The Mafia does know somebody and they are g

In a small office in the Criminalpol HQ in Rome, mobster Tommaso Buscetta asked the interrogator sitting opposite if he was absolutely sure he wanted his questions answered.

It may have seemed an arrogant thing to ask, but this mafioso knew exactly what would happen if he told the lawman everything he knew.

Leaning forward, he told investigator Giovanni Falcone: “First, they’ll try to kill me. Then it will be your turn. They’ll keep trying until they succeed.”

Falcone continued his questioning, and Buscetta did what no man had ever dared – and broke the sacred Mafia code of silence on which he had sworn his life.

His decision to turn from Mafia kingpin to its first turncoat resulted in the convictions of nearly 400 Cosa Nostra mobsters in Italy and the US in the Maxi Trial, from 1986 to 1992.

It was the largest anti-mob prosecution in history, with many jailed for life.

But Buscetta knew he was also unleashing the wrath of the world’s most powerful criminal organisation.

His chilling prophecy soon came true. In 1992 prosecutor Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards were killed when a bomb detonated beneath a highway overpass in Palermo as he drove home from the airport. Two months later, a car bomb killed his friend and investigating partner, Paolo Borsellino.

Others connected to the trial were also murdered. But the one person Mafia assassins failed to kill was Buscetta, who went into hiding with a new identity and citizenship in the United States and spent the rest of his life on the run.

Even when he died of lung cancer in April 2000, aged 71, his body had to be buried under a false name – in case the Mafia still tried to exact revenge.

Dubbed the “Godfather of Two Worlds” because of the power he held on both sides of the law, Buscetta’s story is now being told in a new film The Traitor, directed by Marco Bellocchio.

For John Huber, a Drug Enforcement Agency special agent at the time who had guarded Buscetta, the mafioso’s testimony was a turning point both for the once-invincible Mob and the police.

“It has to be understood that Buscetta was the most important, most wanted and most endangered witness in American criminal history,” he said.

But for Buscetta, who had nine family members slaughtered by the Mafia