ROME — Palermo prosecutors failed for 26 years to name a suspect in the murder of Domenico Geraci, a militant unionist who railed against Mafia influence before he was shot dead at his own doorbell in 1998. But testimony from three new Cosa Nostra turncoats led the Palermo anti-Mafia directorate (DDA) this week to charge two convicted Mafiosi with the crime, judicial sources said. 

 Geraci served in the ranks of the Italian Labour Union (UIL) and as the Italian People's Party Palermo councilor before deciding in 1998 to run for mayor in his hometown of Caccamo, a commune 50 kilometers east of Palermo.

 Throughout his mayoral campaign, Geraci argued that Caccamo — whose city council had been dissolved in 1993 for Mafia infilitration — was still under the Cosa Nostra’s thumb.

 He called a July, 1998 press conference ‘The Fight Against the Mafia for Legality and Development,’ and used the event to denounce Caccamo’s proposed Master Plan as a ploy to enrich mafiosi’s families and their government stooges. He refused to support a water management plan with which he took the same issue. He outlined plans to limit corruption in government agencies across the board. He named names in public. 

 Bernardo Provenzano, the late, convicted capo dei capi of the Corloneosi Mafia, allegedly felt that Geraci had crossed a line. 

 That information comes from Emanuele Cecala, Andrea Lombardo, and Massimiliano Restivo, three Cosa Nostra members whom the Palermo DDA said recently joined veteran turncoat Nino Giuffrè as sources in the long-cold Geraci investigation. 

 The DDA had suspected Mafia involvement in Geraci’s murder from the time of the crime, prosecutors said. But despite useful testimony from Giuffrè, they lacked sufficient evidence to charge a suspect before their interviews with Cecala, Lombardo, and Restivo.

 The three informants — who corroborated, and elaborated upon, Giuffrè's story — told investigators that boss Provenzano asked brothers Salvatore and Pietro Rinella to organize the outspoken unionist’s demise. The Rinella brothers allegedly arranged for two younger men, Filippo Lo Coco and Antonino Canu, to do the dirty work, prosecutors said. 

 On the evening of October 8, 1998, Lo Coco fired six rounds from a semiautomatic rifle as Geraci moved to enter his home after work. His wife and 17-year-old son, Giuseppe, heard the shots. They saw (and Giuseppe threw a potted plant at) a grey Fiat Uno speeding out of Caccamo’s Piazza Zafferana. 

 Gunman Lo Coco and getaway driver Canu are both deceased. The Rinella brothers arranged for both of their deaths in the years following Geraci's murder, the informants told prosecutors. Provenzano died in 2016, after 43 years on the lam and a final decade in near-total isolation in a string of prisons around Italy.

 Salvatore and Pietro Rinella have both been in Sicilian custody since 2003, when a tip from Giuffrè, then a newly-minted turncoat, put an end to their nine years living on the run. The brothers were sentenced to life in prison for murder, extortion, money laundering, and Mafia-type activity during their reigns as bosses in Trabia, a resort town just east Palermo. 

 Giuseppe Geraci, now 42, called this week's revelations "long-awaited." He told La Repubblica that he had grown pessimistic about his father's case — particularly on days like when, on the 25th anniversary of Domenico's murder, Caccamo's local government organized a town-wide sausage festival. But the Rinellas’ charges demonstrate, Giuseppe said, that, "fortunately, the judiciary has not forgotten the sacrifice of a man who thought about his community and wanted to free it from the Mafia."