The attack was carried out with a Fiat Fiorino packed with 227 kilograms of explosives, parked near the Torre dei Pulci, between the Uffizi museum and the Arno River.

There, they played hosts to Gaspare Spatuzza, Cosimo Lo Nigro and Francesco Giuliano, mafiosi from Brancaccio and Corso Dei Mille, two districts of Palermo.

The explosives were then shipped from said abandoned building to Prato by trucker and mafia collaborator Pietro Carra, who had stashed them in a hidden compartment of his vehicle.

On the evening of 26 May, Giuliano and Spatuzza burglarised a Fiat Fiorino lorry and packed it with nearly a quarter of a tonne’s worth of the explosives they had made in Corso Dei Mille.

Several attacks, including this one, were ordered to serve as warnings to mafia members, in the hope of deterring them from becoming Pentiti, and as retribution for the State overruling Article 41-bis on prison regime.

Most notably, Spatuzza claimed that the massacre had been ideated in the presence of Cosa Nostra bosses Matteo Messina Denaro, Giuseppe Graviano and Francesco Tagliavia.