Publicist journalist since 1958, correspondent for Ora of Palermo and for the Ansa News Agency, collaborator with Corriere della Sera, with Il Giorno and with the Gazettino of Venice. In 1960 he created Prospettive Siciliane (Sicilian Perspectives).
He was 24 years old and was a correspondent for the newspaper L’Ora of Termini Imerese. He had written articles and investigative stories on the links between the Mafia and politics in the Madonie area. On May 3rd ,around 11 in the morning Cosimo Cristina left the house well-dressed, with his customary bow tie, freshly shaved and fragrant. In the evening, having not seeing him come home, his parents and three sisters began to worry. Cosimo had still not returned to the family.
after two days of gloomy, profound, absolute desperation after unsuccessful searches by relatives, friends and the police. The corpse of the young reporter was eventually found at 15.35 on the 5th May along the Palermo-Messina railway line, between the Termini Imerese and Trabia stations. His father, an employee of the Railways, heard on the radio the news of the presence of a lifeless body on the train tracks and rushed to the site of the discovery.
For years, the suicide hypothesis was followed and in the 1990s the case was re-opened, but a different judicial explanation for his death was not found.
(from Remembrance Day of journalists killed by mafia and terrorism, 2008)
(Update by Dario Barà – 3rd May 2020)
It took almost 30 years from his death summarily classified as suicide, for a discussion to begin about the young journalist Cosimo Cristina and his journalistic activity. A process of revelation and rediscovery by a small town which had buried him “without a funeral” in 1960. For justice system it was a matter of suicide but for those who knew Cosimo Cristina and for those who studied his life it was instead a murder, a Mafia murder.
- In 1966, six years after the death of Cosimo Cristina, the Deputy Commissioner of Palermo Angelo Mangano, investigating the Mafia in the territory around Palermo, assembled confessions and new investigative elements in a voluminous dossier and reopened the investigation into the death of the journalist. The new investigative thesis was about murder. On July 12th 1966, the judiciary ordered the exhumation of Cristina’s body and an autopsy on it . The outcome of the autopsy performed at the Termini Imerese cemetery by professors Ideal del Carpio and Marco Stassi confirmed the suicide thesis by overturning the investigative findings of Mangano. On October 3rd 1966, the story of Cosimo Cristina was definitively archived as a suicide.
