Unkempt, pudgy and beady-eyed, giovanni brusca was well suited to his Sicilian nickname, u Verru ("the Pig"). Despite his unimpressive physique, Brusca had managed, at 39, to become one of the most powerful and ruthless bosses in the history of the Mafia's legendary Corleone clan. Italian prosecutors say he detonated the bomb that blew up crusading anti-Mafia investigator Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards near Palermo in 1992. The following year, Brusca allegedly ordered bombings in Florence, Milan and Rome that left 10 dead. Last January, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison for killing a Sicilian tax inspector. According to a former henchman, in one particularly chilling act, he personally tortured and strangled the 11-year-old son of a Mafia turncoat, then threw the boy's body into a vat of acid.

To the lawmen who had been closing in on him for the past five months, Brusca seemed as lucky as he was bloodthirsty. He evaded at least three capture attempts this year, but on Monday, May 20, his luck ran out. As Brusca sat in the dining room of a Sicilian villa near Agrigento, eating a steak dinner with his girlfriend and his five-year-old son, along with his brother Vincenzo, 27, his sister-in-law and their two children, some 200 black-hooded special police troops circled the property. At 9:45 p.m., the commandos knocked the doors down and stormed in. Brusca and his brother, also a wanted mafioso, offered no resistance. Ironically, they were watching a TV movie about the Falcone killing at the time of the arrest. Besides a copy of Falcone's book on the Cosa Nostra, police found $30,000 in cash in the villa, suggesting that Brusca was preparing to flee again.

The capture of Italy's most wanted mobster was exhilarating news for the center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who took office two days earlier with a pledge to wage war on the Mafia. Informed of the arrest while attending a concert in Rome, Interior Minister Giorgio Napolitano exulted, "It's an extraordinary success to have captured the main author of the attack on Falcone. It's the greatest tribute we could pay to his memory." Said Falcone's sister Maria: "Finally the state is giving the strong response that Giovanni wanted."

The arrest, coming only three days before the anniversary of Falcone's murder, was a boost for Italy's sagging international image and a major blow to the Corleone clan, which has dominated the Italian Mafia for more than two decades. The organization was already reeling from the 1993 arrest of its longtime capo di tutti capi, Salvatore ("Toto") Riina and the apprehension last year of Riina's successor, Leoluca Bagarella. With Brusca locked up, there was some hope that one of the bloodiest cycles in Mafia history might be over. "We think that Brusca is the last terrorist, and that with his arrest, the era of Mafia terrorism has ended," says Luigi Savina, who headed the police raid on Brusca's villa.

Experts warn, however, that the tentacular crime network has proved its resiliency in the past and cannot yet be written off. "This is one of those operations that will be remembered for a long time in the history of the war against the Mafia," says Palermo's chief prosecutor, Giancarlo Caselli. "But above all, Cosa Nostra has an organization, an ability to cauterize its wounds, to replace immediately its top and intermediate ranks." Law-enforcement officials are now focusing their efforts on tracking down two potential successors: Bernardo Provenzano, 63, and Pietro Aglieri, 36.

Still, Italy had cause to celebrate last week. While government officials congratulated one another in Rome, residents of Capaci, the Sicilian village where Falcone was killed, festooned the city hall balcony with a banner proclaiming thank you in giant letters. "This is an arrest that rewards the professional ability of the forces of law," declared Justice Minister Giovanni Maria Flick, predicting that it would galvanize the new government's anticrime commitment.

No one was more jubilant than the black-hooded policemen, who celebrated like victorious soccer fans when Brusca was hustled into Palermo's central police station some 90 minutes after the arrest. As the scruffy-bearded Brusca emerged from a car, clad in dirty jeans and a rumpled white shirt, dozens of cops cheered, honked their horns and embraced. Some ripped off their ski masks, as if to say they no longer had anything to fear from the Mafia. One reportedly managed to slip past guards and bloody Brusca's nose with a punch in the face.

Asked whether such rowdiness was proper for law-enforcement officials, Rino Monaco, head of the police department's operations center, defended his men for letting off steam. "These kids had to sit for a hundred hours in their hiding places waiting for the moment to move, so they got it out of their system," he said. "Besides, Giovanni Brusca was the bloodiest mafioso still at work, a man who has stained himself with terrible crimes."

Born in San Giuseppe Jato, a Sicilian mountain town of 10,000 situated halfway between Palermo and Corleone, Brusca seems to have been predestined for a life of crime. His grandfather and great-grandfather, both farmers, allegedly had Mafia connections. His father Bernardo, a local Mafia patriarch, is currently serving concurrent life sentences for numerous homicides. Bernardo reportedly allied himself with the Corleonesi in the late 1960s, paving the way for his three sons to pursue their careers in the Cosa Nostra's most powerful and ruthless clan.

A local woman who knew Brusca as a youth says, "He was a very normal teenager. He went out for pizza and to discotheques like everybody else." From adolescence on, however, Brusca seems to have had his sights set on a Mafia career. Like Vincenzo, he never went further than middle school. Their older brother Emanuele, now 41, finished high school and began studying to become a doctor before entering the family trade and eventually joining his father in prison.

By the age of 20, Brusca was working as a driver for Bernardo Provenzano, alias "the Tractor" (because he mowed people down). Now 63 and a fugitive for more than half his life, Provenzano is considered the political head of the Cosa Nostra. Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia turncoat who cooperated in the Falcone investigations, remembers the young Brusca as "a wild stallion but a great leader." Another informant, Salvatore Barbagallo, says, "Giovanni was an excellent soldier, but he doesn't know how to think politically."

Brusca was savvy enough, however, to cozy up to the boss, Toto ("the Beast") Riina. One informant even claims that Riina is Brusca's baptismal godfather. The young man's rapid rise to the top was facilitated by the arrests of Riina and his immediate successor, Bagarella, who was reportedly not an admirer of Brusca. But what really made him stand out among the younger generation of mafiosi was an uncommon bloodlust. "All the pentiti [informants] have described him as a kind of butcher with a lot of instinct and little charisma," says Palermo-based journalist Francesco La Licata, a top Mafia expert. "He's only 39, whereas the boss who preceded him, Riina, is 30 years older. If someone so young arrives at the top, it means only one thing: that he knows how to kill and has no scruples about it."

Nothing better demonstrated Brusca's cold-blooded ruthlessness than the kidnapping and murder of 11-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo. The boy's father, Santino Di Matteo, took part in the 1992 Falcone killing and later informed on others involved in the plot. According to another Mafia turncoat, Giuseppe Monticciolo, Brusca's foot soldiers abducted the boy in November 1993. They told him they were taking him to see his father, who was in hiding. Instead they held the boy for 18 months, during which they tortured him and sent grisly photos to Santino to force him to retract his testimony. Police say the father made a desperate trip to Sicily to try to negotiate his son's release. According to Monticciolo, it was Brusca himself who finally strangled the boy with his bare hands, then threw the body into a vat of acid to destroy the evidence.

The wide use of pentiti spurred the Cosa Nostra to retaliate by veering from the old code of honor, according to which women and children were to be left alone. The traditional code also dictated that mafiosi were practicing Catholics who married and raised families, never divorcing or taking mistresses. Brusca violated that too by living out of wedlock with Rosaria Cristiano, 29, a divorce, and fathering her child. In these and other ways, Brusca embodied an unpredictable new generation of mafiosi who were not bound by the so-called gentlemen's rules that governed the behavior of their predecessors. "The new Mafia is like [Colombia's] Cali drug cartel--it kills judges, prefects and innocent bystanders," says Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the newspaper Il Foglio and a former minister in the Berlusconi government. "The old Mafia didn't do that. They were pro-family and very Catholic."

If the Di Matteo killing demonstrated Brusca's capacity for intimate cruelty, the Falcone assassination showed his flair for the spectacular gesture. Prosecutors claim the hit was ordered by Riina to retaliate for Falcone's investigations, which put nearly 350 prominent mafiosi behind bars during the "maxi-trial" of 1986-87. Allegedly carried out by Brusca, the operation was remarkable for its audacity and efficiency. On May 23, 1992, the judge and his wife were met by his bodyguards at Palermo's airport and escorted toward the Sicilian capital in a convoy of three armor-plated cars. As the vehicles raced along the seafront highway at speeds of up to 160 k.p.h., sirens wailing and lights flashing, Brusca and his confederates watched from a nearby hillside and waited for the right instant. Suddenly Brusca's stubby finger pushed a button, detonating a huge bomb hidden in a passageway under the road. The device turned all three cars into piles of burning, twisted metal, hurling the lead car into an olive grove a hundred meters from the blast and leaving a hole the size of a moon crater in the highway.

Mafia leaders had hoped that the killing of Falcone and the murder two months later of his successor, Paolo Borsellino, would halt the worrisome judicial probes. But instead the brazen murders shocked the public and encouraged the government to intensify its battle against the Mafia. That campaign had been accelerating since the early 1990s under the impetus of two watershed events: the end of the cold war, which robbed the mafiosi of their status as a bulwark against communism, and the mani pulite (clean hands) corruption investigations, which destroyed the old Christian Democrat ruling class that had long turned a blind eye to Mafia activities in exchange for the Mob's electoral support.

Italian authorities scored a major victory in 1993 by nabbing Riina after he had been on the run for 23 years. They contend that the Mob struck back by ordering the bombings of Florence's Uffizi gallery, Milan's Gallery of Modern Art and Rome's Basilica of St. John Lateran, killing 10 people in the process. The Roman target was supposedly chosen to send a message to Pope John Paul, who had recently broken the church's long tradition of maintaining silence on Mafia matters by strongly lashing out against organized crime during a May 1993 visit to Agrigento. Last year Sicilian mobsters murdered 10 relatives of Mafia informants.

But even as Brusca was turning up the heat on his enemies, the police were turning up the heat on him. With girlfriend Rosaria and their son Davide, 5, he changed hideouts frequently and developed a system of sending coded messages through Mafia messenger boys to other mafiosi to avoid using the phone. He became adept at disguising himself, growing mustaches and beards and sometimes shaving his head. Through a combination of luck and quick reflexes, he always seemed to stay one step ahead of the law. "We were tracking him down for months," says Monaco. "We came close to getting him several times before, but he got away." On one occasion last January, police were so close to nabbing him at a villa near Palermo that they found his meal still warm on the dining-room table. When they discovered his next hideout, in San Giuseppe Jato, he had already moved on, but left a huge cache of arms behind.

Apparently aided by Mafia contacts in the seaside town of Agrigento, Brusca moved his family to their final hideaway in the nearby village of Cannitello. Situated on the southern edge of Sicily, the area is best known for its Valley of the Temples, a series of Doric structures on the Ionian Sea dating from the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. But Brusca was more interested in hunkering down than in sightseeing. The two story yellow house, surrounded by a low wall, boasted a garden of yellow, red and pink roses shaded by palm, olive and fig trees, with a large gazebo in the rear. Yet the family rarely ventured outside--not even for a dip in the sea several hundred meters away. Brusca scrupulously avoided contact with the neighbors and, along with his brother Vincenzo, kept only two small cars--a Fiat Uno and a Citroen CX--guaranteed to attract little attention. The refrigerator was amply stocked with food, beer and Coca-Cola, though, and Brusca's closet was later found to be chockablock with designer suits by the likes of Armani, Missoni and Moschino.

For all Brusca's discretion, Palermo police commander Luigi Savina says his men traced their quarry to the Agrigento region by tailing his subordinates. Brusca's crucial mistake, apparently, was to use a cellular phone, which enabled police eavesdroppers to listen in on him. The house was pinpointed when a plainclothes policeman drove through the neighborhood on a scooter without a muffler, letting the phone tappers hear its throaty roar through the phone and confirm the location. Once the house was identified, special forces staked it out for four days before moving in. When police bashed the door down, Brusca and the others were caught completely by surprise. Police official Monaco says the Mafia boss sat "frozen, like he was paralyzed. He didn't say a single word."

After the group was taken to the police station, the two women were released and the Brusca brothers were whisked off the next day to a high-security wing of Palermo's Ucciardone prison. Giovanni Brusca is likely to spend a very long time behind bars: he has already been sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for the 1992 murder of Ignazio Salvo, a Sicilian tax inspector suspected of Mafia connections, and faces murder charges in the Falcone and Di Matteo killings. Vincenzo Brusca, described by police as a "classic Mafia killer," is also facing multiple homicide charges. Few Italians were shedding any tears for them, but their mother Antonina, 63, showed up at the prison with sandwiches for her boys. "My son hasn't killed anybody," she told reporters, adding that she had brought her sons up to fear God. "For all the accusations they hang on him, he can show his innocence."

In Brusca's hometown of San Giuseppe Jato, the arrest was marked by a banner hanging from the town hall picturing the faces of Falcone and Borsellino, the country's best-known martyrs in the anti-Mafia crusade. It was put up by the town's mayor, Maria Maniscalco, an outspoken opponent of the Mob. But the banner remained there only 24 hours before someone torched it. "This was a desperate groan from those who see they are losing ground," says Maniscalco. "But it's an important sign, because it shows that the Mafia still hasn't been beaten. The police have registered important strikes, but Cosa Nostra is still alive and still to be feared."

True, the war has not yet been won. But the hopeful message in Brusca's capture is that the momentum has shifted and the Mafia is on the run. "The time of impunity is over," says Senator Pino Arlacchi, a sociology professor at Sardinia's University of Sassari. "From the arrest of Riina onward, the state has shown that it knows how to find these people and get them." That's a message that Giovanni ("the Pig") Brusca will have long years in prison to ponder.

--Reported by Greg Burke and Toula Vlahou/Rome