Tommaso Buscetta

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Tommaso Buscetta (1960s)

Tommaso "Don Masino" Buscetta (born July 13, 1928 in Palermo , † April 2, 2000 in Florida ) was an Italian mafioso and high-ranking member of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra . He became the most important key witness in the Maxi Trials of the 1980s and 1990s.

Life

Early years

Tommaso Buscetta was the son of a glazier and grew up in an impoverished part of Palermo . He escaped poverty by engaging in criminal activities from a young age. At the age of 17 he married Melchiorra Cavallaro, with whom he had two sons. At the age of 18 he became a member of the mafia . He belonged to the Mafia family of Porta Nuova , a small but important Palermitan family. He later said he was attracted by the respect enjoyed by members of the Mafia. A mafioso always has to act according to the resolutions of a true man of honor; “All things that I got to know within the Cosa Nostra are very beautiful - with the exception of the murders.” Buscetta emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1949 , where he opened his own glass factory without much success. In 1955 he returned to Palermo. According to his own statements, that year he also met the American mafia boss Joseph Bonanno , who was on vacation in Palermo and at a meeting in the elegant Hotel des Palmes made the (successful) proposal to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra to form a commission : It should be a better one Establish contact between the various families and resolve disputes both within and between families.

First Mafia War

In 1962 the First Mafia War began , in which Buscetta was also involved; however, its role is unclear and there are still different versions of the causes of the war and the role that Buscetta played in it. Buscetta was presumably one of the main participants and also committed some murders in the course of the conflict. The commission met in the summer of 1963 and decided to disband for the time being in view of the strong pressure from the police investigation. The families fell apart and there were no more mafia crimes in Palermo by the mid-1960s. During this time, Buscetta changed his position within the Cosa Nostra: If he had previously been a member of the so-called power syndicate and had also tried to achieve a leading position in the Cosa Nostra, he now switched to the company syndicate and now worked exclusively on his economic syndicate Success. Like many others, Buscetta left Palermo and traveled to Switzerland , Canada and finally the United States ; later he also visited Brazil . There he built a drug trafficking network.

All the while, however, he kept in touch with important allies, such as Antonio Salmone , boss of the San Giuseppe Jato family , who, like him, also spent some time in Toronto . He remained close friends with him until his arrest. During this period of his life he married his long-time lover Vera Girotti and took the name Paulo Roberto Felici. He later married the Brazilian Cristina de Almeida Guimares at the age of forty. Due to this unsteady way of life, he was always denied further advancement to leading ranks, although he otherwise enjoyed great respect and associated with the highest-ranking bosses within the Cosa Nostra. During his absence, he was convicted of double homicides by an Italian court in 1968.

The Brazilian police arrested him on November 2, 1972, but did not charge him with international drug smuggling, but sent him back to Italy, where he was initially held in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo until February 13, 1980 . Recently released, he moved to Turin , where he officially worked in a glass factory, but had to report to the local prison every night. Nevertheless, he managed to take regular trips to Palermo. After his release he lived u. a. with his good friends Stefano Bontade and Salvatore Inzerillo , both important Palermitan mafia bosses.

He was especially close friends with the mighty Bontade; he even wanted to get Buscetta to transfer from the Porta Nuova family to the Bontade family Santa Maria di Gesu. Buscetta's boss, Giuseppe "Pippo" Calò , with whom Buscetta had a rather loose relationship, prevented this. During his stay with Bontade and Inzerillo, he found that they were blind to the threat posed by the growing power of the Corleonesians . Both were interested exclusively in the heroin trade , which ran through the Pizza Connection and brought parts of the Cosa Nostra an immense wealth.

Anticipating the Second Mafia War , Buscetta returned to Brazil via Paraguay in January 1981 . The expected war began on April 23, 1981, when Stefano Bontade was murdered on the evening of his 43rd birthday by a killer squad around "Pino" Greco . On May 11, 1981, Salvatore Inzerillo was also killed; Hundreds of their followers were subsequently murdered by the victorious Corleonesians in order to gain absolute rule over the Cosa Nostra. Many other close friends and relatives of Buscetta also fell victim to the war. The attempts of inferior bosses like Gaetano Badalamenti to persuade him to return to Palermo to organize the fight against the Corleonesians there, he rejected as hopeless.

Pentito

At the end of 1983, Buscetta was arrested by the local police while in exile in Brazil. In prison, he swallowed strychnine but survived his suicide attempt. In June 1984 the two judges Giovanni Falcone and Vincenzo Geraci visited him , but Buscetta remained silent. Only after his extradition to Italy did he reveal to Giovanni Falcone: "I am a Mafioso". He became the first significant Pentito and testified as a key witness in the three Maxi trials against the Mafia. His statements also led to the conviction of Antonio Salvo and Ignazio Salvo and Vito Ciancimino . As a result, Totò Riina , the leader of the Corleonesi , was arrested in 1993 . Buscetta received impunity for his confessions and for solving many mafia crimes from the Italian state as part of a witness protection program ; d. H. his sentence was limited to three years and he received a life pension. He was given a new identity; several cosmetic surgery procedures changed his appearance and he subsequently lived in a barracks in the USA under the protection of the US witness protection program .

In retaliation for breaking the so-called Omertà , part of the Mafia's code of honor, the mafia killed 14 relatives of Buscetta's, including two sons and two nephews.

In the 1990s, he accused MEP Salvatore Lima and seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti of having had ties to the Mafia - statements that were doubted by his opponents, given that Buscetta had made multiple contradicting statements about his life as a criminal and a murderer. He also tended to downplay his own criminal profile and that of his friends like Stefano Bontade. So he denied Bontade's involvement in the drug trade or pleaded ignorance about it. He also admitted to having carried out some murders for the Cosa Nostra, but said that he could no longer remember the names of the victims. According to Buscetta, Lima's father was already a member of the “honorable society”. Buscetta further testified that the CIA had ordered the Cosa Nostra to murder Enrico Mattei through the American La Cosa Nostra, which was then affiliated with the US secret service . The journalist Mauro De Mauro , who researched the background to Mattei's murder, was murdered in Sicily in 1970. According Gaspare Mutolo , another major pentito and former drug dealer, the Cosa Nostra was also responsible for the murder of De Mauro. The classification of Buscetta as a pentito / repentant is controversial, since the actual motive for the cooperation with the state was the desire to retaliate against the Corleonesians. Since this was impracticable in any other way, he used the state for this - as did many other Pentiti who followed him. Buscetta herself refused to be called Pentito.

When two of his sons, who ran a pizzeria in Palermo and had no ties to the Mafia, were murdered, Buscetta blamed the Corleonesians and Totò Riina for it: “The blow was so hard for me that I have not been able to to laugh or be happy. The bastard, that hyena (Riina), didn't even give me the opportunity to bury their bodies. He must have burned it or dissolved it in acid. ”He also blamed the senior boss of the Corleonese, Luciano Liggio ,“ I'm better than him. I know where his son lives, but I didn't go and kill him because he didn't harm me and maybe, who knows, he'll become a good person. If I had the chance, I would kill him (Liggio) anywhere, even in court. If someone had brought me a weapon, I would have killed him in front of the judge. ”At a personal meeting, however, he forgave the later Pentito Salvatore Cancemi , who confessed to having personally carried out the murders on Riina's orders.

In the last years of his life, Buscetta was very pessimistic about the chances of success in the fight against the Cosa Nostra: The title of his last book was La mafia ha vinto. Intervista con Tommaso Buscetta (“The Mafia has won”). Buscetta died of cancer in 2000.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. First they'll try to kill me, the it'll be your turn warned the mobster turncoat on irishtimes.com (English)
  2. From our own correspondent - Mafia supergrass who escaped revenge on news.bbc.co.uk (English)
  3. Tommaso Buscetta our godfather on nytimes.com (English)
  4. ^ John Follain: The last Godfathers , Hodder & Stoughton, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-340-97919-8 .
  5. Werner Raith : Parasites and cartridge. Sicily's mafia is seizing power. Book guild Gutenberg , Frankfurt a. M. 1990, ISBN 3-7632-3737-2 .
  6. ^ A b John Follain: The last Godfathers , Hodder & Stoughton, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-340-97919-8 , p. 145.
  7. Mondadori 2007, ISBN 978-8804570042