Tommaso Buscetta

Tommaso Buscetta (July 13, 1928 - April 2, 2000) was an Sicilian mafioso, and later repented. He was the first informant in the Italian pentiti witness protection program.

He was the last of seventeen children raised in a poverty stricken area of Palermo, which he escaped by getting involved with crime at a young age. He became a fully fledged member of the Mafia at the age of eighteen and worked as a hitman. In 1968, Buscetta was convicted of double-murder, but the conviction was in absentia as he was not actually in custody (it is possible in Italy for fugitives to be prosecuted without them being present).

Tommaso Buscetta fled the USA then down to Brazil where he set up a drug-trafficking network. In 1972 Buscetta was arrested and extradited to Italy where began his life-sentence for the earlier double-murder conviction. In 1980, whilst on a day-release from prison, he fled over to Brazil to hide out from the brewing Mafia War instigated by Toto Riina that subsequently lead to the deaths of many of Buscetta's allies in the Mafia, including Stefano Bontade. Arrested once more in 1982, Buscetta was sent back to Italy. He made a suicide attempt, and when that failed he decided that he was utterly disillusioned with the Mafia and the blood-thirsty treachery of people like Riina. Buscetta asked to talk to Giovanni Falcone and began his life as an informant.

His testimony in the New York "pizza connection" trial in the mid-1980s allowed the conviction of hundreds of mobsters in Italy and the United States, including Gaetano Badalamenti.

In Italy he helped the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino to achieve significant successes in the fight against organised crime (the two judges were later both killed by Mafia). He was the star witness in the so-called Maxi Trials that lead to almost 350 Mafia members being sent to prison.

In retaliation, the Mafia killed fourteen of his relatives, including two sons and two nephews, in a revenge by proxy tactic often used against mafiosi who repent.

As a reward for his help, Buscetta was allowed to go and live in the USA under a new identity in the Witness Protection Program. He was reported to have undergone plastic surgery to conceal his identity. He sometimes gave interviews to journalists, although his face was pixelated when he appeared in documentaries, and in an interview with the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi, Buscetta cheerfully bragged that he lost his virginity at the age of eight to a prostitute who charged him just a bottle of olive oil. Buscetta married three times and had six children, and at one point he was briefly suspended from the Mafia for walking out on his first wife, adultery evidently being a greater crime than murder in the eyes of his fellow mobsters.

Judges and policemen found Buscetta to be very polite and intelligent, albeit sometimes prone to vanity. Occasionally Buscetta was somewhat economical with the truth, like any informant. He once claimed he had never dealt in narcotics even though he once contradicted himself by saying that everyone in the Mafia was involved in drugs, without exempting himself from this statement. Originally he denied ever killing anyone but later admitted in a television interview that he was a murderer. Some of his lies had understandable motives. In the 1980s he said he had no knowledge of the links that various politicians like Salvo Lima and Giulio Andreotti had with the Mafia, but in the 1990s he admitted that he knew of such links, claiming that he had feigned ignorance during the '80s because the politicians in question were then in power, and he had feared for his life even within the security afforded by the Witness Protection Program.

Buscetta died of natural causes in 2000, aged 71, having lived out his final years peacefully somewhere in the USA.

References

Excellent Cadavers (1995) Alexander Stille, Vintage ISBN 0099594919

The Antimafia (2000) Alison Jamieson, MacMillan Press Ltd ISBN 033380158

Cosa Nostra (2004) John Dickie, Coronet, ISBN 0340824352

External link

• BBC report of Buscetta's death (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/701861.stm)