Giovanni Brusca - Collaborating With Italian Justice

Collaborating With Italian Justice

After his arrest Brusca started to collaborate. Initially, his collaboration met with scepticism, fearing his 'repentance' could be a ruse to escape the harsh prison terms reserved for ranking Mafia bosses. Did the state really want to start offering protection, not to mention a salary and the promise of judicial leniency, to a monster of a man nicknamed U Verru, The Pig? The man who had punished a Mafia pentito by dissolving the body of his 11-year-old son in an acid bath. In the first three months, much of what Brusca said turned out to be either unverifiable or false, and a growing chorus of politicians called for a tightening of the whole collaboration system.

Despite having confessed numerous murders and other criminal activities, he was not granted the status of full collaborator until February 1999. Until that time Brusca was described as a dichiarante, or talking witness. Although much of his evidence eventually was judged to be credible, suspicions remained that his collaboration was part of a strategy to emasculate other pentiti and subvert the course of justice.

Brusca has offered a controversial version of the capture of Totò Riina: a secret deal between Carabinieri officers, secret agents and Cosa Nostra bosses tired of the dictatorship of the Corleonesi. According to Brusca, Bernardo Provenzano "sold" Riina in exchange for the valuable archive of compromising material that Riina held in his apartment in Via Bernini 52 in Palermo. Brusca also claimed that Riina had told him that after the assassination of Falcone, he had been in indirect negotiations with interior minister Nicola Mancino on a deal to prevent any further killings. Mancino later said this was not true, but in July 2012, Mancino was ordered to stand trial for withholding evidence on 1992 talks between the Italian state and the Mafia and the killings of Falcone and Borsellino.

In 2004, it was reported that Brusca was allowed out of prison for one week every forty-five days to see his family, a reward for his good behaviour as well as becoming an informant and co-operating with the authorities. Relatives of his many victims were angry at such seemingly soft treatment for a multiple-killer.