A law to break the Mafia’s code of silence lets a killer go free

SHORTLY AFTER nine o’clock on a Monday night, Giovanni Brusca, his brother, their wives and children had abruptly to abandon their roast-chicken dinner. Armed, masked police burst into their rented villa and arrested both men.

That was in 1996. On May 31st Mr Brusca left prison in Rome, a free man after serving 25 years of a 30-year sentence imposed for, among many murders, that in 1992 of Italy’s most renowned anti-Mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Falcone. Few recent events have stirred greater revulsion than the release of this former Mafia boss, nicknamed u Verru, (the Pig) in Sicilian. “This is not the justice Italy deserves,” railed Matteo Salvini, the leader of the populist Northern League.

The emotional reaction was surely understandable. Mr Brusca was a leading associate of the late capo dei capi, the boss of bosses—namely the psychopathic Salvatore “Totò’” Riina. In the early 1990s Riina launched a terrorist campaign against the Italian state that involved lethal bombings in several mainland cities, the assassination of Falcone and the later killing of Falcone’s colleague, Paolo Borsellino. It was Mr Brusca who detonated the bomb that killed Falcone, his wife and bodyguards. And when one of the other members of the hit squad, Santino Di Matteo, was arrested and turned...