Arrest
On May 20, 1996, then aged thirty-nine, 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 cellular 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.
Brusca had received a life sentence the previous year after being convicted in absentia of murder and he was subsequently convicted of the bomb attack that killed the Anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone near Capaci. In court Brusca admitted 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.
Read more about this topic: Giovanni Brusca
Famous quotes containing the word arrest:
“One does not arrest Voltaire.”
—Charles De Gaulle (1890–1970)
“Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed Cain’s race invented be,
And blest Seth vexed us with Astronomie.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)