US mafia explosives expert 'helped Sicilian mob kill judge'

Informant says American helped Cosa Nostra assassinate Giovanni Falcone in 1992

New York's powerful Gambino mafia family sent a bomb expert to Sicily to train Cosa Nostra mobsters to assassinate an anti-mafia investigator, a former hitman has claimed.

Maurizio Avola, 56, who is believed to have killed about 80 people before becoming a pentito (informer) told prosecutors in Caltanissetta, Sicily, that an American man came to Palermo in 1992 to help the Sicilian mafia kill the prosecuting magistrate Giovanni Falcone, murdered in a car bomb the same year.