The mafia bosses Matteo Messina Denaro and Giuseppe Graviano attended the Maurizio Costanzo Show, sitting in the audience of the Pairoli Theater in Rome .
It was the winter of 1992 and both were already on the run . A few months earlier, judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino had been killed by Cosa Nostra and a few months later - on 13 May 1993 - a car bomb exploded in Via Fauro in Rome, an attack from which Costanzo and Maria De Filippi miraculously escaped unharmed.
Costanzo's participation in the show could therefore have been a sort of reconnaissance, apparently on behalf of Totò Riina, to prepare the bomb attack against the well-known journalist and presenter, who died on 24 February 2023 .
La Repubblica revealed the news and released an unpublished image of the two bosses among the public. A photo which together with others is part of the investigation, coordinated by the deputy prosecutors of Florence Luca Turco and Luca Tescaroli and by the prosecutor Lorenzo Gestri, on the massacres in the North in which the former senator Marcello Dell'Utri is under investigation and in which he was under investigation also Silvio Berlusconi.
From what we learn, the images were identified by investigators who examined all the episodes of the show from 1991 to 1993, discovering Graviano (wearing a red sweater) and Messina Denaro (to his right) on two evenings: November 13th and on December 30, 1992.
The videos were then shown to various justice collaborators who recognized the two bosses, in particular Graviano.
The investigative inspiration came from Graviano himself: intercepted in prison he revealed to an inmate that in 1992 he had been in Rome with "U siccu" (nickname of Messina Denaro), also in the theater where the Costanzo Show was recorded.
(Unioneonline/lf)