Giorgio Boris Giuliano was a police chief from Palermo, Sicily. He was the head of Palermo's Flying Squad. He was killed by the Sicilian Mafia while investigating heroin trafficking and money laundering. Not long before his death he had been one of the first Italian policemen to have attended the FBI academy at Quantico, Virginia. His son Alessandro became head of the Milan Flying Squad and arrested old guard Mafioso Gaetano Fidanzati in 2009; as part of the same operation, Gianni Nicchi was captured in Palermo.

Mauro De Mauro was an Italian investigative journalist. Originally a supporter of Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime, De Mauro eventually became a journalist with the left-leaning newspaper L'Ora in Palermo. He disappeared in September 1970 and his body has never been found. The disappearance and probable death of the "inconvenient journalist", as he became known as a result of his investigative reporting, remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in modern Italian history.