19 Get Life Terms in Sicilian Mafia Trial

A Sicilian jury convicted top Mafia bosses of murder and drug trafficking Wednesday, and judges sentenced 19 of them to life in prison to climax Italy’s most serious attempt in modern times to cripple the mob.

Verdicts for 452 defendants--and sentencing of 338 found guilty--came in a bunker-like Palermo courtroom Wednesday night, 20 months after the historic Mafia trial opened and 36 days after jurors and two judges began their deliberations in an armored room.

The mass trial, which was estimated to have cost at least $100 million, including $19 million for construction of the courtroom, is seen as the most severe blow against the Mafia in postwar republican Italy. Still, nobody was proclaiming total victory.

“This is not the end of a repressive epoch, but the beginning of a new legality,” said Assistant Judge Pietro Grasso.

Giovanni Falcone, an examining magistrate who was instrumental in assembling the 8,636-page indictment, called the court’s action “an important starting point--not the end but the beginning.”

Six jurors and two judges, who also weigh evidence under Italian law, convicted and sentenced the 338 found guilty, more than 100 of whom are still at large. Another 114 were acquitted.

With a small army of war-ready police on guard outside, more than 1,300 witnesses depicted the Mafia’s growth from a Sicily-centered syndicate to an international organization that made billions trafficking heroin, principally to the United States. In addition to the drug charges, prosecutors accused the defendants of 90 murders, racketeering, money-laundering and other crimes, including participation in a criminal organization.

Inside the courtroom, which is connected by tunnel to Palermo’s Ucciardone Prison, defendants lounged in barred, bulletproof cages as Chief Judge Alfonso Giordano read the court’s findings, answered by scattered protests and the sobbing of relatives.

Broke Vow of Silence

During the trial, the most damning evidence came from about 30 repentant Mafia members, called pentiti, who broke the gang’s historic vow of silence and testified for the government in exchange for more lenient sentences.

“The role of the pentiti was crucial, not enough in itself to convict but important because the witnesses’ testimony was complementary,” Grasso said.

In a nation that has no death penalty, prosecutors had asked for 28 life sentences and more than 5,000 years in prison.

Michele (The Pope) Greco, undisputed “boss of bosses” in Palermo and chairman of the 12-man commission of Mafia bosses that oversaw assassination and the heroin trade, was sentenced to life. So were other commission members and those convicted of murder.

As the jury began deliberating last month, the 64-year-old Greco wished the members “peace and tranquility.” He was among those accused in the 1982 assassination of Italy’s most respected anti-Mafia hunter, Gen. Carlo Alberto della Chiesa, and his young wife.

Greco’s brother Salvatore (The Senator) Greco, got 18 years. Giuseppe (Pippo) Calo, a Mafia financial wizard, got 23 years.

The jury rejected the prosecution’s call for 15 years for bespectacled Luciano Liggio, Mafia boss of the hill town named Corleone, which figured prominently in Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather.” He has been serving a life term since 1974, but the jury acquitted him of four murders that prosecutors charged he had masterminded from his jail cell in Sardinia.

A key prosecution witness, Tommaso Buscetta, was sentenced to three years and six months. Extradited from Brazil on drug charges in 1984, he gave investigators detailed insights on Mafia’s internal structure and decision-making.

A Mafia member who “turned” after six members of his family were murdered in gang warfare, Buscetta proved as credible to the Sicilian jury as he did to one in New York, which convicted 18 of 19 defendants on heroin charges.