A Sicilian Mafia boss who assassinated Italy’s most famous prosecutor and dissolved a boy’s body in acid—on top of reportedly admitting to hundreds of murders—was released from prison Monday, CBS News reports.
Giovanni Brusca, 64, who was known as the “people slayer,” served a 25-year sentence and eventually became an informant, helping authorities track down other mobsters. He left Rome’s Rebibbia prison this week and will now serve four years of probation time.
Brusca, who played a key role in mafia group Cosa Nostra, was loyal to boss Salvatore “Toto” Riina and admitted to carrying out hundreds of murders. Most notably, he detonated the bomb that killed prosecutor Giovanni Falcone in 1992 after Falcone spent years taking down the mafia. The explosion killed Falcone's wife and three bodyguards as they drove into 882 pounds of hidden explosives.
“The state is against us – after 29 years we still don’t know the truth about the massacre and Giovanni Brusca, the man who destroyed my family, is free,” Tina Montinaro, the wife of one of the bodyguards, told Repubblica.
Falcone’s sister, Maria, however, said she was worried by the news but that “it’s the law, a law moreover wanted by my brother and that should be respected.”
Brusca also killed 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo, the son of a mafia member who worked with authorities, by strangling him and throwing him into acid, in what authorities call “one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Cosa Nostra.”
“A person who committed these acts, who dissolved a child in acid, who killed Falcone, is in my opinion a wild beast and cannot get out of prison,” said Matteo Salvini, head of the League party.
