Mutolo's declarations contributed to the indictment of Italy's former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and to an understanding of the context of the 1992 Mafia murders of the politician Salvo Lima and the magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Important supply lines of morphine base and heroin to the Sicilian Mafia were set up in the late 1970s and early 1980s after Cosa Nostra members Pietro Vernengo and Gaspare Mutolo shared prison cells in Italy with the Turkish trafficker, Yasar Avni Mussullulu, and the Singapore-born Chinese, Koh Bak Kin.
[3] Koh Bak Kin was first arrested at Rome airport in 1976 with more than 20 kilograms of heroin and in 1978 was sentenced to six years in prison, where he met Mutolo.
On his return to Bangkok, he was able to guarantee a steady supply of heroin to Cosa Nostra thanks to his links in northern Thailand with an emissary of the opium "baron" Khun Sa.
The shipments were financed by consortium of Sicilian Mafia clans, who had organized a pool to provide the money to buy the merchandise from Thai suppliers.
His Thai supplier Koh Bak Kin was arrested when Egyptian police seized a Greek ship in the Suez Canal carrying some 233 kilos of heroin on 24 May 1983.
The stakes were high, Mutolo was probably the most important possible pentito since the defection of Francesco Marino Mannoia in 1989: he had been a cellmate and driver of Totò Riina.
On 16 July 1992, Borsellino attended another deposition of Mutolo while he was frantically investigating the killing of his friend and colleague Giovanni Falcone.
[1] Two days later, on 19 July 1992, Borsellino and his escort of five police officers were killed in a car bomb in Palermo on the orders of Salvatore Riina and the Sicilian Mafia Commission.
[6] In March 1993, 56 arrest warrants were issued for murders in Palermo on the basis of testimonies made by Mutolo and Giuseppe Marchese.
Mutolo's declarations led to the arrest of Bruno Contrada, the deputy director of the civil intelligence service SISDE, contributed to the indictment of Giulio Andreotti and to an understanding of the context of the 1992 murders of Salvo Lima, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
He warned the Parliamentary Antimafia Commission presided by Luciano Violante in February 1993 of the likelihood that further attacks were being planned by the Corleonesi on the mainland.
Signorino had been one of the main public prosecutors at the so-called Maxi Trial in Palermo in 1987 when he demanded life sentences for 20 accused mafiosi and sought a 17-year prison term for Mutolo.
Signorino had publicly rejected the accusation, and told reporters, "if seeking 20 life sentences at the maxi-trial means I am a mafioso, then go ahead and call me that."
On 24 December 1992, Bruno Contrada – former Palermo police chief and deputy director of the civil intelligence service SISDE – was arrested due to revelations of Mutolo and another pentito, Giuseppe Marchese.
Contrada informed the Mafia of upcoming police operations and prevented an early capture of the fugitive Totò Riina.
Together with another cooperating witness and mafioso turned pentito, Francesco Marino Mannoia, Mutolo provided landmark testimony documenting the ongoing nexus between the Sicilian Mafia and the American Cosa Nostra.
"We all unanimously believed that the trial verdict would be a conviction because the government had to demonstrate to public opinion within Italy and abroad... that it could strike a hard blow to Cosa Nostra."