citizenship and was placed in the Witness Protection Program in exchange for new revelations against the American Mafia. He testified in the Pizza Connection Trial, which took place in 1985 in New York and saw defendants Gaetano Badalamenti and other Sicilian-American mafiosi accused of drug trafficking. He also testified in 1986 at the largest trial against the Mafia in history, the Maxi Trial in Palermo, arising from the statements made to Falcone, Buscetta helped judges Falcone and Paolo Borsellino achieve significant success in the fight against organized crime that led to 475 Mafia members indicted, and 338 convicted, sentences upheld in 1992. In mid-1992, following the bomb attacks in which Falcone and Borsellino were killed, Buscetta began to speak of the political ties of the Cosa Nostra with magistrates, accusing Salvo Lima, killed a few months earlier, and Giulio Andreotti of being the main political referents of the organization; in particular, he reported that he had known Lima personally since the late 1950s, and had met him last in 1980, and also reported that he had learned that the murder of the journalist Mino Pecorelli in 1979 would have been carried out in Andreotti's interest. Buscetta was one of the main witnesses of the trials against Andreotti for mafia association and for the Pecorelli murder. Andreotti was eventually acquitted in 1999 of the charge of having commissioned the assassination of Pecorelli. In court, Buscetta also elaborated in great detail the hidden exchanges that linked politicians and the Mafia. He stated: It is not Cosa Nostra that contacts the politician; instead a member of the Cosa Nostra says, that president is mine (è cosa mia), and if you need a favor, you must go through me. In other words, the Cosa Nostra figure maintains a sort of monopoly on that politician. Every family head in the Mafia selects a man whose characteristics already make him look approachable. Forget the idea that some pact is reached first. On the contrary, one goes to that candidate and says, "Onorevole, I can do this and that for you now, and we hope that when you are elected you will remember us." The candidate wins and he has to pay something back. You tell him, "We need this, will you do it or not?" The politician understands immediately and acts always. During a trial in 1993, the Mafia member Salvatore Cancemi confessed to Buscetta that