Bruno Contrada has died, the man of mysteries: between secret services and controversial relations with Cosa Nostra.

Bruno Contrada, who was 94 years old, has died. A man of the secret services, he was at the center of a controversial judicial case and had ambiguous relations with Cosa Nostra.

Contrada died last night just before midnight. The funeral will be held on Saturday in Palermo. A Neapolitan but Palermitan by adoption, he had spent his career in Palermo and went through all the stages of an investigator from police chief to high-ranking official in the secret services over the course of thirty years. 

Arrested on Christmas Eve '92, the year of the Palermo massacres, and then tried for external complicity in mafia association, Contrada was sentenced to 10 years in prison on April 5, '96. The sentence was overturned by the Court of Appeals on May 4, 2001: acquitted. The Supreme Court referred the case back to Palermo. Then the new sentence of 10 years in 2006, after 31 hours of deliberation by the Palermo Court of Appeals, and the confirmation by the Supreme Court the following year. Then came prison, house arrest, and finally the end of the sentence in October 2012.

Then began the attempts to revise the trial and appeals to the Strasbourg court for human rights. Italy was condemned twice: in February 2014 because the detainee should not have been in prison when he requested house arrest due to his health conditions and then because the former police officer should not have been convicted of external complicity in mafia association since, at the time of the events (1979-1988), the crime was not "sufficiently clear". 

In these years, Contrada has always fought to "safeguard - he said - the honor of a man of institutions." "I want the honor that was taken from me, I have not lost faith in the State," he repeated. After another long legal battle, the first section of the Court of Appeals in Palermo, overturning the decision of the second section, after the annulment with referral by the Supreme Court, accepted Contrada's request for compensation for wrongful detention reducing the amount of compensation to 285,342 euros. The sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2023.