Giovanni Brusca

Italian mafia boss, the killer of Judge Falcone, an Italian judge whose position of being anti-mafia was well known. On 5/23/1992, 5:58 PM, Palermo, Sicily, Falcone was murdered by unknown persons. Giovanni Brusca was accused and captured in Agrigento on 5/20/1996 at the same time that the murder of Falcone was being shown on TV. Brusca was the son and nephew of high members of the Mafia, raised in the business. Hid dad, Bernardo, went to prison in 1985. His older brother, Emmanuelle, went to jail in 1993, and his younger brother is in hiding, on the run. Brusca was not well educated but grew up with a natural self-confidence. Audacious and bold, he founded his career on his cool ability to take care of homicides. When pressure began to surround him, Brusca always contrived golden escapes in rural refuges, such as the grottos of San Giuseppe Jato, like the legendary bandit Salvatore Giuliano. In the gang competition to take over the position of Mafia chief Toto Riina, as a final act of raw brutality, he killed the infant child of a gang member who had committed betrayal, by strangling the child and throwing him into an acid pit. In 1982, Brusca was captured and convicted for the first time and sentenced to a year in prison. In March 1985, he was once more arrested and sent to prison. When the huge Mafia trial began in Palermo, he managed to escape during a prison transfer. Implicated in many gang murders, he was again arrested 5/20/1996 at the time that the murder of Falcone was being shown on TV. Brusca's companion is Rosaria Cristiano; their son, David, was born in Palermo July 1991.