The social and professional experience of Giovanni Falcone, the examining magistrate in the most dramatic legal proceedings ever brought against the Mafia, leads to an examination of the relationship between judicial and ethnographic investigations, for it is thanks to the Maxiprocesso pretrial investigation (1986) that an abundance of information on Cosa Nostra, its way of operating, its internal rules, and its code of honor is now accessible. While the reconstruction of truth by way of clues, in a world protected by omertà, invites comparison between the examining magistrates’ investigative techniques and the epistemological model that has underpinned the social sciences since the nineteenth century, the use of informants belonging to the Mafia underworld—the pentiti—establishes an even more direct parallel with ethnographic methods.