Maxi Trial - Appeals

Appeals

The Maxi Trial was largely regarded as a success. However, the appeals process soon began, which resulted in a shocking number of successful appeals on minor technicalities. Most of this was thanks to Corrado Carnevale, a judge suspected of being in the pay of the Mafia, who was handed control over most of the appeals by the corrupt politician Salvatore Lima.

Carnevale was eventually nicknamed l'ammazza-sentenze - "The Sentence Killer" - because of his tendency to overturn Mafia convictions for technicalities. He threw out some drug-trafficking convictions, for example, because wiretapped conversations presented as evidence referred to the moving of "shirts" and "suits" instead of narcotics, even though it was well known that these were the codenames the members of that particular drug-ring employed for narcotics. He also released one Mafioso, who had been convicted of murder, on the grounds of ill-health. Despite being supposedly at death's door, the mobster immediately fled to Brazil with his illicit fortune and his family.

By 1989, only 60 defendants remained behind bars, and many were not exactly doing hard-time, with several residing in prison hospitals and taking it easy while malingering with phantom illnesses. One convicted Mafioso had a private hospital ward to himself and had several common (non-Mafiosi) criminals as his servants, supposedly while suffering from a brain tumor that, suspiciously, did not show any symptoms whatsoever.

Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino complained about these events but found it hard to be taken seriously as, so it seemed, the state's anti-Mafia crusade lost momentum and their opinions went largely unheard. One informer later said that the Mafia tolerated the Maxi Trials because they assumed those convicted would soon be quietly released once the public had lost interest, and the Mafia could continue with business as usual. It seemed, for a while, that they were correct in this assumption.