Paolo Borsellino’s red diary was not stolen, and it wasn’t either in the bag of the magistrate murdered in D’Amelio road in Palermo on the 19th of July 1992, because “the only investigations carried out soon after the slaughter excluded that the bag kept by captain Giovanni Arcangioli contained a diary, as he always said”. This is what the sixth penal section of the Cassation Court said after the preliminary hearing in Caltanissetta, in which the judge decided that Arcangioli was not guilty of aggravated theft.

The investigation ended with the decision of the Cassation Court, after the prosecutor’s office of Caltanissetta asked three times to close of the case. Everything started with the publication of a video in which there was Arcangioli who was walking towards the end of D’Amelio road carrying a bag. Once opened, the police ascertained that the bag only contained some sheets of paper.

In the red diary that the carabinieri had given Borsellino as a gift, said his relatives, Borsellino used it to write his thoughts, ideas for investigations, notes on his talks with the Mafia informants, especially during the months before his murder. According to some people, that diary also contained useful information concerning the investigations on the Capaci slaughter. According to others instead, the diary is the “black box of the second Republic” and could be have been used to blackmail the people mentioned.

Translated by Chiara Nunnari from John Milton Institute