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Cosimo Cristina

Cosimo Cristina

Mafia
Italy
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Italian version

WHO WAS

Publicist journalist since 1958, correspondent for Ora of Palermo and for the Ansa News Agency, collaborator with Corriere della Sera, with Il Giorno and with the Gazettino of Venice. In 1960 he created Prospettive Siciliane (Sicilian Perspectives).

He was 24 years old and was a correspondent for the newspaper L’Ora of  Termini Imerese. He had written articles and investigative stories on the links between the Mafia and politics in the Madonie area. On May 3rd ,around 11 in the morning  Cosimo Cristina left the house well-dressed, with his customary bow tie, freshly shaved and fragrant. In the evening, having not seeing him come home, his parents and three sisters began to worry.  Cosimo had still not returned to the family.

after two days of gloomy, profound, absolute desperation after unsuccessful searches by relatives, friends and the police. The corpse of the young reporter was eventually found at 15.35 on the 5th May along the Palermo-Messina railway line, between the Termini Imerese and Trabia stations. His father, an employee of the Railways, heard on the radio the news of the presence of a lifeless body on the train tracks and rushed to the site of the discovery.

For years, the suicide hypothesis was followed and in the 1990s the case was re-opened, but a different judicial explanation for his death was not found.

(from Remembrance Day of journalists killed by mafia and terrorism, 2008)

READ HIS STORY

  • Cosimo Cristina: A Biography
    edited by Vincenzo Bonadonna, taken from Memorial Day of journalists killed by mafia and terrorism, 2008

THE SEARCH FOR THOSE RESPONSIBLE

(Update by Dario Barà – 3rd May 2020)

It took almost 30 years from his death summarily classified as suicide, for a discussion to begin about the young journalist Cosimo Cristina and his journalistic activity. A process of revelation and rediscovery by a small town which  had buried him “without a funeral” in 1960. For justice system it was a matter of suicide but for those who knew Cosimo Cristina and for those who studied his life it was instead a murder, a Mafia murder.

  • In 1966, six years after the death of Cosimo Cristina, the Deputy Commissioner of Palermo Angelo Mangano, investigating the Mafia in the territory around Palermo, assembled confessions and new investigative elements in a voluminous dossier and reopened the investigation into the death of the journalist. The new investigative thesis was about murder. On July 12th 1966, the judiciary ordered the exhumation of Cristina’s body and an autopsy on it . The outcome of the autopsy performed at the Termini Imerese cemetery by professors Ideal del Carpio and Marco Stassi confirmed the suicide thesis by overturning the investigative findings of Mangano. On October 3rd 1966, the story of Cosimo Cristina was definitively archived as a suicide.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  • 1998 – Giuseppe Francese, son of Mario Francese, a journalist of the Giornale di Sicilia killed by the Mafia in 1979, after years of oblivion, retracing his father’s work, took up again the case of Cosimo Cristina by reconstructing the story of the journalist, his work and investigative findings up to the outcome of the 1966 investigation.
  • 1998 – In the same years in which the young Francese was working on the story of Cosimo Cristina, the journalist Luciano Mirone was also collecting materials for the publication of “Gli insabbiati. Stories of journalists killed by the Mafia and buried by the indifference” that occurred in 1998. Thanks to the work of Mirone, the magazine Espero and the schools in Termini Imerese, Cosimo’s hometown, after years of oblivion, rediscovery of his background and his journalistic work began.
  • 2000 – The municipal administration of Termini Imerese dedicated a street to the departed journalist.
  • 2010 – On the 50th anniversary of his death with the participation of schools and associations in and around Termini Imerese on the initiative of the local periodical Espero, a commemorative plaque was placed outside the Fossola railway tunnel, the place where the journalist’s body was found.
  • 2011 – The name of Cosimo Cristina, together with that of Giuseppe Impastato, Mauro Rostagno and Giovanni Spampinato, is included among the names of the Journalists Memorial, at the Newseum in Washington dedicated to journalists who died in the course of their work.
  • 2013 – The name and face of the journalist are included in the Ossigeno Memory Panel which recalls those Italian journalists killed while “searching for the truth”.
  • 2017 – The Tisia d’Imera Comprehensive Institute of Termini Imerese dedicates the lecture hall of the institute to the journalist.
  • 2017 – The ‘Casa di Giuseppe’ a study centre on journalists killed by the Mafia is created in Bagheria.
  • 2019 – Cosimo Cristina is remembered together with Giovanni Spampinato and Mauro De Mauro on the plaque affixed by the Municipality of Palermo in the street where the editorial office of the newspaper L’Ora was located, to remember the newspaper and its historic director Vittorio Nisticò.
  • 2020 – On March 6th a plaque dedicated to the eight journalists killed by the Mafia in Sicily was inaugurated in Palermo, in the headquarters of the Sicilian Press Association.

BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS

  • Antonio Bonanno, Luciano Mirone, Cosimo Cristina. The “cub reporter” killed by the Mafia, Round Robin Editrice, 2015
  • Giuseppe Francese, “A Mafia suicide?”, in The Sicily Inquiry, 1998
  • Luciano Mirone, “The cover-ups: Stories of journalists killed by the Mafia and buried by indifference”, Rome, 1998, reprint 2008.
  • Roberto Serafini, “Enza Venturelli. I’ll tell you about my Cosimo Cristina”, Tricase, Youcanprint Editions, 2015
  • UNCI, Day of Remembrance for Journalists Killed by Mafias and Terrorism, Rome, 2008.

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