Santino Di Matteo (born 7 December 1954), also known as Mezzanasca, is an Italian former member of the Sicilian Mafia from the town of Altofonte in the province of Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
[1] He revealed all the details of the assassination: who tunnelled beneath the motorway, who packed the 13 drums with TNT and Semtex, who hauled them into place on a skateboard, and who pressed the button to set them off.
[6] 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 finally strangled; his body was subsequently dissolved in a barrel of acid—a practice known colloquially as the lupara bianca.
[12] In 2010, after Gaspare Spatuzza became a pentito, Benedetto Capizzi, Fifetto Cannella and Cosimo Lo Nigro were sentenced to 30 years in prison for their roles in the murder.
[16] In March 2002, Di Matteo was released early, along with four others, in return for cooperating with magistrates, outraging relatives of Falcone, who stated that the system of pentiti safeguarded killers from prosecution for murder.