Authorities deployed massive security Sunday and ordered an around-the-clock guard for judges, jury and prosecutors in an unprecedented trial of 474 accused Mafiosi opening Monday in a $3 million bunker courtroom.
The trial, in a hall of concrete, steel and bullet-proof glass next door to the 18th-Century Ucciardone prison, will be the largest ever mounted by the Italian republic in its battle against the underworld organization that has terrorized Sicily for 150 years and spread to the U.S. It is expected to last at least until November.
On Sunday, authorities started deploying the first shift of a 2,000-man security force that will guard the building and participants during the trial.
The Court of Appeals named two substitute judges to stand by to take over if violence or illness should incapacitate Presiding Judge Alfonso Giordano and Associate Judge Pietro Grasso. The names of the 6 jurors and 10 alternates were withheld to protect them.
The mass trial is unprecedented in Mafia history, both for its size and for its scope. Charges cover 90 murders in Sicily and billions of dollars of heroin traffic to the U.S. and Canada.
Of the 470 men and 4 women facing charges, 120 are fugitives and will be tried in absentia.
The trial marks a new departure in the state`s attack on the Mafia, taking aim at the organization as a whole rather than focusing on a single crime or on crimes committed by a single Mafia family.
Tommaso ”Don Masino” Buscetta, 57, and Salvatore ”Totuccio” Contorno, 39, the insiders who broke the Mafia code of silence and are now testifying in the ”Pizza Connection” narcotics trial in New York, will be the state`s star witnesses.
But they will not appear at the opening sessions, expected to be devoted to procedural matters, judicial sources said.
Authorities transfered two key defendants, Luciano Liggio and Pippo Calo, from other prisons in secret during the weekend, confirming their arrival only when they were locked in cells.
Liggio was held in Ucciardone. From there he will be taken under guard through tunnels to glass and steel cages in the courtroom. Calo, also a defendant in another criminal case involving the Mafia, was kept separate from his fellow defendants, at a site 21 miles outside the city, judicial sources said.
Liggio, 61, boss of the Corleone family, was described as the godfather who runs the Sicilian Mafia. Calo, 54, named in connection with 69 murders, was described as the Mafia`s financial brain.
