He acted as his own lawyer and defended himself, cross examining Tommaso Buscetta and other pentiti.

On November 16, 1992, Buscetta testified before the Antimafia Commission presided by Luciano Violante about the links between Cosa Nostra and Salvo Lima and Giulio Andreotti.

" Salvo Lima was, in fact, the politician to whom Cosa Nostra turned most often to resolve problems for the organisation whose solution lay in Rome ," Buscetta testified.

Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta testified that Gaetano Badalamenti told him it was the Salvo cousins who commissioned the murder with the Mafia as a favour to Andreotti.

According to the " pentito " ( Mafia defector ) Tommaso Buscetta, Lima ’ s father, Vincenzo Lima, was a " man of honour " of the Palermo Centro Mafia family that was led by Salvatore and Angelo La Barbera of which Buscetta's family – the Porta Nuova Mafia family – was part as well.

Every year Lima provided Buscetta with tickets for the Teatro Massimo in Palermo.

Their big break came with the arrest of Tommaso Buscetta, a mafioso who chose to turn informant in exchange for protection from the Corleonesi, who had already murdered many of his friends and relatives.

Buscetta married three times and had six children, and at one point, he was briefly suspended from the Mafia for walking out on his first wife, adultery being a greater crime than murder in the eyes of his fellow mobsters.

After an interview, Falcone became convinced that Buscetta was genuine and treated him with respect.

This premise became known as the Buscetta theorem.

This premise became known as the Buscetta theorem and would be recognised legally with the confirmation of the Maxi Trial sentence in January 1992.

However, these two paradigms missed essential aspects of the Mafia that became clear when investigators were confronted with the testimonies of Mafia turncoats, like those of Buscetta to judge Falcone at the Maxi Trial.

One of Bontade's close friends was Tommaso Buscetta, who subsequently became a pentito ( collaborating witness ) after he was arrested in Brazil in 1983.

** Tommaso Buscetta, Italian mafioso ( d. 2000 )

Tommaso Buscetta ( in sunglasses ), the first important pentito of Italian Mafia, escorted in a court of law.

In the wake of the Maxi Trial in 1986-87, and after the testimony of Tommaso Buscetta, the term was more often used for former members of the Sicilian Mafia who abandoned their organization and started helping in investigations.

Among the most famous Mafia pentiti is Tommaso Buscetta, the first important pentito.

In the period until the 1990s, there were very few, albeit significant, pentiti such as Tommaso Buscetta, Salvatore Contorno, Antonino Calderone, etc.

* Tommaso Buscetta ( 1928 – 2000 ) was the first important pentito against the Sicilian Mafia.

* Salvatore Contorno ( born 1946 ) started to collaborate in October 1984, following the example of Buscetta.

Tommaso Buscetta (; 13 July 1928 – 2 April 2000 ) was a Sicilian mafioso.

After the Ciaculli Massacre in 1963, Buscetta fled to the United States where the local Gambino crime family helped him to get started in the pizza business.

In 1970 Buscetta was arrested in New York.

Buscetta moved on to Brazil where he set up a drug trafficking network.

In 1972 Buscetta was arrested and tortured by the Brazilian military regime, and subsequently extradited to Italy where he began a life sentence for the earlier double murder conviction.

Arrested once more in 1983, Buscetta was sent back to Italy.

Buscetta asked to talk to Giovanni Falcone and began his life as an informant.

Buscetta ( in sunglasses ) is led into court at the Maxi Trial, circa 1986.

Buscetta revealed the existence and workings of the Sicilian Mafia Commission.

As a reward for his help, Buscetta was allowed to live in the USA under a new identity in the Witness Protection Program.

In an interview with the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi, Buscetta cheerfully bragged that he lost his virginity at the age of eight to a prostitute who charged him just a bottle of olive oil.

Judges and policemen found Buscetta to be very polite and intelligent, albeit sometimes prone to vanity.

Like most informants, Buscetta was occasionally somewhat economical with the truth.

Only after the murders on Antimafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992, did Buscetta decide to talk about the links between the Mafia and politicians.

The upshot of the evening was that I got the address of Pendleton's studio -- or rather, of the studio in which he gave his classes, for he didn't work there himself -- and joined the life class, which met every Tuesday and Thursday from ten to twelve in the morning.

Bede had another brush with Wilfrid, for the historian himself says that he met Wilfrid, sometime between 706 and 709, and discussed Æthelthryth, the abbess of Ely.

In the narrative, just prior to this test, when Joseph had first met all of his brothers ( but not identified himself to them ), he had held a feast for them ; the narrative heavily implies that Benjamin was Joseph's favorite brother, since he is overcome with tears when he first meets Benjamin in particular, and he gives Benjamin five times as much food as he apportions to the others.

While in Rome for Otto's imperial coronation, Bruno met Saint Adalbert of Prague, the first Apostle of the Prussians, killed a year later, which inspired Bruno to write a biography of St Adalbert when he reached the recently Christianized and consolidated Kingdom of Hungary himself.

His father was a gardener, and he himself became first connected with the church in the humble position of a bellringer and verger in the Duomo of Piacenza ; he was twenty-one when the judge Ignazio Gardini, of Ravenna, was banished, and he followed Gardini to Ravenna where he met the vice-legate Giorgio Barni, who was made bishop of Piacenza in 1688 and appointed Alberoni chamberlain of his household.

Himmler met Dönitz in Flensburg and offered himself as second-in-command.

Eldol states that he is the sole survivor of the Britons who met there, having escaped by defending himself a stake that he claims was thrown to him by God.

Jahangir's love for hunting met his love for art as he commissioned artists on multiple occasions to paint him while hunting and would even paint scenes himself, from time to time.

On 19 May 1940 Ribbentrop met the new Italian Ambassador Dino Alfieri, who described the meeting as follows :" He commented at length on the " dazzling " successes of the German armies, extolling the military genius of the Führer ... who had " revealed himself as the greatest military genius since Napoleon "... He spoke of the inevitable clash between the young nations and the old ; of the necessity of breaking the ring with which the Judaeo-democratic-plutocratic powers were trying to encircle Germany and Italy ; and of the need to create a new European civilization.

In early October, the Pope and Emperor met at Rheims, where Louis prostrated himself three times before Stephen.

Stephen himself only returned to the duchy in 1137, where he met with Louis VI and Theobald to agree to an informal regional alliance, probably brokered by Henry, to counter the growing Angevin power in the region.

The team name was opposed by St. Petersburg businessmen on the grounds that it emphasized Tampa at the expense of other Bay Area cities, until NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle himself met with them to encourage their support.

He then met Procopius himself at Nacoleia and convinced his troops to desert him.

" The time traveler eventually arrives in a ruined city in A. D. 1, 001, 930, where he is met by an old man who claims to be the Last Man still alive, and who says he knew the time traveler was coming because he read in an ancient history book that he himself ( the Last Man ) had arrived from the future in A. D. 502, 101 in the same time machine the time traveler was using.

The two men met for the first time the following year, and Jung recalled the discussion between himself and Freud as interminable.

This movement met with strong opposition from the Patriarch Nikephoros, who himself gathered a group of bishops and abbots about him and swore them to uphold the veneration of images.

The uncanonical choice met with opposition from the strictly clerical party of the Stoudites, and this opposition intensified into an open break when Nikephoros, in other respects a very rigid moralist, showed himself compliant to the will of the emperor by reinstating the excommunicated priest Joseph.

When Bessemer tried to induce makers to take up his improved system, he met with general rebuffs and was eventually driven to undertake the exploitation of the process himself.

In 1964, she met Jay Sebring, a former sailor who had established himself as a leading hair stylist in Hollywood.

At Limbdi, he met Thakur Saheb Jaswant Singh, who had himself been to England and America.

At a party, he met a pregnant Elizabeth Taylor ( then married to Michael Wilding ) whose first impression of Burton was that " he was rather full of himself.

Hitler gave Lloyd George a signed picture of himself and said he was pleased to have met " the man who won the war "; Lloyd George was moved by this and replied that he was honoured to receive such a gift " from the greatest living German ".

Severin argues that since Pitman appears to have lived in the lodgings above the father's publishing house and that Defoe himself was a mercer in the area at the time, Defoe may have met Pitman in person and learned of his experiences first-hand, or possibly through submission of a draft.

On 14 June, the rebels are reputed to have been met by the young king himself, and, led by Richard of Wallingford, to have presented him with a series of demands, including the dismissal of some of his more unpopular ministers and the effective abolition of serfdom.

He spent a week in Taos, New Mexico, where he met and befriended Bert Phillips, who had established himself there the previous year.