ».
A heinous murder that, the President of the Republic recalls, contributed to the awareness of the mafia phenomenon: “The national community as a whole, even if struck and shaken, knew how to react by making itself strong of the same determined and lucid energy of which Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa had already given an example, during his brilliant career in the Carabinieri, in his commitment against criminal and terrorist organizations. Despite the brevity of the assignment carried out in Palermo, the sacrifice of the Prefect Dalla Chiesa and his ideal legacy helped to guide many of the choices that, in the following years, allowed a qualitative leap in the action to contrast the phenomena of mafia infiltration in the economy and in the Public Administration. More incisive rules and powers of coordination gave new vigor to the strategies to combat organized crime and strengthened the trust of the public apparatuses that were fighting it, while a feeling of active citizenship grew in civil society, the bearer of a culture of rights opposed to the logic of belonging and privilege “.
Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa was killed on 3 September 1982 in via Isidoro Carini, in Palermo. General of the Carabinieri, originally from Saluzzo, he dealt with the fight against the terrorism of the Red Brigades before being appointed prefect of the Sicilian capital. He took office in April and was killed by Cosa Nostra just six months later, in one of the bloodiest periods for the city since what went down in history as the Second Mafia War.