Giovanni Brusca, considered a top figure in the Italian Mafia hierarchy, is escorted by masked policemen outside police headquarters in Palermo, Sicily, in 1996.Alessandro Fucarini/The Canadian Press
One of Europe’s most notorious and savage killers has been released from prison to the distress of many Italians and the relatives of his victims, who include a teenager dissolved in acid and a crusading anti-Mafia prosecutor.
Giovanni Brusca, 64, was released from Rome’s high-security Rebibbia penitentiary Monday afternoon after serving 25 years in jail. Although his release was expected, the mere thought of the mass murderer walking the streets on parole was repellent to many Italians, all the more so since he has never shown any remorse for his atrocities.
“It is a punch in the stomach that leaves you breathless,” Enrico Letta, the leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, told an Italian radio station Tuesday.
Mr. Brusca was serving a reduced sentence because he became a police informant after his arrest in 1996. At the time, he told prosecutors: “I’m an animal. I worked all my life for the Cosa Nostra [the Sicilian Mafia]. I have killed more than 150 people. I can’t even remember their names.”
Italian Judge Giovanni Falcone (second from the left), surrounded by armed bodyguards, arrives in Marseille on Oct. 21, 1986. Falcone, who earned a reputation as the Mafia's No. 1 enemy, was killed on May 23, 1992, by a half-tonne bomb that exploded under his motorcade as it drove along a highway outside Palermo, Sicily.GERARD FOUET/The Canadian Press
His most famous victim was Giovanni Falcone, whose murder in 1992 still haunts Italy today and has inspired dozens of films and books. The Sicilian prosecuting magistrate and his colleague Paolo Borsellino spent most of their careers trying to break the stranglehold of the murderous Cosa Nostra families on Sicilian businesses from construction firms to retail shops.
Their efforts led to the so-called Maxi Trial, thought to be the largest trial in history. It began in 1986, ended six years later and saw almost 500 Mafiosi indicted, most of them convicted for heinous crimes. The severe blow to the Cosa Nostra’s power in Sicily – the crime families never fully recovered from the convictions – made Mr. Falcone and Mr. Borsellino marked men.
Hitmen planted a massive roadside bomb outside Palermo that killed Mr. Falcone, his wife, Francesca, and three police bodyguards on May 23, 1992. It was Mr. Brusca, working on the orders of Cosa Nostra chief Salvatore Riina, who detonated the bomb by remote control from a small building on a hill overlooking the road. The explosion was so powerful that it registered on local earthquake monitors.
Less than two months later, the Cosa Nostra used another bomb to assassinate Mr. Borsellino and five police officers. That attacked was also ordered by Mr. Riina, though Mr. Brusca was not thought to have been involved in it.
Mr. Brusca’s sadistic violence knew no bounds, hence his Sicilian dialect nicknames, which translate to “the swine” and “the people slayer.”
His youngest victim was thought to be Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was kidnapped at the age of 14 on Mr. Brusca’s orders and kept in captivity under depraved conditions for two years. In January, 1996, he was strangled and his body was dissolved in a barrel of nitric acid.
Mr. Brusca had the boy kidnapped in an effort to keep his father, Santino Di Matteo, a Mafioso turned informant, from collaborating with investigators.
The boy’s mother, Franca Castellese, told Italy’s ANSA news service through her lawyer: “We respect the laws and sentences of the state. But I will never be able to forgive Giovanni Brusca. He killed my son whom he knew well and with whom he played at home. How can I forgive him in my heart?”
Mr. Falcone’s sister, Maria Falcone, said she understood why Mr. Brusca’s state-witness status gave him the right to an early release. “On a human level, this is news that pains me,” she told ANSA. “But the law on the reduction of sentences for the collaboration of Mafiosi is a law my brother wanted, and therefore it must be respected.”
This May 23, 1992, file photo shows the damage at a highway that links Palermo to its airport after a bomb blast killed anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three policemen escorting them.Nino Labruzzo/The Canadian Press
The murders of Mr. Falcone and Mr. Borsellino triggered a massive anti-Mafia backlash, with the Italian state pouring investigative and legal resources into Sicily to try to break the power of the remaining Cosa Nostra families. The effort produced some notable successes, with the Cosa Nostra thought to be substantially weakened since the early 1990s.
But other Italian Mafia organizations, including the Camorra, operating in and around Naples, and the ‘Ndrangheta, based in Calabria, in Italy’s deep south, have thrived.
They have built international crime networks that allow them to earn tens of billions of dollars a year from extortion, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting and other criminal activities. Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak was investigating the ‘Ndrangheta’s connections in his country when he and his girlfriend were murdered in 2018.
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