All Blog Posts Tagged 'Corleonesi' (20)

By David Amoruso

A secret pact between the Sicilian Mafia and the Italian State has resulted in the conviction of eight men, including Mafia bosses and police and government officials, among them a close political associate of Silvio Berlusconi. The pact was made in the 1990s to bring a halt to Cosa Nostra’s bloody war…

By David Amoruso

He was the boss of bosses of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia. As leader of the infamous Corleonesi, Salvatore "Toto" Riina ordered the death of hundreds, including the high-profile assassinations of anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Now he is dead himself, at age 87, of natural causes.

Riina had turned 87 on…

By Thom L. Jones

The media called them raggazzi di una stagione ‘straordinaria: “The boys of an extraordinary season.”

Beppe Montana and Calogero Zucchetto and Pippo Giordano and Roberto Antiochia and Natale Mondo and Ninni Cassarà and the rest of the Squadra Mobile, the Flying Squad. They knew what they had to do and lived their lives doing…

By Thom L. Jones

Sometimes, history makes us remember and then, at times, helps us to forget.

It’s easy to recall the first iPhone that was launched in 2007 and would come to change everything we have ever known about personal communication. Mention a judge who was blown up by the Mafia in 1983, and eyes glaze and heads shake and no one…

By Thom L. Jones

If you Google ‘Mafia’ you will get 163,000,000 hits.

If you Google ‘Cosa Nostra’ you will get 5,280,000 hits.

In 1950 the Mafia did not exist, publicly that is. Sicily knew about it, but even then, to the…

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Cosa Nostra boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano was laid to rest today in a cemetery in Corleone, Italy, his…

By David Amoruso

Sicilian Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano passed away at age 83, sources told Italian news agency ANSA today. Considered Cosa Nostra’s boss of bosses, Provenzano spent 43 years on the run before finally being caught in 2006. He was…

By Thom L. Jones

These are murderers who killed a man, killed a thought, a hope, a way of being, the very idea of humanity.

- Lorenzo Matassa. Public Prosecutor. Court of Palermo, February 23rd, 1998.

In the early 1990s, a courageous Catholic priest, Giuseppe 'Pino' Puglisi, took over…

By David Amoruso

Tommaso Buscetta was the first boss of the Sicilian Mafia to break omerta and tell authorities (almost) all he knew about the secretive criminal brotherhood. Now, Italian filmmakers will produce a big-budget film to tell the story of his life and how he became The Traitor.

That, by the way, is also the movie’s…

By David Amoruso

Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, the son of Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the former boss of bosses of the Sicilian Mafia, is causing outrage in Italy this week with the release and promotion of his book Riina Family Life. While calling his father a “hero,” he refuses to discuss Cosa Nostra or his father’s murderous acts, which caused…

By David Amoruso

Vincenzo Bontà, the son-in-law of Sicilian Mafioso Giovanni Bontade, was shot dead in Palermo yesterday. Bontà (45) was killed along with 53-year-old Giuseppe Vella. The pair was murdered in a very narrow part of the Via Falsomiele in Palermo, leaving them no chance to escape. Two suspects have been arrested by…

By Thom L. Jones

The photograph has been appearing for over thirty years. It is one of the most iconic and yet at the same time, distorted images of what the Sicilian Mafia is about: Control by force. It is almost always headed a Mafia killing in Corleone. This is the misrepresentation. The act of violence occurred, in fact, in a suburb of Palermo.

It has appeared in…

By Thom L. Jones

Italians know Corleone as a small, inland town of about 12000 inhabitants, situated in the highlands of Western Sicily, approximately mid-way between Palermo and Agrigento.

We mostly know Corleone as the name of a fictitious Mafia boss-Don Corleone- the central character in Mario Puzo's 1969 novel The Godfather. Although…

By David Amoruso

Are Italian authorities too harsh on imprisoned Cosa Nostra boss Bernardo Provenzano? His lawyer and family say yes. In video clips aired by Michele Santoro’s Servizio pubblico, or public affairs program, on television network LA7, viewers see an old and vulnerable Provenzano, who is unable even to use the prison…

By Thom L. Jones

I imagine a scene, long ago, in the town of Corleone, in the heartland of Western Sicily.

I see Doctor Michele Navarra (right). A classic valetudinarian; a sensitive and haunted expression playing across his features. The face of a man who had sold his soul to the Mafia and the devil for an excellent price, as English author Norman Lewis…

By Thom L. Jones

In his government photograph, Antonino Burrafato (photo, below right) has something of the look of actor Jon Cryer, wearing a uniform and a funny hat. His lips are pursed as though he is about to ask the man behind the camera to get on with it. The eyes are steely and piercing, someone who does not suffer fools gladly. He looks more like a Jefe than simply a…

Part One - Part Two - Part Three



By Thom L. Jones



Following Leggio’s acquittal in the second trial, although he was subject to…