After a long and distinguished career, culminating in the Maxi Trial in 1986–1987, on 19 July 1992, Borsellino was killed by a car bomb in Via D'Amelio, near his mother's house in Palermo.

Though many of their childhood friends grew up in the Mafia background, both men fought on the other side of the war against crime in Sicily as prosecuting magistrates.

While Borsellino tended towards the right and became a member of the Fronte Universitario d'Azione Nazionale (FUAN), a right-wing university organization affiliated with the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement,[4] Falcone drifted away from his parents' middle-class conservative Catholicism towards communism.

[9] During those years, working together with magistrates Falcone and Chinnici, Borsellino continued his research about the Mafia and its links to political and economic powers in Sicily and Italy.

The Antimafia pool was a group of investigating magistrates who closely worked together sharing information to diffuse responsibility and to prevent one person from becoming the sole institutional memory and solitary target.

[3] In 1986, Borsellino became head of the Public Prosecution Office of Marsala,[10] continuing his personal campaign against the Mafia bosses, in the most populated city of the province of Trapani.

In 1987, after Caponnetto resigned due to illness, Borsellino was the protagonist of a great protest about the unsuccessful nomination of his friend Falcone as head of the Antimafia Pool.

[12] In July 2012, Mancino was ordered to stand trial on charges of withholding evidence on 1992 talks between the Italian state and the Mafia and the killings of Falcone and Borsellino.

Borsellino unofficially asked Carabinieri Colonel Mario Mori to resume a previous investigation by Falcone into Mafia control of public works contracts.

Mori was later investigated on suspicion of posing a danger to the state after it was alleged he prevented the arrest of Provenzano and had taken a list of Riina's demands that Ciancimino had passed on.

[15] In 2014 Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, testified in a trial in which 10 defendants including the former interior minister, Nicola Mancino, were accused of negotiating with the Mafia.

[16] On 17 July 1992, Borsellino went to Rome where he was told by Gaspare Mutolo, a Mafia member turned informer, of two allegedly corrupt officials: Bruno Contrada, former head of Palermo Flying Squad, now working for the secret service (SISDE), and anti-Mafia prosecutor Domenico Signorino.

The bomb attack also claimed the lives of five police officers: Agostino Catalano, Walter Cosina, Emanuela Loi (the first Italian policewoman to be killed in the line of duty), Vincenzo Li Muli and Claudio Traina.

[18] In his last video interview, given on 21 May 1992 to Jean Pierre Moscardo and Fabrizio Calvi, Borsellino spoke about the possible link between Cosa Nostra's mafiosi and rich Italian businessmen such as future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.