a classical education, Falcone studied law at the University of Palermo following a brief period of study at Livorno's naval academy. Falcone and Borsellino met again at Palermo University. While Falcone drifted away from his parents' middle-class conservative Catholicism towards communism, Borsellino was religious and conservative; in his youth he had been a member of the (FUAN), a right-wing university organisation affiliated with the neo-fascist MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano). However, neither ever joined a political party, and although the ideologies of their political movements were diametrically opposed, they shared a history of opposing the Mafia. Their different political leanings did not thwart their friendship. Falcone wanted a naval career but his father thought him too independent-minded for the armed forces, and sent him to study law. Graduating in 1961, Falcone began to practice law before being appointed a judge in 1964. Falcone eventually gravitated toward penal law after serving as a district magistrate. He was assigned to the prosecutor's office in Trapani and Marsala, and then in 1978 to the bankruptcy court in Palermo. First trial against the Mafia In early 1980, Falcone joined the ‘Office of Instruction’ (Ufficio istruzione), the investigative branch of the Prosecution Office of Palermo. He started to work at a particularly tense moment (→ 'Years of Lead'). Judge Cesare Terranova, a former parliamentary deputy and Antimafia reformer who had been the main prosecutor of the Mafia in the 1960s, was to have headed this office, but he was killed on 25 September 1979. Only two months earlier, on 21 July 1979, Boris Giuliano had been assassinated; he headed the police investigation squad investigating heroin trafficking by the Mafia headed by Rosario Spatola and Salvatore Inzerillo. Taking Terranova's place was Rocco Chinnici, who was murdered by the Mafia in July 1983. On 5 May 1980, Giuliano's successor in investigating the heroin network, Carabinieri captain Emanuele Basile, was killed. The next day, the prosecuting judge Gaetano Costa signed 55 arrest warrants against the heroin-trafficking network of the Spatola-Inzerillo-Gambino clan. From Sicily heroin was moved to the Gambino crime family in New York, who were related to the Inzerillos. Chinnici appointed Falcone to investigate the case, one of the biggest Antimafia operations in more than a decade. Costa signed the indictments after virtually all of the other prosecutors in his office had declined to do so – a fact that leaked out of the office and eventually cost