Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia pentito who had cooperated with Falcone's investigations, remembered Brusca as "a wild stallion but a great leader.

[5] He revealed all the details of the assassination: who tunnelled beneath the motorway, who packed the thirteen drums with TNT and Semtex, who hauled them into place on a skateboard and who triggered the detonator.

[9] Di Matteo made a desperate trip to Sicily to try to negotiate his son's release, but on 11 January 1996, after 779 days, the boy, who by now had also become physically ill due to mistreatment and torture, was strangled to death; his body was subsequently dissolved in a barrel of acid — a practice known colloquially as the lupara bianca.

In the months following Riina's arrest in January 1993, a series of bombings by the Corleonesi targeted tourist spots on the Italian mainland: the Via dei Georgofili bombing in Florence, Via Palestro in Milan and the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano and Via San Teodoro in Rome, which left ten people dead and 71 injured as well as severe damage to centres of cultural heritage such as the Uffizi Gallery.

As the scruffy-bearded Brusca emerged from a car, clad in dirty jeans and a rumpled white shirt, some ripped off their ski masks, as if to say they no longer had anything to fear from the Mafia.

[18] In court he admitted to detonating the bomb, planted under the motorway from Palermo airport, by remote control while watching Falcone's convoy through binoculars from a hill.

Initially his collaboration was met with skepticism, fearing his "repentance" to be a ruse to escape the harsh prison terms reserved for ranking Mafia bosses.

[21] In the first three months, much of what he told authorities turned out to be either unverifiable or false, and a growing chorus of politicians called for a tightening of the collaboration system.

Mancino later said this was not true,[23] but in July 2012 he was ordered to stand trial for withholding evidence on 1992 talks between the Italian state and the Mafia and in the killings of Falcone and Borsellino.

[8] Amid public backlash, politicians Matteo Salvini of the Lega Nord and Enrico Letta of the Democratic Party were critical of the decision to release Brusca.

The Italian series Il cacciatore covers the entire period from after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino right up to the arrest and imprisonment of Brusca over three seasons.