Italy tried to negotiate a deal with the Mafia
Published on: Monday, 25th May 2009 05:22 AM
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Administrator
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The murders of two courageous Sicilian judges in 1992 shocked Italy to the core, scandalised Europe, and forced the Italian state to take the Mafia threat seriously for the first time.
But this week Giovanni Brusca, the man who killed the first of those judges, Giovanni Falcone, by detonating a huge bomb under the Palermo airport motorway, told a heavily-guarded "bunker court" inside Rome's Rebbibia jail that the Italian authorities were secretly trying to cut a deal with Salvatore "Toto" Riina, the capo di capi of Cosa Nostra at the time and the architect of the atrocities. Their efforts went on to the last minute.
Until he turned pentito, or super-grass, Giovanni Brusca was one of Sicily's most ruthless mobsters, held responsible for between 100 and 200 murders. Nicknamed Il Maiale – the Pig – it was Brusca who kidnapped an 11-year-old boy called Giuseppe di Matteo, the son of another gangster, held him for 26 months, then had him strangled before dissolving his body in acid.
Brusca told the hearing that shortly before Falcone's assassination, Toto Riina met a politician who was accompanied by a police escort, and handed the politician, whom he refused to name, a list of demands that had to be met before the Mafia would stop its increasingly brutal war against the state.
Read complete article here - Instablogs