guards and punched Brusca in the face. In 1997, Di Matteo and Brusca met face to face during court proceedings. Bursting into tears Di Matteo told the judge: "I guarantee my collaboration, but to this animal I guarantee nothing. If you leave me alone with him for two minutes I'll cut off his head." The confrontation threatened to become violent, but court security guards restrained Di Matteo. Brusca had also asked Giuseppe Di Matteo's family for forgiveness. In 1999, Brusca was sentenced to 30 years in prison for Di Matteo's murder. In 1997, Brusca was sentenced to 26 years in prison for the bomb attack that killed the Anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone near Capaci. In court, Brusca admitted to detonating the bomb, planted under the motorway from the airport to Palermo, by remote control while watching the magistrate's convoy through binoculars from a hill. Brusca was given another life sentence in 2009, for the murder of Salvatore Caravà. Collaborating with Italian justice and release After his arrest, Brusca started to collaborate with police. Initially his collaboration was met with skepticism, fearing his "repentance" could be a ruse to escape the harsh prison terms reserved for ranking Mafia bosses. In the first three months, much of what Brusca said turned out to be either unverifiable or false, and a growing chorus of politicians called for a tightening of the collaboration system. Brusca had offered a controversial version of the capture of Totò Riina: a secret deal between Carabinieri officers, secret agents and Cosa Nostra bosses tired of Riina's dictatorship. According to Brusca, Bernardo Provenzano "sold" Riina in exchange for the valuable archive of compromising material that Riina held in his apartment in Via Bernini 52 in Palermo. Brusca also claimed that Riina had told him that after the assassination of Falcone, he had been in indirect negotiations with interior minister Nicola Mancino in a deal to prevent any further killings. Mancino later said this was not true, but in July 2012, Mancino was ordered to stand trial for withholding evidence on 1992 talks between the Italian state and the Mafia and the killings of Falcone and Borsellino. Brusca was imprisoned in Rebibbia, Rome, and though he requested house arrest nine times since 2002, all of these requests had been refused. In 2004, it was reported that Brusca was allowed out of prison for one week every 45 days to see his