Giuseppe ('Pino') Puglisi was born in the working-class Brancaccio district of Palermo — in the same neighbourhood where, fifty-six years later, he would be killed. He was ordained priest at the Palermo archdiocesan seminary in 1960 at twenty-two and served for thirty-seven years across the difficult inner-Palermo parishes of the long post-war years — Settecannoli, Romagnolo, Boccadifalco, Godrano — increasingly developing a distinctive pastoral method focused on systematic catechesis of children and adolescents (drawing them out of the Mafia-recruitment-age cohort), economic micro-development (small artisan trade workshops attached to the parish), and direct confrontation with local Mafia clan structures.
In September 1990, at fifty-three, he was assigned as parish priest of the parish of San Gaetano in the heart of his native Brancaccio — a Palermo district at that time under the absolute control of the Graviano brothers' Cosa Nostra clan. He founded over the next three years the Centro Padre Nostro — a parish-attached community center providing free primary schooling, basic health care, after-school programmes, and adolescent counselling for Brancaccio's children. The Center deliberately recruited from the Mafia-recruitment-age cohort (8–15 years) and was an immediate threat to the Graviano clan's territorial-loyalty base.
He received explicit Mafia threats from 1991 onwards (the Graviano brothers later, in their courtroom confessions of the early 2000s, acknowledged having ordered the death). On his fifty-sixth birthday, September 15, 1993, returning home from the parish, he was shot in the head at point-blank range outside his rectory door by Salvatore Grigoli, a Cosa Nostra hitman of the Graviano clan. Grigoli later testified — at the trial that convicted him — that Puglisi's final words, looking directly at him as he raised the pistol, were a smile and the words 'I was expecting this.' The episode broke Grigoli; he confessed publicly, converted to Catholicism, and gave the testimony that secured the convictions of the Graviano brothers and the broader Brancaccio Cosa Nostra leadership. Beatified by Pope Francis at Palermo on May 25, 2013 — the first formally beatified Mafia-killed Catholic.