All Blog Posts Tagged 'Corleonesi' (25)

By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.              

“You never know what enough is unless you know what is more than enough.” - William Blake     

It’s a story with more twists and turns than a novel by Agatha Christie. A list of…

This is part 2 of Five Minutes to Midnight. Read part 1 here.

By Thom L. Jones for…

By David Amoruso

A Sicilian Mafioso, who in the 1990s decided to testify against his Cosa Nostra colleagues, was shot to death on Tuesday evening in a parking lot in Chiavari, a city in Northern Italy. 70-year-old Pino Orazio was allegedly killed by a bullet to the neck fired from close range.

Orazio was known to…

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

The film Il Traditore (The Traitor) detailing the life of Sicilian Mafia boss-turned-snitch Tommaso Buscetta has been selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival on May 14-25, the event’s organization announced on Thursday.

Directed by Marco Bellocchio,…

By Thom L. Jones

"By knowing the men of honor, I have learned ……..that Mafia logic is the logic of power, and it always works towards a purpose. Sometimes those Mafiosi strike me as the only rational beings in the world populated by madmen." - Giovanni Falcone to Marcello Padovani

"You’re the Maradona of the law:…

This is part 2 of Three good men and their fight to the death against the Sicilian Mafia: Giovanni Falcone. To read part 1 click here.

By Thom L.…

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…