Brusca returns to court as a free man to speak about Dell’Utri, but is deemed unreliable

Giovanni Brusca returns to court as a free man. The former Mafia boss who pressed the remote control that triggered the Capaci massacre and who has confessed to dozens of murders is due to appear today at the court in Florence as a witness in the trial against Salvatore Baiardo. This will be his first public appearance since the end of his probation in May 2025. He will testify on a subject on which his statements have already been deemed unreliable by the judges, namely the alleged links between Dell’Utri, Silvio Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra. 

As we have been pointing out for some time now, the trial against Baiardo for aiding and abetting and aggravated defamation against the journalist Massimo Giletti (Baiardo has denied showing the journalist a photograph from the early 1990s allegedly depicting Silvio Berlusconi alongside the mafia boss Giuseppe Graviano and the former general Francesco Delfino) has been turned by the Florentine public prosecutors into yet another platform from which to sling mud at the former prime minister and his right-hand man. Thanks to the ploy of the ‘mafia-related’ aggravating circumstance, in fact, the prosecutors have managed to slip back in ‘through the back door’ the charge against Berlusconi (who has since died) and Dell’Utri of being the external instigators of the mafia massacres of 1993–1994: In the surreal view of the Florentine prosecutors, Baiardo allegedly denied having shown the photo to Giletti in order to discredit this line of accusation. Thus, the Florence Public Prosecutor’s Office managed to secure permission from the court to have a number of mafia figures symbolic of the period of the massacres appear in court, such as Giovanni Brusca and Antonino Giuffrè (who will also be heard today), Giuseppe Graviano, Gaspare Spatuzza and Cristoforo Cannella.

As we have reported in recent days, Graviano has already made it known that he will use this opportunity to reveal his ‘truths’ about the period of the terrorist attacks to the nation, although it is not known what these might be, given that he has been deemed ‘completely unreliable’ by the public prosecutors in Caltanissetta.

Today it is Brusca’s turn, whose credibility regarding the alleged links between Berlusconi and the Mafia has already been heavily discredited by the courts, both in the trial for aiding and abetting against Dell’Utri and in the trial concerning the so-called state-Mafia negotiations. In the trial against Dell’Utri, for example, the judges at the Court of Palermo described Giovanni Brusca’s statements as characterised by “extreme ambiguity” and “on a collision course with, and in stark contrast to, certain incontrovertible and irrefutable pieces of evidence”. The court concluded by stating that Brusca “had not wished to make a spontaneous and honest contribution to the establishment of the truth”.

Even in the ‘Trattativa’ trial, the judges’ assessment of Brusca’s statements was harsh. In the judgement acquitting Calogero Mannino, the investigating judge noted that Brusca tended to “enrich his statements with connections between facts known to him and facts learnt from trials and the media”, offering “far-reaching” interpretations. So much so that in 2001, during an interrogation, the Florentine public prosecutor Gabriele Chelazzi cautioned Brusca, reminding him that he should not behave like “a consultant to the prosecution”, but should confine himself to reporting what he knew.

It is therefore unclear why a state witness deemed “unreliable” regarding the events surrounding Dell’Utri and his alleged links with Cosa Nostra should be called upon to testify again on these matters.

The same uncertainty applies to the turncoat Antonino Giuffrè: in the trial against Dell’Utri, the Palermo Court of Appeal highlighted that, during the investigations, Giuffrè had not levelled any accusations against the former senator: it was only later, during the trial, that Giuffrè described Dell’Utri as ‘a person very close to Cosa Nostra’ and ‘the provider of political guarantees in favour of the mafia organisation’. For these reasons, ultimately the Court “did not consider it possible to attribute credibility to the openly accusatory statements made by Giuffrè at the trial, which were irreconcilably at odds with those made during the investigations”.

The question remains the same: how credible can Giuffrè’s accounts of the alleged links between Dell’Utri and Cosa Nostra be? No one knows, but clearly this is not what really matters to the public prosecutor’s office.