Giovanni Brusca

His father Bernardo Brusca (1929–2000), a local Mafia patriarch, served concurrent life sentences for numerous homicides.

Bernardo allied himself with the Corleonesi of Salvatore Riina, Bernardo Provenzano and Leoluca Bagarella when he replaced Antonio Salamone as capomandamento of San Giuseppe Jato.

He paved the way for his three sons' careers—Giovanni, his younger brother Vincenzo and elder brother Emanuele.

Giovanni Brusca (born 20 February 1957) is an Italian mobster and former member of the Corleonesi clan of the Sicilian Mafia.

Brusca was born on 20 February 1957 in San Giuseppe Jato.

His grandfather and great-grandfather, both farmers, were made members of the Mafia.

When Bernardo was sent to prison in 1985, Giovanni became head of his San Giuseppe Jato district.

He had a major role in the 1992 murders of Antimafia Commission prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and businessman Ignazio Salvo, and once stated that he had committed between 100 and 200 murders.

Brusca had been sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for Mafia association and multiple murder.

In 1992 Brusca murdered the anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone by planting half a tonne of explosives under a road.

Brusca detonated the explosives as Falcone's car drove along the road, killing Falcone, Falcone's wife and his three bodyguards.

Months after the Falcone's death, he also murdered the boss Vincenzo Milazzo and the businessman Ignazio Salvo.

Shortly before he ordered the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo, Brusca had discovered that he had been sentenced in absentia to a life sentence for the 1992 murder of Ignazio Salvo.

After Santino Di Matteo was arrested on 4 June 1993, he became the first of Falcone's assassins to become a government witness – a pentito.

He revealed all the details of the assassination: who tunnelled beneath the motorway, who packed the 13 drums with TNT and Semtex, who hauled them into place on a skateboard, and who pressed the button.

In retaliation for Di Matteo becoming an informant, the Mafia kidnapped his 11-year-old son, Giuseppe Di Matteo, on 23 November 1993.

According to a later confession by one of the kidnappers, Gaspare Spatuzza, they dressed as police officers and told the boy he was being taken to see his father, who was at that time being kept in police protection on the Italian mainland.

Brusca was involved in the campaign of terror in 1993 against the state during their crackdown against the Mafia after the murders of Anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Following the months after Riina's arrest in January 1993, there were a series of bombings by the Corleonesi against several tourist spots on the Italian mainland – the Via dei Georgofili bombing in Florence, Via Palestro in Milan and the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano and Via San Teodoro in Rome, which left 10 people dead and 71 injured as well as severe damage to centres of cultural heritage such as the Uffizi Gallery.

He was captured in 1996, turned pentito, and his sentence reduced to 26 years in prison.

In 2021, Brusca was released from prison.

A pudgy, bearded, and unkempt mafioso, Brusca was known in Mafia circles as u verru (in Sicilian), il porco or il maiale (in Italian; "the pig", "the swine"), and u scannacristiani ("the people-slayer"; in the Sicilian language, the word cristianu means both "Christian" and "human being").

Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia turncoat who had cooperated with Falcone's investigations, remembered Giovanni Brusca as "a wild stallion but a great leader".

Di Matteo made a desperate trip to Sicily to try to negotiate his son's release, but on 11 January 1996, after 779 days, the boy, who by now had also become physically ill due to mistreatment and torture, was finally strangled; his body was subsequently dissolved in a barrel of acid — a practice known colloquially as the lupara bianca.

The boy's executioners were Enzo Brusca (brother of Giovanni), Vincenzo Chiodo and Salvatore Monticciolo, acting on the orders of Giovanni Brusca.

On 20 May 1996, then aged 39, Brusca was arrested in a small house in the Sicilian countryside near Agrigento, where he was dining with his girlfriend, their young son and his brother Vincenzo, his sister-in-law and their two children.

The investigators were able to pinpoint their exact location when the noise of a plainclothes officer driving by the house on a motorbike was picked up by officers listening to a call intercepted on Brusca's mobile phone.

When Brusca was hurried into Palermo's police station some 90 minutes after the arrest, dozens of police officers cheered, honked their horns and embraced each other.

As the Scruffy-bearded Brusca emerged from a car, clad in dirty jeans and a rumpled white shirt, some ripped off their ski masks, as if to say they no longer had anything to fear from the Mafia.

One reportedly managed to slip past guards and punched Brusca in the face.

In 1997, Di Matteo and Brusca met face to face during court proceedings.

Bursting into tears Di Matteo told the judge: "I guarantee my collaboration, but to this animal I guarantee nothing. If you leave me alone with him for two minutes I'll cut off his head."

The confrontation threatened to become violent, but court security guards restrained Di Matteo.

Brusca had also asked Giuseppe Di Matteo's family for forgiveness.

In 1997, Brusca was sentenced to 26 years in prison for the bomb attack that killed the Anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone near Capaci.

In court, Brusca admitted to detonating the bomb, planted under the motorway from the airport to Palermo, by remote control while watching the magistrate's convoy through binoculars from a hill.

In 1999, Brusca was sentenced to 30 years in prison for Di Matteo's murder.

Brusca was given another life sentence in 2009, for the murder of Salvatore Caravà.

After his arrest, Brusca started to collaborate with police.

Initially his collaboration was met with skepticism, fearing his "repentance" could be a ruse to escape the harsh prison terms reserved for ranking Mafia bosses.