Why Giovanni Brusca is the most terrifying Mafia murderer in history - Crime 2021
Giovanni Brusca, known as "The Pig" for his unquenchable thirst for blood, killed between 100 and 200 people in a way that tames other mobsters.
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He was known as "The Slaughterer," "The Executioner," and even as "The Pig," both for his body shape and appetite — including, as TIME wrote, "his thirst for blood." For nearly 20 years from the late 1970s, whoever the Sicilian Mafia wanted, Giovanni Brusca would kill them without hesitation.
In the end, Brusca had killed so many people that he lost count and could only say that his total number was somewhere between 100 and 200, which could make him the deadliest mafia hit man of all time.
Murder was his business. "At his heart, a mafioso is not a bloodthirsty person or a terrorist," Brusca said. "The rule is that he kills on behalf of the organization."
And for Giovanni Brusca there was never a life outside of that organization. He was born to a long line of mafia members in San Giuseppe Jato, Sicily in 1957. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father had all been in the mafia, with his father still the local boss in his hometown.
A Mafioso's lifestyle was ingrained in Brusca from an early age. By five o'clock he had already been in prison - not as a prisoner, that would come later - but to visit his father. As he grew older, he helped refugees fleeing with food and clothing and cleaned his father's weapons, which had been stored and buried in nearby fields.
At the age of 18, Giovanni Brusca killed his first victim. A year later, he killed his second, shooting the target outside a crowded movie theater with a double-barreled shotgun.
With two murders to his name, he was officially inducted into the Mafia by "the boss of bosses" Salvatore "Toto" Riina. Once an official member, Brusca started out as a driver for another boss, Bernardo Provenzano.
But it wasn't long before Brusca was given the task of doing what he did best: torture and kill.
He often tortured victims first to 'get them talking', which was part of the assignment. But most of the time they didn't because they knew they would die anyway.
Regardless, torture at the hands of Giovanni Brusca can usually last half an hour, which probably seemed like an eternity to the victim, when Brusca broke his legs with a hammer and attacked his ears with pliers.
Finally, he and his men often strangle their victims, which itself regularly took ten minutes. Two men held the victim's feet, two others his arms, while a fifth slipped a thin nylon cord around his neck and killed him.
Once the victim was dead, Brusca had creative ways to ship corpses. “I've dissolved bodies in acid; I've roasted corpses on large grills; I buried the remains after digging graves with an earth-moving machine," he wrote in his memoir. “Some pentiti [former criminals] today say they are disgusted by what they did. I can speak for myself: I have never been upset by these things. '
And if such excruciating methods of torture, murder, and corpse disposal suggest anything that these murders were in any way crimes of passion, it simply wasn't. Usually, Brusca did not know the victim. A boss would give the order and he would follow it. It was that simple.
On one occasion, he was given a time and place to kill an unknown target on a particular tractor make. Three different people came by on three different tractors. So Brusca killed them all.
But Giovanni Brusca didn't just commit murder, he helped wage war against the Italian government itself. In the 1980s, as part of Riina's death squad, Brusca and his men fought with police with AK-47s and targeted prosecutors with car bombs.
The first to die was the chief prosecutor Rocco Chinnici in Palermo in July 1983. The force of the explosion blew the car three stories high before falling back to Earth. Two bodyguards died with Chinnici and 20 bystanders were injured.
Chinnici had founded the Antimafia Pool, a group of magistrates who wanted to take down the organization. With the death of Chinnici, Giovanni Falcone took over the head of the Antimafia pool. He was given unprecedented powers to fight the Sicilian mafia. Between February 1986 and January 1992, more than 300 mafiosi were given life sentences (including Riina, although he had fled and was thus sentenced in absentia).
By 1990, many of the mafiosi who had been brought down by Falcone had appealed and been released on technicalities, with only 30 behind bars (while some in government, meanwhile, tried to make a deal with the mafia to stop prosecutions to stop the bloodshed). ). By January, however, Falcone and fellow anti-Mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino had dismissed many of the appeals and quashed some of the previously successful appeals.
Falcone and Borsellino now had targets on their backs more than ever - and both were indeed killed in car bombs two months apart in 1992.
Giovanni Brusca later admitted to detonating the bomb that had killed Falcone, his wife, and two Sicilian special anti-terrorist agents, to protect him.
With the assassination of Falcone on May 23, 1992, the mafia launched an unprecedented war against the state.
Riina unleashed hell, using car bombs against the police and even blowing up entire government buildings. Meanwhile, Brusca strangled the boss of the rival Alcamo crime family, who resented Riina's authority, as well as the boss's pregnant partner.
Law enforcement then retaliated for all this bloodshed and arrested a key mobster, Mario Santo Di Matteo, who was an accomplice of Brusca's in Falcone's murder.
Before long, Di Matteo became a government informant, speaking to authorities about everyone involved in the murder, including Giovanni Brusca. But first, Di Matteo's information led to Riina's capture by officers of Italy's paramilitary national police, the Carabinieri, at a traffic light on January 15, 1993. At his trial in October 1993, Riina was sentenced to life imprisonment.
With Rina behind bars, Brusca emerged as a top mob boss. One of his first assignments was to punish Di Matteo for his treason.
In 1993, Brusca kidnapped Di Matteo's 11-year-old son, Giuseppe, to persuade Di Matteo to recant his testimony. For a period of 28 months, Brusca tortured the boy while he starved and kept him in a cage. They even sent photos of the battered boy to his father. Finally, in January 1996, when the boy was 14, Brusca had him strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
And it was all to no avail. Di Matteo did not return and his information led to Brusca being convicted in absentia for detonating the car bomb that killed Falcone.
Authorities eventually tracked down and captured the man they had convicted in absentia on May 20, 1996, when she caught 39-year-old Brusca in the Sicilian countryside near Agrigento.
Four hundred men surrounded the house where he and his family were staying. When 30 men attacked the house at 9 p.m., they found Brusca and his family watching a television program on Falcone. The fourth anniversary of his murder was in two days.
But despite Brusca's revenge against Di Matteo for becoming an informer, now that he was caught, he soon became one himself.
Brusca's testimony led to Riina being given additional sentences for ordering the murders of Falcone and Borsellino. Despite his cooperation, Giovanni Brusca himself has now served multiple life sentences - a fitting ending for a man who has had such a horrific career.
After this look at Giovanni Brusca, you'll see some intense Letizia Battaglia photos that will take you right into the bloody heart of the Sicilian mafia. Then see what life was like in Murder Inc., the fatally stricken squad of the New York mob.
