American mafia 'sent explosives expert' to help Sicilian mob assassinate crusading investigator

America’s notorious Gambino crime family sent an explosives expert to Sicily to help Cosa Nostra blow up a crusading anti-mafia investigator, a turncoat has told Italian prosecutors.

Giovanni Falcone was killed 27 years ago this week, on May 23 1992, when the car he was travelling in was blown to bits by a bomb planted in a culvert beneath a stretch of motorway outside Palermo, Sicily’s regional capital. His wife and three police bodyguards were also killed.

It is still regarded as one of the most heinous crimes in Italy’s history, with the 53-year-old Falcone hailed a hero and regarded as a symbol of the fight against organised crime.

The killing was followed a few months later by the assassination of another high-profile anti-mafia investigator, Paolo Borsellino, who was a close friend and collaborator of Falcone.

It is now claimed that Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, received training with the bomb and its remote-controlled detonator from an American “man of honour” sent from New York by John Gotti, the notorious head of the Gambino family who was known as ‘the Dapper Don’ for his expensive suits.

“The foreigner arrived in the first few months of 1992,” Maurizio Avola, a convicted mafia killer who became a ‘pentito’ or turncoat in 1994 after confessing to around 80 murders, told investigators recently.

“He was about 40 years old, had brown hair, dark eyes, he was of robust build and he was dressed elegantly,” Avola told prosecutors, according to La Repubblica newspaper. “I met him in a house in Catania (in eastern Sicily) and was later told ‘today you’ve met someone really important,’” said Avola, now 57, who was involved in the planning of the bombing. “I was told that the foreigner collaborated in the attack.”

Falcone was killed by the Sicilian mafia because he had managed to put so many of their members behind bars during a series of maxi-trials, in what was a major blow to Cosa Nostra.

The murder was blamed on the “Corleonesi”, mafia families and their affiliated clans who came from the town of Corleone.

The Sicilian mafia’s ties to American mob families stretch back a century, but this is the first time that it has been claimed that the US mafia was involved in the killing.

One mafia expert said it seemed odd that the Gambino family would help the Corleonesi because the Americans were allied to the Corleonesis’ rivals.

“But it may be that the Gambinos at a certain point recognised that the Corleonesi had been victorious in the war between rival families in Sicily,” said John Dickie, professor of Italian studies at University College London and the author of Mafia Republic – Italy’s Criminal Curse.

“Certainly there is nothing unusual in the traffic of personnel and ideas across the Atlantic - it dates back to the early 20th century. They were cousin organisations.”

Even after nearly 30 years, there is an abiding fascination in Italy in the murder of Falcone.

“It was like the Kennedy assassination. Everybody remembers where they were at the time. It defined an era and was a turning point in the history of the mafia,” said Prof Dickie.