Italy Hitting Back Sentences for 338 mafiosi

Even though he rattled off the sentences so rapidly that he sounded like a tobacco auctioneer, Presiding Judge Alfonso Giordano needed one hour and 40 minutes to reach the end of the list. When he finally finished, 338 members of the Mafia were sent to jail for crimes ranging from murder to drug trafficking. The remaining 114 on trial were acquitted by the eight-member court that met in a heavily guarded Palermo courtroom crowded with specially built cages to hold the 452 defendants. Thus ended, nearly two years after it had begun, the biggest Mafia trial in Italian history. Said Palermo Judge Pietro Grasso, a member of the court: "It was a landmark for law, for us and for our children."

For the first time it was the top mobster bosses -- who ran a vast illicit empire financed largely by heroin sales to the U.S. -- who received the longest terms. Among 19 men who received life sentences was Michele Greco, 63, nicknamed "the Pope" for his high position in the Mafia. Greco was found responsible for scores of murders, including the 1982 assassination of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Only three months before his death, Italian authorities had sent the crime-busting military man to Palermo to lead the battle against the Mafia.

The prosecution relied heavily on 14 Mafia members who broke the code of silence, known as omerta, to describe the organization's workings. The star witness was Tommaso Buscetta, 59, a mobster who once ran some Mafia operations in the U.S. and South America and who also testified in the "Pizza Connection" trial in New York City, which led to the conviction of 17 drug traffickers. Buscetta described to the jury the Mafia's pyramidal structure, capped by a twelve-member cupola, or commission, that ruled on all major gangland murders. There were plenty of those. The prosecution charged that between 1978 and 1982 the cupola directed a wave of terror in which some 425 people, including magistrates, police investigators and politicians, were killed in Palermo alone.

Even as the court wound up its courageous deliberations, another trial against 78 alleged mafiosi continued in the same Palermo courtroom. Meanwhile, a new wave of killings was feared imminent: only three hours after he was acquitted of charges of international drug trafficking and Mafia association, Antonino Ciulla, 35, was gunned down in Palermo on his way to celebrate his release. Italian police also launched an investigation into the execution- , style slaying of Businessman Francesco Gitto, 58, a first cousin of Matilda Cuomo, the wife of New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Gitto, a well-known figure in his hometown of Barcellona in eastern Sicily, was not known to have Mafia ties. But police said the .38-cal. pistol used to kill him had been used in two other suspected Mafia homicides.