[2] At the Giornale di Sicilia he began to take care of all crime reporting, from the Ciaculli massacre to the murder of Carabinieri Colonel Giuseppe Russo.

By digging in the intrigues connected with the construction of the Garcia dam, he also was the first to understand the strategic evolution and the new interests of the Mafia of Corleone and their spread to Palermo.

[4] In his motivation of the sentence of his killers in 2001, 22 years later, the judge described Francese's skills: "An extraordinary capacity to make connections between the most significant news events, interpret them with courageous intelligence, and thus to draw a reconstruction of exceptional clarity and credibility on the evolutionary lines of Cosa Nostra, in a historical phase in which – in addition to the emergence of insightful and widespread mafia infiltration in the world of procurement and economics – Cosa Nostra's strategy of attacking the State institutions began to take shape.

A subversive strategy that had made a quality leap just with the elimination of one of the most lucid minds of Sicilian journalism, a professional stranger to any form of packaging, free of any complacency towards the cliques colluded with the Mafia and able to provide the public with important tools for the analysis of the changes taking place within Cosa Nostra.

In December 2003, the Italian Supreme Court absolved Pippo Calò, Nenè Geraci and Giuseppe Farinella "for not having committed the crime" and confirmed the sentence of 30 years of prison for Totò Riina, Leoluca Bagarella, Raffaele Ganci, Francesco Madonia and Michele Greco.

The Italian Union reporters commemorated the journalist with the inauguration of a green area named after him in Viale Campania, an important avenue in Palermo, in the presence of family members.