The Sicilian Connection

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Italian officials were delighted by Buscetta's offer. But they were also skeptical, knowing that no high-level Mafioso was likely to violate omerta, the code of silence, and disclose secrets about the criminal organization. Palermo Deputy District Attorney Vincenzo Geraci was understandably surprised when he met Buscetta in Brazil last June and found him willing to tell what he knew. In their initial interview, Geraci recalled, Buscetta told the prosecutor, "I am not your adversary." A month later, after Buscetta had been extradited to Italy and assured that his family would be protected, he began to talk, said Geraci, "with composure, clarity, self-control and great seriousness." But not, Geraci observed, without sadness. Buscetta had several reasons for opening up to the authorities. One was a sense of disillusionment over what had happened to the Mafia in recent years. "Buscetta is a Mafioso of the old school, a man without scruples but a man of honor," said Geraci. "The Mafia has changed and is no longer an honored society but a band of assassins. His ideology has been crushed."

Some U.S. Mafiosi believe that Buscetta may also be trying to get back at those who kept him out of the Mob's higher councils because he had abandoned his first wife, thereby showing disrespect for the institution of marriage Others see a simpler motive. "He's settling scores," says a former New York detective who has spent most of his ife studying the Mafia. "He's trying to get even with the people who killed his family."

Whatever his purpose, Buscetta has apparently been forthcoming. In a series of conversations lasting through the summer and covering 3,000 pages, he offered a history of the Sicilian Mafia's operations going back, in some cases, to 1950. He volunteered details that authorities had long suspected but never been able to prove. Not since Joseph Valachi, a soldier in New York's Lucky Luciano family, spilled what he knew to a U.S. Senate committee in 1963 has anyone provided such a comprehensive picture of the Mafia and its operations. Said Judge Schiacchitano: "Buscetta has offered confirmation for many, many things that we had learned elsewhere but could not prove conclusively."

He has certainly enlightened the authorities about the Mafia-related killings that have frequently turned Palermo into a war zone.