Francesco Marino Mannoia - Government Witness

Government Witness

In the fall of 1989 Marino Mannoia’s mistress contacted the police’s Antimafia unit in Rome, indicating the mafioso was ready to talk. After negotiations over security Marino Mannoia and magistrate Giovanni Falcone started a series of testimonies on October 8, 1989. He followed in the footsteps of Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno in becoming an informant. Falcone recalled Marino Mannoia as an intelligent and reliable witness.

His collaboration was important because he was the first pentito that came out of the winning faction of the Second Mafia War. He was able to update the authorities on the activities within Cosa Nostra throughout the 1980s, including the fates of Filippo Marchese and Giuseppe Greco. Not long after he began to talk to the authorities Mannoia's mother, aunt and one of his sisters were murdered in their Bagheria home as revenge, it being a common tactic by the Mafia to kill the relatives of the pentiti to discourage others from similar cooperation with authorities.

Marino Mannoia was admitted into the Witness Protection Program in the United States (Italy had no such programme at the time). In the US, he testified against the Sicilian faction of the Gambino Family, the so-called Cherry Hill Gambinos, John, Rosario and Joe Gambino. He had met with John Gambino personally, who had inspected the quality of the heroin Marino Mannoia was refining in Palermo.