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hair-trigger thrill that comes when danger is mixed with unscrupulous cunning. The world of the cinematic mafia is one where the conflicts that everyone feels—between the competing claims of ambition, responsibility, and family—become matters of life and death.
    It would be both pious and untrue to say that the mafia presented in fiction is simply false—it is stylized. And mafiosi are like everyone else in that they like to watch television and go to the cinema to see a stylized version of their own daily dramas represented on-screen. Tommaso Buscetta was a fan of The Godfather, although he thought the scene at the end where the other mafiosi kiss Michael Corleone’s hand was unrealistic. The conflicting demands that lie behind the motivation of a fictional character like Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone—ambition, responsibility, family—are indeed the same ones that are central to the lives of real mafiosi.
    One obvious thing that is different is that none of the glamour of the cinema can survive an encounter with the horrific reality of Cosa Nostra. A less obvious, but in the end more important, difference is that whereas Michael Corleone’s story is about the moral dangers of unchecked power, real Sicilian mafiosi are obsessed with the rules of honour that limit their actions. A man of honour may dodge, manipulate, and rewrite those rules, but he is nonetheless always aware that they shape how he is perceived by his peers. That is not to say that the values of mafia honour have much that is conventionally ‘honourable’ about them. Honour has a specific meaning within Cosa Nostra that informs even its members’ most execrable actions, as the unsettling case of Giovanni Brusca, the man who pressed the detonator on the Capaci bomb, goes to show.
    Brusca was known in Cosa Nostra circles as ‘lo scannacristiani’, ‘the man who cuts Christians’ throats’. In Sicily, ‘a Christian’ means ‘a human being’; in the mafia, it means ‘a man of honour’. Brusca was part of a death squad reporting directly to the boss of bosses, the leader of the Corleonesi, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina. After the Capaci bombing Giovanni Brusca was not idle. He killed the boss of the Alcamo Family who had begun to resent Riina’s authority. A few days after that, members of Brusca’s team strangled the same man’s pregnant partner. Brusca then killed a spectacularly wealthy businessman and man of honour who had failed to use his political contacts to protect the mafia from the maxi-trial.
    Worse followed. ‘Lo scannacristiani’ was the friend of another man of honour, Santino Di Matteo, whose little son Giuseppe would play with Brusca in the family garden. That was all before Santino Di Matteo decided to betray Cosa Nostra’s secrets to the state; he was the first mafioso to tell the authorities how the killing of Falcone had been carried out. Brusca’s response was to kidnap little Giuseppe Di Matteo at a gymkhana and hold him captive in a cellar for twenty-six months. Finally, in January 1996, when Giuseppe was fourteen, Brusca ordered him to be strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
    ‘Lo scannacristiani’ was captured on 20 May 1996 in the countryside near Agrigento. Four hundred police surrounded the box-like two-storey house where he was hiding. At about 9 P.M ., a team of thirty broke in through the doors and windows. They found Brusca and his family at table watching a television programme about Giovanni Falcone—the fourth anniversary of his murder was only two days away. In the bedroom police discovered a wardrobe full of Versace and Armani clothes, and a big red bag containing some $15,000 in Italian and US currency, two GSM cellphones, and jewellery including Cartier watches. On the dining-room table they found a short-barrelled pistol; it was made of plastic and belonged to Brusca’s young son Davide.
    Brusca is now collaborating with justice. By his own disturbingly imprecise confession, he has killed