Sicilians Accuse 18 <i> Mafiosi</i> in Assassination of Judge : Crime: Nine mob families are implicated after 18-month probe of bombing that killed anti-Mafia jurist.

ROME —  Climaxing a landmark investigation, Sicilian magistrates dealt a powerful new blow to the Cosa Nostra on Friday, accusing 18 organized crime figures of the 1992 assassination of Italy’s leading anti-Mafia judge.

Arrest warrants issued in the Sicilian city of Caltanissetta reward a full-throated national anti-Mafia crusade triggered by the murder of Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards in May, 1992.

The 18-month investigation, aided by FBI specialists and key testimony of a renegade mafioso , implicated nine different Cosa Nostra families in Sicily in the murder plot against the jurist who had sent hundreds of mafiosi to jail.

The order to kill Falcone came from Salvatore (Toto) Riina, the Cosa Nostra boss of bosses, investigators said. Planned with military precision, the assassination was carried out not with the usual street killers, but with the unprecedented participation of Palermo clan bosses themselves.

Ten of the bosses named in warrants announced Friday were already in jail as the investigation unfolded, including Riina, 63, who was arrested in Palermo last January after 23 years as a fugitive. He is serving two life sentences.

Four of the remaining eight accused mafiosi were arrested in recent days, and four remain at large, police said Friday night.

It was a combination of old-fashioned shoe leather and new-fangled scientific detection, plus the confession of a Mafia thug, that cracked Falcone’s murder.

The country’s top anti-Mafia judge when he died, Falcone had earned a death grudge by masterminding a maxi-trial of more than 400 mafiosi in 1986.

Killing him was Riina’s decision, investigating Magistrate Giovanni Tinebra told reporters Friday in Caltanissetta, headquarters for the investigation.

Riina, who had ruled the Cosa Nostra for about a decade, “took the decision to carry out a massacre which was executed by his most trusted and closest men,” Tinebra said.

The magistrates gave a detailed account of plans for murder with a bomb that killed Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards, and wounded about 20 others:

Mafia killers got a detonator and a remote control for the explosives that killed Falcone from a gang member who worked as a builder in Palermo. Other gang members stuffed the explosives into a culvert on the freeway between Punta Raisi Airport and Falcone’s native Palermo.

The 53-year-old judge worked in Rome, making frequent but unannounced visits home. With the explosives in place, the Mafia sat down to wait.

Two mafiosi , one of whom chain-smoked Merit cigarettes, waited with the remote control on a hillside overlooking the highway for five days.

Finally, on a Saturday afternoon, a Mafia lookout in Rome called Palermo on his cellular telephone to say that Falcone had taken off on an Italian government jet.

A mafioso in his butcher’s shop near Falcone’s apartment in Palermo reported that the judge’s armored sedan and two escort cars had left for the airport.

At the airport, a mafioso watched the plane land. Then he fell in behind Falcone’s motorcade as it left the airport, talking for nearly six minutes on his portable phone to the two killers on the hill.

Antonio Gioe smoked; Giovanni Brusca held the remote control. When the lead car of the motorcade crossed the culvert, investigators say, Brusca, who is still at large, pushed the button.

In the aftermath, FBI investigators immediately joined national police and members of Italy’s elite anti-Mafia force, the DIA.

As an investigation that still has gaps to fill began to focus initially, police arrested Gioe: It was his DNA on the cigarette butts from the hillside. On July 30, Gioe, 37, was found hanging in his cell in a Rome jail--a suicide, police say.

By then, Mario Santo di Matteo, leader of the Altonfonte clan in Palermo, was also in jail, having been named by a Mafia turncoat as a possible conspirator in the killing.

Three weeks ago, the 39-year-old Santo di Matteo confessed to having helped plan the Falcone killing.

He recited chapter and verse, naming participants and their roles.

Painstakingly, the DIA reconstructed the chain of cellular calls that began as Falcone left Rome for an intended weekend at home, and ended with a 25-second message, “Mission accomplished.”