Depraved Mafia boss ‘The Pig’ roasted corpses on grills and dissolved boy in acid – World News

He played a hand in more than 100 deaths and is even said to be the Mafia’s deadliest ever hitman – now, he’s free to walk the streets.

Italy has erupted in fury this week after mob boss Giovanni Brusca was released early from jail, having helped prosecutors in their fight against the Sicilian Mafia group known as the Cosa Nostra.

The criminal turncoat, 64, was given a 25-year reduced sentence despite horrific acts that include dissolving a young boy’s body in acid and cooking corpses over a grill.

Over his bloody career, which saw him finally arrested in 1996, Brusca waged war not just against bitter gang rivals, but also the state – notoriously assassinating the high-profile judge Giovanni Falcone.

Known as ‘The Pig’ and the ‘People Slayer’, his release has sickened relatives still mourning the victims of his barbaric reign.

Tina Montinaro, whose bodyguard husband was killed alongside Falcone, told the Republica: “The state is against us – after 29 years we still don’t know the truth about the massacre and Giovanni Brusca, the man who destroyed my family, is free.”

Natural born killer with ‘little charisma’

Born into a long line of Mafiosa, Brusca grew up on the streets of San Giuseppe Jato, Sicily, visiting his criminal father in jail when he was just five years old.

Even as a young child, he learned how to clean his father’s guns and helped fugitives on the run by giving them food and clothes.

By the age of 18, he had killed his first two victims – the second with a double-barrelled shotgun outside a cinema.

Such an early penchant for bloodshed earned Brusca entry into the Mafia, serving under the powerful crime lord Salvatore Riina as he worked his way up as a hitman.

In his book The Mafia, author Al Camino describes Brusca as a “ruthless butcher with little charisma”.

Torturing victims for information in painful half-hour sessions, he would reportedly break their legs with hammers and pull on their ears with pliers.

His bloodlust appeared to have no limits. When a neighbourhood boss bizarrely asked him to kill a man seen on a certain type of tractor, Brusca saw three such vehicles pass by and killed all three drivers.

On another occasion, he rushed a job because a victim was about to get married and he did not want to see the fiancee be left as a widow.

Dissolved boy in acid after 800 days of torture

Chillingly, Brusca showed little remorse, later boasting in his memoirs about his increasingly vile exploits.

“I’ve dissolved bodies in acid; I’ve roasted corpses on big grills; I’ve buried the remains after digging graves with an earthmover,” he wrote.

“Some pentiti [former Mafiosi] say today they feel disgust for what they did. I can speak for myself: I’ve never been upset by these things.”

His most stomach-churning crime came in 1993, when the Mafia decided to take revenge against turncoat Santino di Matteo by kidnapping his 12-year-old son.

Led by Brusca and gang leader Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, the Cosa Nostra disguised themselves as cops, telling young Giuseppe di Matteo that they were taking him to see his father.

Attempting to intimidate Santino, who was being held in police custody after agreeing to testify against the mob, the group sadistically tortured Giuseppe for nearly 800 days.

Kept in a cafe, beaten and starved, they sent pictures of the boy to Santino, who desperately tried to negotiate his release.

However, in 1996, Brusca gave the order to “get rid of the puppy” and the exhausted child was strangled to death.

His body was then dissolved in acid to ensure it would never be found – a practice known as ‘lupara bianca’.

Blew up anti-mob investigator on bridge

The chilling murder, however, was not what brought Brusca down. By now, the man also dubbed ‘The Executioner’ and ‘The Slaughterer’ was already on the run.

Four years earlier, the mobster had detonated a car bomb that killed Italy’s leading anti-Mafia investigator, Giovanni Falcone.

The legendary judge had spent his career trying to bring the mob to justice, famously bringing about the so-called ‘maxi trial’ in 1986, which led to the conviction of 342 mafiosi.

Brusca was instructed to seek revenge, and in 1992 planted half a tonne of explosives under the road near Palermo as Falcone’s car drove past.

Falcone’s wife and three bodyguards were also killed in the attack, and Brusca was forced on the run.

It was the capture of Santino di Matteo that later identified ‘The Pig’ as the ringleader, and sealed the fate of young Giuseppe.

Brusca was finally snared on May 20, 1996. Now aged 39, he was caught by officials living at a small house in the Sicilian countryside near Agrigento, where he was dining with his girlfriend and their family.

Incredibly, investigators tracked down the location when the noise of a plainclothes officer driving by the house on a motorbike was picked up by officers listening to a call intercepted on Brusca’s mobile phone.

‘I cannot remember the names of the many I killed’

The following year, Brusca was sentenced to 26 years in prison after admitting he plotted the assassination of Falcone.

The case, which remains one of Italy’s most notorious murders, was instrumental in introducing a raft of tough anti-Mafia legislation.

Brusca, however, broke his own rules – agreeing to become a state witness to reduce his sentence. His evidence led to police tracking down a number of gangsters responsible for the Mafia’s crime wave across the 80s and 90s.

In 1999, he published a prison memoir in which he bragged about his sickening past, claiming to be the Mafia’s most prolific killer.

“I killed Giovanni Falcone,” he wrote. “But it was not the first time: I had already used the car bomb to kill Judge Rocco Chinnici and the men of his escort.

“I am responsible for the kidnapping and death of little Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was 13 years old when he was kidnapped and 15 when he was killed.

“I have committed and personally ordered over 150 crimes. Even today I cannot remember every one, one by one, the names of those I killed. Many more than a hundred, certainly less than two hundred.”

His early release this week, however, has united both the public and political parties from across the spectrum in indignation.

Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing League party, said: “After 25 years in prison, the mafia boss Giovanni Brusca is a free man. This is not the ‘justice’ that Italians deserve.”

Enrico Letta, the leader of the centre-left Democratic party, added: “It is a punch in the stomach that leaves you breathless.”