L'uomo di vetro nel prisma della verità. La storia di Leonardo Vitale pentito di mafia

A Man of Glass in the Prism of Truth - The author takes a fresh look at a legal case that took place in the early 1970s and has recently been used as the source of a novel and a film, finding useful tools for commenting on the truth of legal proceedings as a result of the interaction between different discursive regimes. The case of Leonardo Vitale, the first member of the Sicilian Mafia to turn informant, can be observed not only with reference to its specific content - the story of a member of "Cosa Nostra" who broke the bond of silence, offered a description of the Mafia as seen from the inside and so delivered himself up to an inexorable vendetta – but also as a potential paradigm of the relationship between law and truth. The factual truth that the rules of the criminal proceedings enable us to reconstruct seems to depend, in this story, on a more extensive theoretical syntax than the one that can be derived from the legal codes alone: a predicative system that admits certain topics and objects, while relegating others to a status of irrelevance. In a cultural framework in which there are even those who question whether the Mafia exists at all, while its members’ destiny is subject to their unmitigated fidelity, the words of an informer run the risk of rapidly being sidelined as the ravings of a madman, while their message is totally ignored and has no effect.

Ernesto De Cristofaro, L'uomo di vetro nel prisma della verità. La storia di Leonardo Vitale pentito di mafia in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 2/2009, pp 181-188, DOI: 10.3280/SD2009-002012