Excellent Cadavers1995
the mafia and the death of the first Italian Republic
by Alexander Stille
Excellent Cadavers is the story of the extraordinary efforts of two Sicilian magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who took the war against the mafia further than anyone had dared before. That war would ultimately claim their lives as well as help topple the ruling coalition that had governed Italy since World War II.
The engineers of the renowned "maxi-trials," Falcone and Borsellino succeeded in penetrating the mafia's code of silence and revealing, for the first time, the inner structure of Sicily's Cosa Nostra.
One of their great breakthroughs was to win the cooperation of Tommaso Buscetta - the first of many Sicilian bosses to become witnesses - a development that revolutionized organized crime prosecutions in the United States as well as in Italy. "Before Buscetta we...