The beard, which for 32 years has grown unkempt in the name of a denied justice, will not cut it, because the road to the search for truth is still long. But today for Vincenzo Agostino is still an important day, a goal, albeit partial, after years of battles to get an answer on the murder of his son Nino and his wife Ida Castelluccio. The decision to sentence the boss Nino Madonia to life imprisonment for the double crime, committed in Villagrazia on August 5, 1989, is a first response after decades of misdirection and filing. In the meantime, a decision that establishes a first step: the assassination of the police officer, who collaborated with the secret services to search for mafia fugitives, was Cosa Nostra. The indictment, for the crime, of the mafia boss Gaetano Scotto, then, adds another piece of truth.
The ambush was wanted by that part of Cosa Nostra that had relations with 007. Scotto, it is now clear, carried on ambiguous relations with exponents of the Services. Finally, the third piece of the mosaic put in its place today by the GUP, with the decision to arrange the trial for Paolo Rizzuto, a neighbor and friend of Agostino, accused of aiding and abetting for having lied about the murder. It is the seal to the thesis long supported by the victim’s father according to which someone for years would have tried to file the investigation.
Antonino and Ida, who was only a few months pregnant, were shot dead in front of the entrance to the summer home of the Agostino family, in Villagrazia di Carini (Palermo). Two killers arrived aboard a large-displacement motorbike, which was then found burnt not far from the scene of the massacre. Reticences, cover-ups, missing documents have hindered the investigation. Augustine’s own membership in intelligence has been denied for years. Only over time it was discovered that the victim also had “covered duties”, which went beyond his ordinary institutional duties. And it was possible to reconstruct the context in which the crime would have matured and the murky terrain of opaque relationships between components of the thing some infidel exponents of the institutions Agostino, together with Emanuela Piazza, who was also killed, Giovanni Aiello and Guido Paolilli, all police officers, was part of an intelligence structure that had relations with pieces of the Cosa Nostra. Only shortly before his death he had understood the real purpose of the “cell” to which he belonged and had moved away from it. A choice that, according to investigators, cost him his life. With the conviction of Madonia, therefore, a murder for years remained shrouded in mystery is reconstructed. The trial of Scotto and Rizzuto will have to give the answers still missing.