Corleonesi - Blog 2.0 - Gangsters Inc. - www.gangstersinc.org
2024-03-28T16:25:02Z
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Sicilian Mafia snitch shot dead in parking lot – Testified against Catania’s notorious Santapaola Clan in 1990s
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-snitch-shot-dead-in-parking-lot-testified-against
2019-04-24T14:24:21.000Z
2019-04-24T14:24:21.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-snitch-shot-dead-in-parking-lot-testified-against" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237131873,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237131873?profile=original" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Orazio was known to park his car there frequently, which leads authorities to believe his killer was waiting for him. The spot is near Orazio’s jewelry business Isola Preziosa, which he ran with his wife and daughters and started in 2009 after he decided to leave the witness protection program.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>A Mafia war and testifying about it</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236979466,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236979466?profile=original" /></a>He had enjoyed the program’s protection ever since he had become a witness against the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Mafia</a> in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Catania" target="_blank">Catania</a>, Sicily, in the 1990s. The area was under the control of infamous mob boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-benedetto" target="_blank">Benedetto “Nitto” Santapaola</a> (right), who had forged close ties to the Corleonesi run by <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-boss-toto-riina-dead-at-87" target="_blank">Toto Riina</a> and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-of-bosses-bernardo-provenzano-dead-at-83" target="_blank">Bernardo Provenzano</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-search-of-the-corleonesi-how-the-mafia-changed-forever" target="_blank"><strong>In search of the Corleonesi: How the Mafia changed forever</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Santapaola was arrested in 1993 after 11 years as a fugitive and was sentenced to life for a long list of crime, which included the murders of General Dalla Chiesa, and anti-Mafia judges <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/three-good-men-and-their-fight-to-the-death-against-the-sicilian" target="_blank">Giovanni Falcone</a> and Paolo Borsellino. In his absence, his family fought a violent war for control of the area against the Cappello and Mazzeo clans, causing hundreds to die.</p>
<p>It was Orazio who at this time decided to become a pentito, a government witness, and help police piece together the puzzle of violence and destruction brought on by the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=War" target="_blank">Mafia war</a>.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Questions about motive</strong></span></p>
<p>Though his murder on Tuesday evening has all the earmarks of a Mafia hit, investigators feel there could be other motives behind the killing. As the owner of a jewelry shop this could’ve been a robbery gone bad. Resentment within his own family could also be a reasoning for his death, they say. Then there is the business angle as well. In March of 2018, a former business partner accused him of stealing jewelry from him.</p>
<p>Further complicating things, is that no shell casings were found. Police can thus not exclude the use of another murder weapon, like a knife or an ice pick. To know more they are currently watching footage of security cameras nearby.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Mafia turncoats under deadly threat</strong></span><br /> <br /> The fact remains that a Mafia snitch was killed. And in recent years more and more have been found dead. Last year on Christmas Day, the brother of a ‘<a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Ndrangheta" target="_blank">Ndrangheta</a> turncoat was <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/brother-of-mafia-snitch-was-murdered-after-he-had-asked-to-be-rem" target="_blank">riddled with bullets</a> by hitmen.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/ndrangheta-rat-recants-testimony-then-disappears" target="_blank"><strong>‘Ndrangheta Rat Recants Testimony, Then Disappears</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Italy’s witness protection program is facing increasing problems. With the country’s economy going through hard times, far-right deputy prime minister and interior minister Matteo Salvini said in March that his ministry would review the budget and spending on police protection for those threatened by the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mafia" target="_blank">Mafia</a>.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>“We are dead men walking”</strong></span></p>
<p>“Ignazio Cutrò, a Sicilian businessman and president of the National Association of State Witnesses, received numerous threats, including torched cars and packages containing bullets, after agreeing to testify against suspected extortionists and entering witness protection. Despite the intimidation, last year protection for him and his family was revoked,” journalist Lorenzo Tondo wrote in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/17/italian-state-betrayed-me-life-after-turning-mafia-informant-witnesses-protection" target="_blank">The Guardian</a> about the damage budget cuts are doing to Italy’s witness protection program.</p>
<p>“Italy is pushing people to rebel against the mafia,” Cutrò <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/17/italian-state-betrayed-me-life-after-turning-mafia-informant-witnesses-protection" target="_blank">tells him</a>. “But when the state gets what it wants, it abandons them. We are a bunch of dead men walking.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Sicilian Mafia section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
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Film detailing life of Mafia snitch Tommaso Buscetta competes for the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/film-detailing-life-of-mafia-snitch-tommaso-buscetta-competes-for
2019-04-19T08:16:31.000Z
2019-04-19T08:16:31.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/film-detailing-life-of-mafia-snitch-tommaso-buscetta-competes-for" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237120270,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237120270?profile=original" /></a>By Gangsters Inc. Editors</p>
<p>The film <em>Il Traditore</em> (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.</p>
<p>Directed by Marco Bellocchio, <em>Il Traditore</em> deals with <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Cosa Nostra</a>’s most volatile period in which the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Corleonesi" target="_blank">Corleonesi</a>, led by <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Riina" target="_blank">Toto Riina</a>, seized control of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mafia" target="_blank">Mafia</a> and wiped out the competition, which included Mafia leader <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Buscetta" target="_blank">Tommaso Buscetta</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: Basta!</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/basta-how-sicily-s-antimafia-movement-is-successfully-standing-up" target="_blank"><strong>How Sicily’s Antimafia movement successfully fights Cosa Nostra</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Buscetta is played by actor Pierfrancesco Favino, who audiences may know from his roles in <em>Marco Polo</em>, <em>Angels and Demons</em>, and as a Rome crime boss in <em>Romanzo Criminale</em>.</p>
<p>“Tommaso Buscetta is a very complex character,” Bellocchio told Italian news agency <a href="http://www.ansa.it/" target="_blank">ANSA</a>. “I tried to make an open film and his betrayal, too, must be seen in this light. Strangely, it is a very personal film and at the same time objective.”</p>
<p><strong>Watch the teaser trailer for <em>Il Traditore</em> (The Traitor) below:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AcbIieh9l-M?wmode=opaque" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Sicilian Mafia section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
<p> </p></div>
Sicilian Mafia boss Toto Riina dead at 87
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-boss-toto-riina-dead-at-87
2017-11-17T07:00:00.000Z
2017-11-17T07:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-boss-toto-riina-dead-at-87" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237096270,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237096270?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Riina had turned 87 on Thursday, but had been in a coma for several days after two surgeries. He passed away at 3:37 a.m. at a prison hospital in Parma, Italy. He was serving multiple life sentences for a long list of heinous Mafia crimes and murders, most of which he committed while a wanted man by authorities. He was finally apprehended in 1993, after 24 years on the run.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/three-good-men-life-and-death-in-sicily-fighting-the-mafia" target="_blank">Three Good Men</a>: Life and Death Fighting the Sicilian Mafia</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>As a result of his vicious war against the Italian state, Riina caused a crackdown on <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Cosa Nostra</a>, with more police scrutiny and tougher prison sentences for Mafiosi. This included the 41-bis regime, which puts those with a high-ranking position in organized crime under a maximum-security environment designed to cut them off from associates on the outside to prevent them from exercising their power and influence.</p>
<p>It did nothing to temper Riina’s murderous attitude. In <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-boss-toto-riina-prosecutors-have-to-die" target="_blank">conversations recorded</a> by prison officials in November of 2013, he was overheard threatening the lives of prosecutors involved in the upcoming <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mafia-state-trial-exposes-italy-s-corrupt-political-system" target="_blank">Mafia-State trial</a>, which charged him with murders and Mafia crimes. “[He] shall die and all the prosecutors of the negotiation [trial] with him,” Riina said. “They're driving me crazy. They have to die, even if it's the last thing I do.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/to-kill-a-dream-the-sicilian-mafia-and-the-murder-of-a-priest" target="_blank">To Kill a Dream</a>: The Mafia and the Murder of a Priest</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Instead, more charges were added to his indictment. And his stay in prison was made a bit stricter than it already was.</p>
<p>Riina’s rise in the Sicilian Mafia came under the tutelage of Luciano Leggio, his mentor and boss of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-search-of-the-corleonesi-how-the-mafia-changed-forever" target="_blank">Corleonesi</a>. After Leggio was imprisoned in 1974, Riina, together with his longtime right-hand <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-of-bosses-bernardo-provenzano-dead-at-83" target="_blank">Bernardo Provenzano,</a> tore apart the established order in the underworld of the island to place his clan at the pinnacle of power and establish himself as the boss of bosses of Cosa Nostra. </p>
<p>Of these three blood-thirsty men, Riina is the last to pass. Leggio died in 1993 at age 68. <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-of-bosses-bernardo-provenzano-dead-at-83" target="_blank">Provenzano died</a> in July of 2016 at age 83. Seeing the death and destruction he set in motion not many will shed a tear for his passing. “The Beast” is gone.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Sicilian Mafia section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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Cosa Nostra boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano dead at 83
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-of-bosses-bernardo-provenzano-dead-at-83
2016-07-13T15:49:40.000Z
2016-07-13T15:49:40.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-of-bosses-bernardo-provenzano-dead-at-83"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237076268,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237076268?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Sicilian Mafia boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-bernardo">Bernardo Provenzano</a> 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 serving life in prison for various Mafia crimes including the murders of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.</p>
<p>Good things come to those who wait. And waiting they did. Situated on a mountain in the Sicilian countryside near the village of Corleone, several men were patiently and intently watching a sheep farm below them. Their eyes focused for that one sign. A sign of life. The men were members of an Italian police unit tasked with finding Provenzano, the man who had become a myth and legend. He had also become a ghost. He had vanished into thin air on September 18, 1963.</p>
<p>Together with his boss Luciano Leggio and his brother-in-arms Salvatore Riina, Provenzano had seized control of the Mafia in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Corleone">Corleone</a>, a town in the Palermo province of Sicily made infamous by Mario Puzo’s The Godfather only a few years after his disappearance. Though the fictional brutality of The Godfather in no way accurately portrayed the vicious violence Leggio, Riina, and Provenzano would bring upon not just Corleone and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Sicily">Sicily</a>, but the whole of Italy. Leggio and Riina were the most blood-thirsty. Under their rule the so-called <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-search-of-the-corleonesi-how-the-mafia-changed-forever">Corleonesi</a> seized power of the country’s underworld, leaving a trail of hundreds of dead bodies and an ambiance of fear. The Corleonesi could not be seen. They <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-s-viale-lazio-massacre">appeared</a>, murdered their victim, and vanished. Rival Mafiosi were scared to their bones. They could not comprehend the bloody game of chess in which they were being wiped off the board. The <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-search-of-the-corleonesi-how-the-mafia-changed-forever">Corleonesi</a> were a step ahead at every turn. And Bernardo Provenzano was an integral part of it.</p>
<p>After Riina and his cohorts were caught and sent to prison, Provenzano took control and immediately set about a change in policy. The constant violence had weakened the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Mafia</a>. Murdering Mafiosi, politicians, judges, journalists, policemen, and innocents had done nothing to increase the organization’s power. Rather, it had created a cry for change, of public outrage, of opposition against <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Cosa Nostra</a>.</p>
<p>Though Provenzano was well-versed in the violent ways of mob life - he got his nickname “The Tractor” because he was so proficient at <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-s-viale-lazio-massacre">mowing people down</a>, and his boss once said: “He shoots like an angel but has the brains of a chicken” - after taking over for Riina he showed he did in fact have the brains after all. He ceased the war against the Italian state and took Cosa Nostra back into the shadows, back into the business of making money.</p>
<p>It was the mid-1990s now and he had been on the run for over thirty years. He was running a multi-billion dollar industry of both illegitimate and legitimate businesses with thousands of people at his disposal. Yet the only thing authorities had of him was a photo made in 1959.</p>
<p>Rumors were flying wild. People claiming he was dead and that the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mafia">Mafia</a> used his name to send police on a wild goose chase while others said that he was living the high-life in some exotic location. Wherever he was, he seemed to have gotten away with it.</p>
<p>Still, a bunch of dedicated policemen did not agree. They were chasing what at times actually seemed like a ghost, but a ghost does not leave traces, does not leave signs of life, and this ghost did. Men took orders via small hand-written notes passed along by other trusted men. The notes involved Men of Honor, Mafiosi, and the affairs of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Cosa Nostra</a>. It was clear that the ghost was not dead. Not by a long shot. He was just hidden. And they were about to find his hiding spot.</p>
<p>As the years went by Italian authorities had continued to scrape away at <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-bernardo">Provenzano</a>’s power, arresting several of his most trusted lieutenants and creating valuable sources of information in the process. As a result, Provenzano had to switch tactics and people to stay ahead of the law. With most of his Mafia underlings in prison, he had to rely on his own blood, his wife, sons, brothers, nephews. He depended on them for all his needs. One of those needs was getting his dirty laundry cleaned. Not the illegal money type of dirty laundry, but actual dirty laundry: underwear, socks, etc. He needed food, and was particular about it. And he needed a lot of other things. He was driving his family up the wall with his needs and specific requests.</p>
<p>As his family got restless with their notorious relative back near his old stomping grounds, authorities were watching and listening, trying to pick up on any clues that would give away the location of the elusive boss. As they followed the comings and goings of Provenzano’s wife, sons, nephew, agents noticed some interesting things. Like how packages that seem to contain clothing are moved around between various people. People who normally would not be bringing each other such packages. As agents followed the packages they ran into difficulties as the man they tried to follow was extremely cautious. Another problem was the terrain. The man took a drive into the mountains near Corleone, making it almost impossible to keep eyes on him without being seen. But good things come to those who wait. Once they found a point in the mountains that gave them a good overview of the area in which their deliveryman drove his car they found their final destination: a sheep farm.</p>
<p>As they watched the sheep farm they saw several packages being delivered every couple of days. There was something strange going on. Now all they needed was a sign that someone who was not supposed to be living there was hiding out somewhere on the premises. The owner of the farm was seen standing in front of a hut talking to someone. He would also bring food and packages inside. But it wasn’t until agents noticed an arm reaching outside the door that they knew someone was inside. After that agents rushed to the cottage, barging through the door, where they came face to face with a ghost of flesh and blood, a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boss">boss of bosses</a>.</p>
<p>Bernardo Provenzano was startled, but quickly regained composure. An agent filmed the raid, in it Provenzano is filmed looking up at his captors. “You don’t know what you are doing,” he cryptically told the agents as they searched the cottage that served as home to the most powerful mafia boss in the world. Surrounded by rotting food, smelly laundry, and with little comfort and hardly any freedom, Provenzano had effectively been living in jail already. All for the good of Cosa Nostra.</p>
<p>In prison he was incarcerated under the 41-bis regime, which is reserved for Italy's most dangerous criminals. His family worried it was <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/italian-prison-too-tough-on-mafia-boss-provenzano">too much for the elderly Mafia boss</a> as he began showing signs of health problems. It was later reported he suffered from Parkinson's disease.</p>
<p>Provenzano’s death marks the end of a life dedicated to death and destruction. Few bosses have devoted every second of their life to Cosa Nostra, but <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-bernardo">Provenzano</a> has done his utmost best to do exactly that. His wife and children came second. His personal life as well. His health and personal comfort did not matter either. His life was about “the life.”</p>
<p>Now that he has passed away, he leaves behind nothing but blood and sorrow. Though his actions later in life may have prevented further bloodshed, they do not erase or make light of his violent past.</p>
<p>As a religious man, Provenzano now faces his maker, no doubt realizing that he wasted his life, devoting each day to deeds that can only be considered the purest of evil.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Sicilian Mafia section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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Mafia traitor Tommaso Buscetta’s life story to hit big screen
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/mafia-traitor-tommaso-buscetta-s-life-story-to-hit-big-screen
2016-05-18T12:00:00.000Z
2016-05-18T12:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mafia-traitor-tommaso-buscetta-s-life-story-to-hit-big-screen"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237069886,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237069886?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>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 <em>The Traitor</em>.</p>
<p>That, by the way, is also the movie’s working title. “The Traitor” will be a high-profile project with shooting taking place across the world in Italy, Brazil, and the United States. Italian director <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0069166/" target="_blank">Marco Bellocchio</a> will pen the screenplay.</p>
<p>“I am interested in Buscetta’s character because he is a traitor,” Bellocchio told <a href="http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/italian-auteur-marco-bellocchio-to-make-biopic-about-tommaso-buscetta-cosas-nostras-first-turncoat-1201776756/" target="_blank">Variety</a>. But, he added, in actuality it wasn’t Buscetta who betrayed the ‘sacred’ principles of Cosa Nostra. “It was [then Cosa Nostra boss] <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-boss-toto-riina-prosecutors-have-to-die">Totò Riina</a> and the Corleonesi Clan.”</p>
<p>This view is one that argues there was a gentle, kind, and respectful version of Cosa Nostra before the vicious Riina seized control. Many would disagree with that view, but it is one many screenwriters and moviemakers have adapted when creating a film about the Mafia as it is a storyline that strikes a chord with the audience.</p>
<p>It is also the view of Buscetta himself. “Today, the Mafia takes from everybody and gives nothing back,” he testified. “It exists only for the personal benefit of its members. Its members care nothing for the needs of anyone but themselves. […] I have seen so many changes in the organization that I no longer feel bound by the code of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-sound-of-silence-how-the-mafia-in-sicily-communicates">omerta</a> or silence.”</p>
<p>In reality, Cosa Nostra had always been a violent, vicious and predatory organization. One that ruled the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-travel-guide-reveals-island-s-underworld">Sicilian island</a> by fear and intimidation. The only thing that changed was that when Toto Riina and his Corleonesi took over in the 1970s, several other Mafia families lost power and influence. Though they claimed theirs was a gentler Mafia, it was nothing more than a media campaign by those that were on the losing end of the game they themselves have played for so many decades.</p>
<p>Among those “losers” was boss Tommaso Buscetta. After he fled to South America to evade Corleonesi hitmen, he was arrested by authorities and deported back to Italy. To escape his hopeless situation, he tried to commit suicide in his cell. When he woke up, realizing he had failed, he decided to cooperate with prosecutors and destroy his enemies in the mob from the other side.</p>
<p>Working closely with anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone he set about detailing Cosa Nostra’s structure, history, bosses and members, its politics, and how it makes its money.</p>
<p>His testimony led to the conviction of 435 bosses and members of Sicilian Cosa Nostra in the Maxi-Trials and 35 Mafiosi in the American <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-the-sicilian-mafia-flooded">Pizza Connection trial</a> busting a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-the-sicilian-mafia-flooded">billion-dollar heroin pipeline</a> as a result.</p>
<p>After his successful cooperation he was granted U.S. citizenship and a place in the country’s Witness Protection Program. In 2000, he died at age 71 of natural causes at an unknown location somewhere in the United States.</p>
<p>His surviving relatives have approved the making of this film, <a href="http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/italian-auteur-marco-bellocchio-to-make-biopic-about-tommaso-buscetta-cosas-nostras-first-turncoat-1201776756/" target="_blank">Variety</a> reports. “It will be based on extensive research done by a team of journalists, testimony from people who knew him, and material in Italian archives.”</p>
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Killed Cosa Nostra mobster’s son-in-law also whacked in hit
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/killed-cosa-nostra-mobster-s-son-in-law-also-whacked-in-hit
2016-03-04T18:30:00.000Z
2016-03-04T18:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/killed-cosa-nostra-mobster-s-son-in-law-also-whacked-in-hit"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237055683,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237055683?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>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 police.</p>
<p>Bontà was married to Daniela Bontade, daughter of the late lawyer and Cosa Nostra leader Giovanni Bontade, who himself came from illustrious crime family lineage with a mob boss father and brother who rose to incredible power in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Sicilian Mafia</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237056273,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237056273?profile=original" width="176" /></a>His brother, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-stefano">Stefano</a>, was seen as Cosa Nostra’s crown prince before he was <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/photo/1981-murder-of-cosa-nostra?context=album&albumId=6329524%3AAlbum%3A576">murdered in 1981</a> by <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-salvatore">Toto Riina</a>’s <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-search-of-the-corleonesi-how-the-mafia-changed-forever">Corleonesi</a>. Giovanni Bontade sided with Riina’s Corleonesi so that he could take <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-stefano">his brother</a>’s place, but was killed himself in a mob hit seven years later together with his wife in September 28, 1988. The man who murdered him, Pietro Aglieri, eventually took over as boss of the Santa Maria di Gesù crime family.</p>
<p>Though <a href="http://palermo.blogsicilia.it/disperazione-sul-luogo-del-delitto-era-buono-non-doveva-morire-cosi/328195/immagine/vincenzo-bonta-3/" target="_blank">Bontà</a> and Vella had no criminal records, authorities were initially treating this as a Mafia hit because of Bontà’s Mafia connections and also because either Bontà or Vella was “executed” with a shot to the head region. The area where they were killed was described by police as a Mafia stronghold.</p>
<p>As always with Mafia violence, there is only dread and sorrow. Not only did Daniela lose her father and mother and her uncle, now, she has also lost her husband. Their children their father. On the other end of the spectrum are all of the Mafia’s victims: Citizens, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mafia-attacks-shopkeeper-in-palermo-for-refusal-to-pay">shopkeepers</a>, innocent bystanders.</p>
<p>The Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, Francesco Lo Voi, also wanted to alert the press and public to Cosa Nostra’s resilience. “Cosa Nostra is still alive,” he told reporters. “Unfortunately we have to record the permanent vitality of the Mafia and organizations operating in the area. I repeat once again: If anyone thinks that the Mafia has been defeated, and everything is over, obviously, they did not understand anything yet.”</p>
<p>Yet, when police followed all their leads, they concluded there was no Mafia link. Today, <a href="http://www.ansa.it/english/news/2016/03/04/cops-arrest-couple-in-double-palermo-hit_351dab33-1781-4454-ba22-e5a132d0cdd1.html" target="_blank">ANSA</a> reported that, "Late on Thursday the flying squad arrested 52-year-old city surveyor in charge of graveyards Carlo Gregoli and his spouse Adele Velardo, 45, a housewife. Investigators say they have security camera footage of the couple's Toyota SUV at the scene of the crime and a statement from an eyewitness, as well as evidence they fired with two different weapons. The couple has denied all involvement, but it is believed the motive may have been a quarrel between the suspects and Bonta', who was their neighbor."</p>
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Italian Prison Too Tough On Mafia Boss Provenzano?
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/italian-prison-too-tough-on-mafia-boss-provenzano
2013-05-21T11:43:40.000Z
2013-05-21T11:43:40.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/italian-prison-too-tough-on-mafia-boss-provenzano"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237018883,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237018883?profile=original" width="524" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>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 telephone.</p>
<p>Provenzano is credited with bringing the Sicilian Mafia back to power after its power had crumbled under the leadership of Salvatore Riina. He did so while in hiding and spent forty-three years evading authorities and escaping justice until his capture in 2006.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237018673,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237018673,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237018673?profile=original" width="320" /></a>After his arrest in 2006, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-bernardo">Provenzano</a> began serving life under the 41-bis maximum security regime in a prison in the city of Parma in the north of Italy (right). This prison regime was one of the reasons Provenzano’s predecessor <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-salvatore">Salvatore “Toto” Riina</a> decided to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mafia-state-trial-exposes-italy-s-corrupt-political-system">wage war</a> on the Italian state.</p>
<p>The video clips, taken from surveillance cameras inside Parma prison, come a month after a request by Provenzano’s lawyer Rosalba Di Gregorio for his immediate release from the harsh regime on health grounds was denied. According to his family the video proves their father and husband is not treated well and is in need of better care.</p>
<p>Provenzano’s frail health has been a recurring topic. A year ago, the imprisoned mob boss tried to commit suicide by placing a plastic bag over his head. Prison authorities claimed the attempt was part of an elaborate plot of the Mafioso to try and make himself look insane. And in December of last year, he needed surgery to reduce bleeding on his brain caused by a fall.</p>
<p>Check out the video below and see how the most powerful mafia boss in the world is faring behind bars:</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UYhwA6xnK10?wmode=opaque" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
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La Primula Rossa: The Story of Luciano Leggio (Part 3)
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-2
2011-03-05T09:30:00.000Z
2011-03-05T09:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-2"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006468?profile=original" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of">Part One</a> - <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-1">Part Two</a> - <strong>Part Three</strong><br /> <br /> By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> Following Leggio’s acquittal in the second trial, although he was subject to re-arrest to face other outstanding charges, the Attorney General in Palermo, Scaglione himself, had ruled this could only take place in Corleone. As he had no intention of ever returning there, Leggio’s freedom seemed guaranteed. He entered a number of private clinics on the mainland, ending up in Rome, and when it was time to leave, a Cadillac, supplied by Frank Coppola turned up to drive him off.<br /> <br /> Leaving the Romana di Bracci clinic, he made a visit to a lawyer. <br /> <br /> Journalist Mario Francese, in an article published in <em>Giornale di Sicilia</em> on March 10th, 1974, claimed that Leggio went to the law office of Salvatore Albano, in Rome, where he had drawn up a special power of attorney in favour of his older sister, Maria Antonina, allowing her almost a free hand in administering his estate and assets.<br /> <br /> The notorious lawyer and Leggio had worked together since the 1960s. Albano also represented Frank Coppola and Giulio Andreotti, the most famous of Italian politicians, who was arrested and tried twice for complicity in cases regarding the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Leggio surfaced a few weeks later at Cinisi near Palermo, living under the protection of Don Tano Badalamenti, the capo of the local cosca. He had courted a woman from Corleone when he was young, a woman whose family was close to that of Leggio’s. So, they had been connected through both of their families-biological and crime-for a number of years.<br /> <br /> After a period of some weeks, Leggio then moved east across the island to the province of Catania, where he stayed in hiding in a two story villa in Via Morgioni in the hills above San Giovani La Punta. The house he rented was only a short distance from the local carabinieri barracks. As in Corleone, four years before, he seemed to enjoy the risk or perhaps the challenge of living almost under the noses of the very people charge with his capture and arrest. <br /> <br /> He was joined there for a time, by Riina along with Bernardo Provenzano who was also on the run from the law. The Calderone brothers, head of the Catania cosca, organized papers for Leggio and Provenzano, in the names of Antonio and Giuseppe Farrugia. Leggio was using this identity when he was finally caught by the police in Milan, three years later. Although he was thirty-seven at this time, Provenzano could not drive, and had to commute between Catania and Palermo by train.<br /> <br /> Ironically, the two men claimed to be butchers by profession. They were probably two of the three biggest, in the history of the Mafia. <br /> <br /> In July 1971, two months after he probably shot Judge Scaglione, the short, stocky man with the limp, moved across to the mainland and settled in Milan. Pippo Calderone the capo of the local Mafia family in Catania, was under police surveillance, and it was certain that eventually they would have tracked him to the house in San Giovanni. It was time for Leggio to move on.<br /> <br /> In this period, he was operating his crime family through both Riina and Provenzano, two killers who were every bit as ruthless and deadly as he was. In a meeting with the two men in Catania, he had made the decision to appoint Riina as his regent, to arbitrate on his behalf when he was unable to attend commission meetings. <br /> <br /> By this time, the Mafia commission, perhaps set up sometime following a mob meeting at the Hotel des Palmes in Palermo in 1957, and made up of the representatives of the major families on the island, had laid down an edict that kidnappings were out of bounds.<br /> <br /> It’s more than probable in fact that in Palermo at least, going back to the end of the 19th century, there had been some formalized system to control continuity between the various cosche, a governing body of some description. This was according to evidence presented at the Court of Catanzaro. <br /> <br /> In January 1897, the eight Mafia families of the Palermo region convened in a meeting headed by Malaspina cosca boss, Francesco Siino. Unresolved matters lead to an inter-family war that went on until 1900. Siino became one of the causalities and was shot and wounded. <br /> <br /> Ermanno Sangiorgi, the Palermo chief of police, persuaded Siino to become a <em>pentito</em>, only the second Mafioso in Sicily to have turned informant, after Salvatore D’Amico, a member of the <em>Stuppaggheri</em> sect of Monreale. He was the first ever to disclose intimate details of the organization, naming structure, ranks from boss down to soldier and his testimony generated an investigation resulting in the arrest and trial of 19 members of the clan. For his help in unveiling the secret society, he was murdered in Bagheria, in 1878.<br /> <br /> Irrespective of when and how the commission started, its members decided that people who were rich enough to justify the risks in terms of kidnappings, were also often politically placed in positions of power that caused the act to be counter-productive to the political strategy of the Mafia. But kidnappings were a great source of income for the Corleonesi, now badly lacking funds. They had financed a number of costly trials, and lawyer’s fees and the usual bribes had dug deep into their reserves. <br /> <br /> So Luciano Leggio got involved in kidnappings on the Continent.<br /> <br /> Between 1961 and 1972, 372 known Mafiosi moved to Milan, or operated between the largest city in Italy and Sicily. He was one of them.<br /> <br /> From the time he moved to the mainland in 1971 and his arrest there in Milan, in 1974, information on his movements and activities is fragmented and at times, vague. Almost all of it comes to us from informants. There is evidence that through a nominee, Antonio Quartararo, that he purchased a citrus grove, Vaccarizzo, in Catania and had constructed a two-story, 400 square metre house, which had a built-in storage cell, intended to hold kidnap victims.<br /> <br /> When he first arrived in Milan he stayed at Via Steniti 6, living under the protection of Francis Turatello, aka <em>Faccia d'Angelo</em>-Angel Face-a member of the ‘New Camorra’ in Naples. Turatello’s name goes down in mob history as surely the only one who was murdered in prison (in 1981) and then disemboweled by his killer, Catania Mafioso Antonino Faro, who proceeded to eat his liver. Faro a five-times killer by the age of 28, killed Turatello under the orders of Camorrista Pasquale Barra, who in turn was following the orders of the ‘New Camorra’ boss Rafaele Cutolo. The murder created a major rift between Sicily and Naples as not only was Turatello the godson of Frank Coppola, he was personally appointed by Leggio to supervise the Corleone’s drug business in Milan.<br /> <br /> In 1971, Leggio held a council meeting at his apartment with Tommaso Buscetta, Gaetano Badalmenti and Geraldo Albertini. On the agenda were a number of items, including the development of the family’s drug-trafficking business. <br /> <br /> Other meetings with mob associates were held regularly in a restaurant and wine bar he co-owned in the Via Giambellino. Later in the year he held another sit-down meeting, this time attended by Salvatore Riina, Vincenzo Arena, Giuseppe Taormina and Salvatore Gambino. This was mainly about setting territorial boundaries in the kidnapping business he was developing. There were more meetings, including one attended by Riina, Salvatore Enea, the Bono brothers, Gerlando Alberti, Francesco Scaglione and Vincent Arena. These meetings were tracked through the use of informants, by Colonel Giuseppe Russo, a carabinieri specialist in organized crime, who would be murdered by the Mafia in 1977, while holidaying with his wife and child in the resort of Ficuzza, near Corleone.<br /> <br /> Leggio, Turatello, and other Catania mobsters, formed a gang based upon, and referred to by law enforcement, as <em>Anonima Sequestri</em> literally ‘Anonymous Kidnappers.’ Originally a Sardinian phenomenon, it had been transported to the mainland and adopted by Camorra gangsters. The Naples based version of the Sicilian Mafia may well have begun in Sardinia, in a prison in Cagliari, a port on the island, in 1200, and imported into Naples at some later time. <br /> <br /> Lombardy became the kidnapping capital of Italy. Between 1969 and 1999 there were 672 kidnappings registered by the police in the country and 158 took place in and around Milan.<br /> <br /> One of the most famous Leggio helped to architect was the abduction of the young John Paul Getty III in 1973. He was held for months in Calabria, before his tightwad grandfather coughed up the $3 million ransom after he got an ear in the mail. <br /> <br /> By this time, Leggio had been convicted by the court of appeals in Bari, in Calabria, for not committing a murder.<br /> <br /> In the strange and perverse Italian judicial system, in December 1970, he was convicted-in abstenia-of murdering Doctor Michele Navarra back in 1958. There had been no new evidence introduced to inculpate him, but he was found guilty because no crimes of the Mafia type had been committed in Corleone since his arrest in 1964.<br /> <br /> He was given a life sentence because ‘Leggio’s sinister personality had been clear in the proceedings (the trial), and the fact that he is a Capo beyond any reasonable doubt.’ <br /> <br /> In fact, the only tangible evidence that linked him to the killing was a reflector that broke off the Alfa 1900 during the shoot-out, and was found at the scene by investigators. And even this was suspect, as there was a strong possibility that the original fragments had been replaced to throw doubt on the court exhibit.<br /> <br /> The Supreme Court of Italy upheld the verdict. It was a finding based on shifting sands and broken mirrors, but it was the only way the judiciary could figure out how to lock down Leggio, a man who had evaded the law for over twenty years. <br /> <br /> Everybody knew he did it, no one knew how he did it, so they convicted him for being in effect the man who probably did it. It was a pretty shonky deal by any legal parameter, and illustrated just how low the law had sunk in its desperation to get its man.<br /> <br /> The Court of Appeals in Bari had acquitted Liggio of various homicides, but sentenced him to life for the murder of his former chief, Michele Navarra, recorded in the Antimafia Commission, <em>Relazione sull'indagine riguardante casi di singoli Mafiosi,</em> pp. 105-130; Antimafia Commission, <em>Relazione conclusiva</em>, VI legislature, doc. XXIII, n. 2 (Roma, 1976), pp. 110-117 <br /> <br /> But convicting him and grounding him where two very different matters. He entered into some of the best years of his life in the early 1970s, taking a string of bewildering alias’s-at one time he held eleven different passports-in names like Pablo Villa, Sebastiano Tarola, Antonio Tazio, Calogero Polla, Baron Osvaldo Fattori, Antoni Paranzan and Michele Di Terlizzi, among others.<br /> <br /> From some time in 1971 until September 1973, Leggio’s address was Via Cremosana 4, an apartment which belonged to a close associate, Nello Pernice. Nello, known as ‘The Negro’ because he had been born in Addis Abbaba, was a career criminal and alleged hit-man for the mob. He had been ‘made’ into the Mafia by Leggio, when they were both incarcerated at Ucciardone Prison in Palermo.<br /> <br /> Leggio roamed Europe, setting up an expanding criminal empire based on theft, embezzlement, gambling, extortion in the construction industry, and kidnapping on a grand scale. He travelled widely, without any problems from police or custom authorities. Marco Nese an Italian journalist, tracked Leggio down on one occasion and photographed him in a Swiss restaurant.<br /> <br /> Here, Leggio met up again with Gerlando Alberti, a member of the Porta Nuova Mafia family in Palermo, and along for the ride were Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore ‘L‘ingegnere’ Greco, one of the most enigmatic Mafiosi of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, to dine in the Park Hotel in Geneva, in May 1972.<br /> <br /> It’s quite possible he even visited America during this period of his life based in northern Italy.<br /> <br /> Nicholas Pileggi, the well-known author, claimed in an article he wrote in 1973 on the drug trade that a group of senior New York Mafiosi, all well-known to law enforcement, held a meeting late in 1972 in the home of a Gambino crime family capo Johnny D‘Alessio, on Staten Island. Leggio was noted as being one of the seven or eight men, including Funzie Teiri, head of the Genovese Family, Aniello Dellacroce, number two man in the Gambino Family, and Alphonse Persico brother of Carmine, boss of the Colombo’s, who attended, along with Francesco Salamone, who interestingly, was listed as the president of a company in Milan linked into Leggio and other mobsters. The Italian Financial Police believed this was a front for mob money laundering.<br /> <br /> In Milan, Leggio went generally by the name of Antonino Farruggia, the one he had used in Catania. He claimed to be an importer of wines, and ran a large wine store called Vinicola Borroni in the Viale Umbria, and the wine bar on the Via Giambellino, through his nominee, Pernice. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006879,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006879,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006879?profile=original" width="367" /></a>He had, at some time, formed a relationship with a woman called Lucia Parazana (right), a Yugoslav refugee, who worked as a nurse, (the same occupation held by Leoluchina Soressi back in Corleone!) and they moved, in September 1973, into a top floor apartment of an upmarket apartment building at Via Ripamonti 166 in the Vigentino district, about two miles from the centre of Milan.<br /> <br /> On April 5th 1973, Angelo Mangano, the police officer who had seemingly arrested Leggio in 1964, was attacked outside his home in Via di Tor Tre Teste in the eastern suburb of Casilino in Rome, along with his driver, Domenico Casella. Although both of them were shot repeatedly by three men, and badly injured, they survived. <br /> <br /> According to informants, the attackers were Michele Zazza, the infamous Camorrista, and his nephew Ciro Mazzarella along with Leggio. Enrico Bellavia in his book <em>Un Uomo D’Onore</em> claims that Angelo Nuvoletta was also one of the attackers. Bellavia relates that Leggio, Provenzano, Riina and Francesco Di Carlo, the boss of the Altofonte cosca held a meeting at which the attack was planned. Di Carlo subsequently became a pentiti and offered up this information. It may have been pay-back time for Leggio, having perhaps long held a venomous hatred for the police officer who had helped arrest him in 1964, back in Corleone.<br /> <br /> Fourteen shots were fired at the two men by the assassins, who had driven up in a yellow Alfa 2000 with Milan plates.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Cornuto</em>,’ one of them shouted. ‘<em>You’re finished being a spy</em>,’ and then the gunmen opened up. Investigators were puzzled by two things. Firstly, Mangano’s wife had received a telephone call only the previous day, threatening his life, which should have meant he was being extra cautious. Secondly, they wondered why a self-proclaimed top marksman in the state police, did not even return a shot!<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007274,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007274,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007274?profile=original" width="482" /></a>Mangano (right) later claimed he had been shot because he was about to unearth the killers of Judge Scaglione and other serious crimes linked into Leggio.<br /> <br /> Sometime in June, 1973 Leggio became the perpetrator of a particularly nasty quartet of murders.<br /> <br /> Damiano Caruso, was a soldier in the Mafia family of Giuseppe Di Cristina, in south-east Sicily, although he himself lived in Villabate. The family don of Reisi had been an informer for the carabinieri and claimed among other things that Leggio had a fire-team- <em>gruppi di fuoco</em>- of 14 assassins, who were prepared to kill anyone, anywhere, on his orders.<br /> <br /> Caruso found himself in Milan. Escaping from internal exile he came to northern Italy to meet up with many of the Mafioso who had settled here, looking for opportunities. Caruso had been one of the squad that killed Michele Cavataio in what came to be known as ‘The Viale Lazio Massacre,’ in December 1969. Along with Bernardo Provenzano, another member of the team, he was wounded.<br /> <br /> He was sent to New York to recuperate. There, he had gotten into trouble with Carlo Gambino who was then one of the most powerful mob bosses in America, and was banished back to Sicily. Caruso was a man, according to Antonino Calderone, who had unlimited courage and a huge amount of ferocity in his nature. However, he had no idea when to shut up and listen to others who had more knowledge than he had. He did whatever he wanted to, regardless of the consequences, and this would be his undoing. He once tried to kill a parliamentary deputy, hitting him with an axe, doing more damage to himself when he missed his swing, slashing his own leg. <br /> <br /> His boss, Di Cristina, ordered him on one occasion to kill a Mafioso called Candido Ciuni in the small bar the man ran on the Via Maqueda in Palermo. Caruso attacked the man in October 1970, stabbing him, though not finishing the job off properly. <br /> <br /> A week later, on Tuesday 27th, while the wounded man lay in the Civic Hospital recovering, Caruso, Raffaele and Pasquale Bovi, Pietro Ciotta and Gioacchino Marrone, walked into the building, dressed as doctors. They disabled the duty doorman, Salvatore Saglio, ran up the stairs to the second floor and in room six, machine-gunned the injured man to death, in front of his screaming wife, Antonina Orlando, who desperately tried to stop it by rugby tacking one of the gunmen. It was unique in mob killings in Sicily: shooting the victim a second time, as he recovered from the first attack. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007671,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007671,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007671?profile=original" width="202" /></a>Ciuni (right) who was 44 at the time of his death, came from Ravenusa, a small town near Riesi, the fiefdom of Di Cristina, and his family had been involved in a feud with the family of the Mafia boss since 1946. He had also publicly voiced his dissent in the killing of Vitto Gattuso, who had been shot-gunned to death while walking hand-in-hand with his small son as punishment for an infringement against Di Cristina. <br /> <br /> Ironically, and somewhat amazingly, in view of the events, there is a proverb in the town of Ravenusa that recalls:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>First they stab you and send you to hospital where they fatten you up and then kill you</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Leggio believed Caruso had been responsible for the death of a young man he was fond of, Nino Guarano. Nicknamed ‘Big Heart’ he had been part of a plot to de-throne Di Cristina, and when Caruso found out, he killed him.<br /> <br /> In addition, Caruso had robbed a jeweller in Palermo who was under the protection of Salvatore Riina, as well as stealing goods from a warehouse owned by another man of honour. Enough aggravation to get you killed by Leggio, who organized for Nello Pernice, to have Caruso removed. In typical Leggio style, one mere death wasn’t enough to satisfy his passion for murder. When Caruso’s woman came calling looking for him, Leggio murdered her, and then for good measure, raped this woman’s fifteen year old daughter before disposing of her. <br /> <br /> To round it off, a cousin had travelled to Milan endeavouring to track down Caruso, and in a fit of pique, Leggio killed him as well. This information was passed onto the authorities by Antonino Calderone.<br /> <br /> The kidnapping of wealthy industrialist Pietro Torrielli in December of 1972, set the whistles and bells going in the office of Judge Giuliano Turone, the deputy anti-Mafia prosecutor of Lombardy. The huge ransom of 1.5 billion lire was an indication that the kidnappers were probably part of a sophisticated ring. Following the release of Torrielli, the <em>Guardia di Finanza</em> (Financial Police) followed a long and torturous paper trail of documents, bank checks, money orders and telegrams that all seemed to lead to one Senor Antonio, whose name kept coming up on wiretaps the police had set up across Milan. All of their intelligence pointed to the fact that Senor Antonio was Luciano Leggio. On May 13th, 1974, a wiretap on his own phone altered the police to the fact that he was soon leaving the city on an ‘extended visit.’<br /> <br /> Plans were laid, and at 6:00 am on the morning of May 16th, the Financial Police mounted a massive containment exercise. Ten trucks containing 47 police officers arrived in the Vigentino district, sealing off all possible escape routes around the apartment at Via Ripamonti. At 6:30 am Colonel Vissicchio and Major Lombardi in charge of the arrest, accompanied by a dozen officers, climbed to the top floor of the building and hammered on the apartment door. It was opened by Leggio in pyjamas and slippers.<br /> <br /> In the background the police could hear a baby crying. It was Paolo, Leggio’s one year old son. The most wanted and perhaps feared man in the whole of Italy surrendered peacefully. The police found a revolver in his bedroom along with books on philosophy and history. It was almost an exact replica of his arrest in Corleone ten years before!<br /> <br /> Tommaso Buscetta when he gave evidence following his decision to become an informer against the Mafia, inferred that Riina had betrayed his boss in order to gain control of the Corleonesi. <br /> <br /> In an ironic twist, it’s quite possible that twenty years later, Riina after 23 years 6 months and 8 days on the run, was arrested himself because of the betrayal of one of his men, Baldassare Di Maggio.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006468?profile=original" width="428" /></a>Destined to spend the rest of his life in various prisons across Italy, and finally into the isolation of Badu e Corros penitentiary in Nuoro on the island of Sardinia, at the age of forty-nine, for Luciano Leggio (right), his life of freedom was over. But that did not stop him from running his crime family. Riina and Provenzano operated as his proxy on the cupola, with Riina gradually assuming more and more power over the Corleonesi’s affairs. <br /> <br /> Leggio sat in his prison cells across Italy, moving his killers like pawns across the chessboard of Sicily, picking up judges and prosecutors and journalist and politicians. And knocking them down one by one as it suited his agenda.<br /> <br /> Over the next twelve years, he was constantly moving between prisons and courthouses.<br /> <br /> ON July 29th 1974, he was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in connection with the 114 Trial.<br /> <br /> In November 1974, along with 31 other men, he was tried for the crimes committed by Anonima Sequestri.<br /> <br /> In 1975 he was arraigned before Judge Terranova and his conviction for the murder of Dr. Navarra in 1958 was re-confirmed.<br /> <br /> He was tried in connection with the kidnapping of Luigi Rossi di Montelera, in 1976.<br /> <br /> In 1977 he was indicted on the evidence of Leonardo Vitale, the pentiti from the Alterallo cosca, near Palermo, who pre-empted Buscetta and Contoro as the most significant Mafia informant of the 20th century, although the authorities had no real idea who and what they were dealing with, and simply had him shipped to a mental hospital for seven years.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007477,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007477,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007477?profile=original" width="304" /></a>Leggio featured at a court of appeals hearing in 1978 at Palermo, when he and Benedetto La Cara argued their cases against their 1974 sentences.<br /> <br /> In 1982 he was tried in Reggio Calabria in connection with the killing of Judge Terranova and acquitted. <br /> <br /> In November 1985 he was back in Reggio Calabria, where he appeared to be having an affair with a buxom, 41 year old blonde from Perugia, called Maria Pia Davena, although their meetings were always in prison cells or courthouse interview rooms.<br /> <br /> There were hearings regarding the murder of Judge Terranova in April 1986, moved from Calabria to Palermo, in order to have him handy for the forthcoming Maxi-trial.<br /> <br /> The Genoese police officer in charge of logistics at the trial held in Sicily, in Palermo, in a special bunker-style courthouse built onto the Ucciardone prison, would not even mention Leggio’s name in the security of his own quarters.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Leggio</em>,’ he explained to anthropologists John and Peter Schneider, ‘<em>could bury any of us</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Although he exerted his hold over some of his interests, there never was, according to Judge Giovanni Falcone, a <em>grande vecchio</em>-powerful old man, of the Mafia, who pulled the strings from the very top. The judge considered this concept an idea of great intellectual crudity.<br /> <br /> As Leggio and everyone who followed him knew, the real power lay in the Palazzo Chigi and the Montecitorio, in Rome, the heart in the body of political Italy.<br /> <br /> In one of his many trials or court hearings in the 1970s, Leggio defended his lifestyle by quoting almost word for word the Mafia definition as laid down by the famous 19th Palermitan doctor and ethnographer, Giuseppe Pitrè:<br /> <br /> <em>Mafia is neither a sect nor an association, it has no regulations or statutes. The Mafioso is not a thief or a criminal……..Mafia is the awareness of one’s own individual strength…….The Mafioso is someone who always wants to give and receive respect. If someone offends him, he does not turn to the law.</em><br /> <br /> Throughout part of his years of isolation, Leggio used a Catholic priest, Agostino Coppola, to carry messages from him to his subordinates in the Mafia. The grandson of the old don, Frank Coppola, he was, like a number of the men of the cloth in Sicily, a Mafioso himself, made into the Partinico cosca in 1969. This was confirmed to the authorities by Antonino Calderone. A man of some considerable power within the church, Coppola at one time, administered the assets of the diocese of Monreale and was the parish priest of Carini for a number of years.<br /> <br /> Coppola’s brothers, Giacomo and Domenico were Mafioso who controlled the land west of Carini towards Paterna, an area which included the Zucco Estate an area of 147 hectares and a number of buildings, including a castle. Giuseppe Russo the carabinieri colonel murdered by the Mafia in 1977, was convinced that the priest Coppola had arranged to hide Leggio on this estate for a number of months<br /> <br /> The priest had acted for Leggio’s kidnapping unit on at least one occasion when he was the emissary between the gang and the family of the young engineer, Luciano Cassina, kidnapped in August 1972 and held in captivity for six months until released on payment of a ransom of over one billion lira. For this little escapade, the priest was indicted in 1976 and sentenced to 14 years in prison.<br /> <br /> Eventually suspended and then dismissed from the church, he married into the Caruana family, the greatest drug dealers the Sicilian mob has ever known. He was the priest who in fact married Salvatore Riina and his life-long love, Antonietta Bagarella, on April 16th, 1974 either in a villa near Cinisi, or at a little church in the San Lorenzo district of Palermo, according to which source is consulted.<br /> <br /> In 1977, prison officials at the penitentiary in Lodi in the province of Lombardy, Northern Italy, discovered a plot to spring Leggio, apparently engineered by the Mafia, and the prisoner was immediately moved to another high security facility.<br /> <br /> Between 1979 and 1980 when he was incarcerated at Ucciardone in Palermo, another conspiracy to break him out of prison was uncovered, and he was again transferred.<br /> <br /> Leggio’s incarceration in prison was a lot more comfortable than a lot of his peers. Before he was sent to Badu e Corros in Sardinia, he had his meals delivered from an outside restaurant, and paid another inmate to act as his food taster, to make sure he wasn’t poisoned. At one prison he had as his protector and guard Antonino Faro, the Catania Mafioso and homicidal cannibal killer. <br /> <br /> As the years passed, Leggio grew fleshy and even sleeker in his appearance, but always kept himself smart and well-groomed. He had boxes of long, fat Toscanello Tuscany cigars delivered each week, and would sport a huge diamond and gold ring to impress his guests.<br /> <br /> He would spend his time writing poetry and reading, studying the pre-Socratic philosophers and later serious writers such as Dostoevsky.<br /> <br /> He filled his days painting, producing over 400 pictures, strong vibrant images of Corleone and the surrounding countryside, either from his memory or from postcards sent to him by friends and relatives. One of his lawyers, Pierro Arru, said Leggio‘s inspiration came from Vincent Van Gough. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008273,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008273,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237008273?profile=original" width="350" /></a>Some less than kind commentators, suggested that the paintings were in fact done by other inmates, one in particular, Gaspare Mutolo, who had shared a cell with Leggio for a period of time, claimed he painted more than half of the work that was eventually put on display, and Leggio simply added his signature to them. ‘<em>Leggio</em>’ he claimed, ‘<em>couldn’t paint a daisy</em>.’ Whatever, the works of art attracted thousands of curious sight-seers when they went on exhibition. <br /> <br /> His first collection of fifty-five paintings was displayed at the Marino Gallery on the Via Dante in Palermo in January 1988, organized by another of his lawyers, Salvatore Traina. The showing opened on Saturday 2nd, and by the following Tuesday, forty had already been sold. The proceeds of the sales, organized by his ageing sister, Maria-Antonina, back in Corleone, would go towards providing a dialysis machine in the hospital there. Some of his works were to sell for as high US$30,000. Soon, art galleries in New York, Spain and Germany were clamouring to get their hands on them.<br /> <br /> In 1992, the governor of the prison applied for an injunction to prevent Leggio sending out anymore of his paintings on the grounds that they contained secret signals to his mob associates. Leggio’s lawyer fought the action, but the Italian supreme court found in favour of the prison authorities. <br /> <br /> Early in 1986, Leggio was moved from his current prison back to Palermo as a defendant in another major organized crime investigation that became known as the Mafia maxi-trial. <br /> <br /> The biggest legal event of its kind, ever held in Sicily, it ran from February 1986 until December 1987. 464 defendants, including 4 women, faced charges, that along with their names, filled 400 pages of the court documents than ran to 8607 pages. There were 200 defence lawyers in court along with two full sets of judges and jurors to last the course.<br /> <br /> There were over 100 prisoners who appeared in the special courthouse on February 10th. One hundred and thirteen were out on bail awaiting a later trial and 115 under indictment were at large, including Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. By December 1987, the trial was over, having sentenced over 300 of the accused on a variety of charges from murder to associating with the Mafia. Leggio, secured in his own private cage during the hearings, treated the court with contempt and disdain. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008498,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008498,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237008498?profile=original" width="422" /></a>‘<em>How could I do these things I’m accused of?’ he said. ‘I have been in prison for the last twelve years. Do you wish to call my jailer to confirm that I have not been out. It is impossible that I have committed crimes</em>.’<br /> <br /> He had indeed been in prison during the steamroller rise of the Corleonesi’s to power within the brotherhood. During the blooding of the second Mafia war in the early 1980s when perhaps a thousand or more were killed, according to Judge Giovanni Falcone, he had been confined. He was incarcerated when he helped organized the take over of the heroin trafficking into America. The Mafia had murdered a former mayor of Palermo, eleven senior police officers, four judges, six public prosecutors, two famous journalists and four politicians. The dead were everywhere. It’s more than conceivable that none of these things happened without his approval and consent, and during all of this time, he was in prison.<br /> <br /> He was cleared of all counts, on this, his last trial. As usual, the judiciary couldn’t really come to terms with a man who was really a monster.<br /> <br /> On Monday, November 15th 1993, he collapsed in his prison cell at the high security prison in Sardinia. He had been here for nine years. <br /> <br /> Penitentiary Guard, Antonino Pampitta, discovered him in a routine cell-check at 8:35 am. lying on his bed, his mouth open, gasping for breath, his eyes dilated In his final years, Leggio suffered from many ailments-asthma, prostate and liver problems, along with rheumatism and bladder dysfunctions, and his endless bone problems. Three doctors worked on him, trying to keep him alive. Taken to the San Francesco Hospital on the Via Mannironi in Nuoro, he went peacefully before the ambulance arrived, as his heart turned to jelly and died on him and his kidneys and bladder finally gave in to the struggle. He was sixty-eight years old. <br /> <br /> The official cause of death was myocardial infarction. <br /> <br /> Dying quietly in bed was an option he had offered few of his enemies. <br /> <br /> His lawyer, Francesco Azzena had been appealing his sentence, on the grounds of his numerous health problems, and the fact that he had in total, served 25 years in prison.<br /> Angelo Puggioni, the owner of a well-known furniture store in Nuoro- Dania Arredamenti- had guaranteed Leggio a position as an interior designer, should his release be facilitated.<br /> <br /> The image of Luciano Leggio, one of the most virulent Mafioso of all times, effusively offering clients advice on their selection of drapes and soft furnishings, is one to be conjured with long into the night.<br /> <br /> After a postmortem, just to make sure he had died a natural death , his body was shipped by air to Sicily, arriving into Punta Raisi, Palermo airport at 1:30 pm on the 17th of November.<br /> <br /> The coffin was collected by an old, blue Mercedes hearse, and escorted by two police jeeps, the convey made its way south, through Montelepre, the haunt of the bandit Giuliano fifty years before, then across and through San Giuseppe Jato, the heartland of the Mafia for over 100 years, and into Corleone. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009452,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009452,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009452?profile=original" width="392" /></a>The hearse brought the body to the tiny church of San Rosalia in the Piazza Giuseppe Vasi. Here, parish priest Girolamo Leggio, first cousin to the dead man, performed the burial service. This and the internment, were attended by only some immediate family-his sister Carmella and cousin Giovanna Palazzo along with her husband, Francesco Zito. Maria Antonina (right) the sister who administered his estate and had been charged with allocating the proceeds of Leggio’s paintings into philanthropic endeavours, stayed at home with brother Carmelo, who had been part of Leggio’s original gang.<br /> <br /> At the cemetery on the Via Marqueda, TV camera crews and newspaper reporters filled out the available spaces. There was a strong police presence in and around the area, and many tourists, unaware of the proceedings taking place, were re-routed away from Corleone that day as the law closed down the area with roadblocks on all the main roads into the town. The streets were deserted, the shops closed down for the day. The town rested still and quiet, as though waiting for the consummation of a curse long overdue.<br /> <br /> Leggio’s partner from Milan did not attend the funeral services as neither did his son, 19 year old Paolo, who according to the media, had disowned his father. Leochina Sorisi now married and living in Genoa, wanted nothing to do with the ceremony. The only one from that period at the cemetery was a man in a grey overcoat who claimed to have been Sorisi’s cousin, and had been around during those days in 1964. He wanted, as he told a reporter, ‘to see the end of the story.’ <br /> <br /> This may have been Ludovico Benigno, who had been one of the men seen with Placido Rizzotto before he was kidnapped and murdered, all those years before.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009296,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009296,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009296?profile=original" width="455" /></a>At five minutes after four in the afternoon, the sky overcast through the fiery glow of the setting sun and a wind blowing in over the Rocca Busambra shrouded in dark clouds, dusting dried flowers from graves across the cemetery, the coffin was interred in the red, granite family vault, alongside his brother Giralamo who had been buried there in 1967. There is no name or picture on the tomb to indicate Luciano Leggio is buried here. Two wreaths, one from his sisters and brother one simply marked ‘from the grandchildren,’ are laid in place, and it is over.<br /> <br /> La Primula Rossa now lies forever, in this graveyard, only twenty five paces from the grave of Dr. Michele Navarra. Somewhere here, in this burial ground, it is rumoured, lie the remains of Calogero Bagarella, interred in secret after he was killed in the shoot-out at the Via Lazio, in 1969.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Leggio was one of the most important chiefs of the Cosa Nostra</em>,’ said Luciano Violante, chairman of the anti-Mafia Committee in the Italian Parliament. A fitting epitaph, a back-handed compliment, or perhaps a sad commentary on a wasted life. <br /> <br /> On January 29th 1994, a ceremony was held in the town of Corleone to rename Piazza Vittorio Emanuel III. After months of wrangling amongst council members, it was agreed to call the square ‘Piazza Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellini’ as a permanent tribute to the two judges murdered two years previously, by the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Hundreds of people gathered that morning in the square overshadowed by the local carabinieri barracks, where sixty-eight years earlier, Carmelo Rizzotto had been one of the dozens of suspected Mafia criminals rounded up before being deported to the Palermo prison. <br /> <br /> The re-naming was pushed through by mayor Giuseppe Cipriani who said, ‘There is more to Corleone than the Mafia.’ Sisters of the murdered judges carried out the unveiling ceremony.<br /> <br /> Ironically, the superintendent in charge of monuments for the city, was called Meli, the same name as Antonino Meli, the 68 year old judge from Caltanissetta , appointed by Rome in 1988 as chief prosecutor in Palermo to head up the anti-Mafia Co-ordinating Group, replacing Falcone and effectively putting back efforts to defeat the Mafia by years. Also, the stonemason hired to create the granite street signs for the square was called Liggio!<br /> <br /> Maybe degrees of separation, as conceived by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929; coincidence, an alignment of random points, the long arm of fate, kismet, chance; all sorts of threads run through the story of Luciano Leggio, linking together a tapestry of energy rather than fabric.<br /> <br /> It had been a long and winding road for him and the Sicilian Mafia, a road that had taken him and his criminal clan from a rustic-based enterprise into a tangled urban world of deceit, treachery and mayhem on a scale never seen before in Italy.<br /> <br /> Anton Blok said, ‘<em>Before there was the Mafia; now there is politics</em>.’<br /> <br /> It may be somewhat simplistic to infer that the Mafia changed its spots simply because it became involved in the machinations of the state. However, there is little doubt that all along, Cosa Nostra’s most exhilarating and profound attraction to its members, was and is, its complete and utter insouciance to the law. Its members could do anything they wanted, safe in the unconditional knowledge that they were protected by their own special coda. It was a short step from indifference to the law towards indifference to the state. It did however, require a quantum leap in the mob’s philosophy regarding killing as a means to an end.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237010063,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237010063,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237010063?profile=original" width="179" /></a>The <em>Little King of Corleone</em> may also have qualified for a unique if somewhat macabre appellation, as one of the greatest mass murderer of his time. His tally was probably somewhere between one to five hundred, many at his own hand, but most at his direction.<br /> <br /> He left as his legacy, the two killing machines he had nurtured and encouraged- his avatars-Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano (left), who eventually both came to represent him on the Mafia’s commission-its board of governors, creating a new precedent within the Sicilian Mafia that under certain circumstance, there could be more than one capo leading a family. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009686,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009686,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009686?profile=original" width="240" /></a>Riina (right) who became know as ‘The Beast,’ and rightly so, was eventually brought to bay in 1993, and caged forever. Provenzano, called ‘The Tractor,’ because he ran everything down in his path, kept going for another thirteen years until he was finally brought to justice in April 2006. It was reported that the townspeople of Corleone were so delighted that he had at last been brought down, they re-named a street after the date he was captured-11 Aprile.<br /> <br /> Their successor as the supreme boss of Cosa Nostra is supposed to be Matteo Messina Denaro, a man of forty-eight. A Porsche-loving, computer savvy, Latin speaking, playboy-killer, known affectionately by his peers as ‘<em>Mathew Money</em>,’ and who once bragged: ‘<em>I filled a cemetery all by myself</em>,’ he seems to be as equally evasive, and difficult to catch as Luciano Leggio was. And like Leggio, he suffers from a permanent and debilitating disease, although his is myopia. <br /> <br /> He is the capo of Castelvetrano, the same place where the bandit Salvatore Giuliano was murdered in 1950. Nothing is set in concrete however, and time will tell if he is in fact the man who has taken over from Provenzana. His story is still to be told.<br /> <br /> In 2005, talking with Gabriella Ebano, the Sicilian author and photographer, Pina Rizzotto, recalled the effect her brother’s murder had on the family. How she and her parents and sisters went with the procession to the Rocca Busambra, on December 14th 1949, and on that cold and misty morning, had witnessed his remains being reclaimed from the deep cave that was used as a burial ground by the local Mafia.<br /> <br /> How her mother, Rosina screamed in anguish and her father, Carmelo, stood with tears streaming down his face, as her brother’s head and items of his clothing were brought out by carabinieri sergeant, Orlando Notari, who had been lowered into the 35 metre chasm.<br /> <br /> Although Placido had been adopted by Rosina, his own mother Giovanna Moschitta, Carmelo’s first wife, dying of the Spanish Flu in 1918, when he was just a baby, he was always been considered by the Rizzotto’s as their eldest boy and treasured son.<br /> <br /> Every night for 57 years, Pina said she had offered a prayer for him. Her sister Salvatrice developed heart problems, and another sister Concetta, six months pregnant, lost her baby because of the stress they went through when their brother disappeared. The whole family was torn apart, and never put together again.<br /> <br /> As the investigation dragged its slow way through the courts and appeals, her brother’s remains lay boxed as evidence, 6007/63, and were never returned to the family even though they made application on five different occasions between 1952 and 1963. Her parents and all her five siblings died without being able to bury their brother and son, and in due course the remains of Placido Rizzotto disappeared into the labyrinth of the Italian bureaucracy. In 2005, Francis Forgione, president of the anti-Mafia Commission, promised there would be a major government investigation to find and return the box. It was thought to be either stored somewhere in the courthouse building in Palermo or at the Court of Cassation in Rome. Things grind exceedingly slow in Italian bureaucracy. <br /> <br /> In August 2008, human remains were found in a sinkhole on the Rocca Busambra. <br /> <br /> In March 2010, Carmelo Rizzotto was exhumed, and DNA samples were taken to match to these remains. The RIS (<em>Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche</em>) of the CID branch of the carabinieri carried out the tests in Messina. Also, found in the cave, was the skeleton of a farm animal which could indicate that after killing Rizzotto, Leggio had the body carried to the mountain by a mule, which was subsequently shot, and left with the trade unionist’s remains.<br /> <br /> The tests however, were negative, as disclosed towards the end of November 2010.<br /> <br /> After 62 years, the search for closure is still important to the members of Placido Rizzotto’s family, the trade union he represented, and in fact the state of Italy.<br /> <br /> It has not gone unnoticed that the bodies of Michele Navarra, Luciano Leggio and other Mafiosi who contributed to the murder of the young trade unionist have been buried with full civil and religious accord, whilst their young victim has still not been laid to rest.<br /> <br /> In Placido Rizzotto we see the true face of the victims of the Sicilian Mafia, and their families, representing the thousands of similar stories which lie untold across a hundred years of enforced violence, generated in order to satisfy the ambitions of those who worshipped false myths and pagan gods and destroyed everything that stood in their way. Men, who Corrado Stajano claimed, <em>were a ghastly tangle of terror, vice, brutality and death</em>.<br /> <br /> Renate Siebert in her achingly beautiful account of life and death in the Mafia, from a woman’s perspective, ‘<em>a journey into Hades</em>,’ as she describes it, hopes that women’s sensibility will help bring about the demise of a phenomenon that represents a negation of what is considered one of the higher achievements of civilization, the right of man, denied individuals through terrorism executed at every social level in Sicily.<br /> <br /> James Lee Burke notes in his book ‘<em>The Glass Rainbow</em>’: ‘<em>If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence in our skin</em>.’<br /> <br /> Surely no one is born malevolent and debased? Genetic disposition and social pressures create the schismatic shift in personality that eventually erupts as a psychosomatic earthquake, damaging everything and everyone around the fault line of that person’s presence. <br /> <br /> Then again, Anthony Burgess in his dystopian novella, ‘Clockwork Orange,’ explored the theme that perhaps we are all born evil, or at least can become perverted along the way.<br /> <br /> Luciano Leggio came into the world a baby, innocent as all are, until these changes occurred in him and turned him into the epitome of malevolence and abomination.<br /> <br /> Mark Twain believed everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anyone. If that is the case, Luciano Leggio’s moon was surely always in perpetual eclipse.<br /> <br /> Aristotle spoke of <em>hamartia</em>, the tragic flaw of man. While the modern popular rendering of hamartia is broadly imprecise and often misleading, it lends itself perfectly to the concept that in Leggio’s case, it may well have been simply that he was Sicilian, and as a result, his destiny was predestined. <br /> <br /> It is hard to find the verbs or adjectives that do justice to the nature of this man: evil, controlling, frightening, unpredictable, pernicious, deadly, capricious, cruel, predatory, aberrant, mendacious are just some that come to mind. They hint at his nature, but hardly scratch the surface of the person. <br /> <br /> He killed for fun, as a game, out of sheer malice, according to Antonino Calderone. <br /> <br /> Maybe this is all we really need to know about La Primula Rossa.<br /> <br /> If we all have our own dark dreams that keep us awake in the small hours of the morning, Luciano Leggio was surely Sicily’s, until Salvatore Riina came along to live up to his nickname ‘The Beast,’ and start the whole, heartbreaking cycle over again.<br /> <br /> Paolo Borsellino, the judge murdered by Cosa Nostra in 1992, said:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>People are dying all around me. If we deny the Mafia their existence they vanish like a nightmare</em>.’<br /> <br /> He was wrong of course. It seems more than likely, they never will.<br /> <br /> Nine years later in August 2001, Pietro Lunardi, a minister of the state under the government of Silvio Berlusconi, admitted this when he claimed: ‘<em>We have to live with the Mafia. They have always been and will always be</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Giovanni Falcone wrote about the permanent sense of mortality that engulfs the life of a Mafioso:<br /> <br /> <em> ……the constant risk of death, the low value placed on the lives of</em><br /> <em> others, but also on one’s own, force them to live continually on the alert. We</em><br /> <em> are often amazed by the incredible quantity of details that besiege the</em><br /> <em> memories of the men of Cosa Nostra. But when one lives, as they do, in</em><br /> <em> expectation of the worst, one is forced to gather even the smallest crumbs.</em><br /> <em> Nothing is useless. Nothing is a product of chance. The certainty of the</em><br /> <em> closeness of death – in a moment, a week, a year – infects them with a</em><br /> <em> constant sense of the utter precariousness of their lives.</em> <br /> <br /> Could it be that Leggio lived by his own, unethical, self-interested code of behaviour because he knew how circumscribed his life was? Surrounded by men who would kill each other without cause or conscience, all operating within an element characterised by random or formulated sudden violence. Men who, as Renate Siebert pointed out, operated in an activity obsessed by death, and were in contrast to the hagiographic image they liked to portray-rebels, negative heroes and defenders of a historical tradition- instead, contrivers of violence and assassination, which spoke more of cowardice and manipulation than any patina of honour. <br /> <br /> It’s possible that in the end, Leggio quite simply adopted Machiavelli’s guiding principle that the end justifies the means, and applied this philosophy as an excuse for his lifestyle.<br /> <br /> Whatever it was that tripped him over from peasant boy to peasant boy-killer, Luciano Leggio created a journey for himself that could only ever lead to one of two destinations: death or imprisonment. <br /> <br /> I leave the final words to the late, and great, English author, Norman Lewis who wrote one of the finest books ever on the Mafia, called <em>The Honoured Society</em>. He had been in Sicily during World War Two as part of the military occupying forces, and returned in the 1960s to travel across the island and research this social criminal phenomena that was evolving, yet again in the post-war years. Another phoenix arising, just like it had before, following the assault on its seemingly invincible being by Cesare Mori in the late 1920s.<br /> <br /> He talks about a small town near Palermo, but his observations could easily apply to Corleone or any of another hundred small places across western Sicily.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>The Mafiosi of Tommaso Natale are Bedouins in double-breasted suits and gaudy pullovers, with nomad faces and eyes still screwed up from searching the depths of hallucinatory landscapes for their straying beasts. Without realizing it, they have killed each other as far back as anyone can remember, and still kill each other, not so much out of bloodthirsty sentiment, but from economic necessity. There has never been enough to go around</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Francis Ford Coppola himself, could not have created a more evocative image.<br /> <br /> <em><strong> These are of some of the sources I used in preparing the story:</strong></em><br /> <br /> <strong> Bibliography</strong><br /> <br /> Alongi, Giuseppe. El Maffia. Palermo: Sellerio Editor. 1977.<br /> Arlachi, Pino. La mafia imprenditrice. Bologna: 1983.<br /> Arlachi, Pino. Men of Dishonour. New York: 1993<br /> Bardoni, Avril. Man of Respect. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, spa. 1988.<br /> Biagi, Enzo. Il boss è solo. Milan: Mondadoris 1990.<br /> Blok, Anton. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.<br /> Dalla Chiesa, C. Michele Navarra e la mafia del corleonese. Palermo: La Zisa, 1990.<br /> Dolci, Danilo. Fare prèsto (e bene) perchè si muore. Turin: Franscesco De Silva, 1954.<br /> Falcone, Giovanni. Cose di Cosa Nostra. Milano: Rizzoli, 1991<br /> Follain, John. A Dishonoured Society. London: Little Brown & Co. 1995.<br /> Gambetta, Diego. La mafia siciliana. Turin: 1992.<br /> Hess, Henner. Mafia. Rome, Bari: Laterrza and Figli Spa, 1984.<br /> Kermoal, Jacques and Bartolomeri, Martine. La mafia se met à table: Histories e recettes de l’honorable société. Paris: Actes Sud 1986.<br /> Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il gattopardo. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960.<br /> Lewis, Norman. The Honoured Society. New York: Putnam, 1964.<br /> Lodato, Saverio. Dieci anni di Mafia. Milan: Rizzoli, 1990.<br /> Lupo, Salvatore. Storia della Mafia. Rome: Donzelli, 1993.<br /> Lupo, Salvatore. Story of the Mafia. New York: Columbia University Press 2009.<br /> Nese, Marco. Nel Segno della Mafia: Rizzoli 1976.<br /> Pantaleone, Michele. Mafia e dròga. Turin: Einaudi, 1966.<br /> Poma, Rosario. La Mafia: Nonni e nipoli. Florence: Vallecchi, 1971.<br /> Schneider, Jane and Peter. Culture & Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press, 1976.<br /> Servadio, Gaia. Mafioso. New York: Stein and Day, 1976.<br /> Siebert, Renate. Mafia and anti-Mafia Concepts: Universita della Calabria.<br /> Secrets of life and death. London: Verso, 1996.<br /> Stille, Alexander. Excellent Cadavers. London: Jonathon Cape, 1995.<br /> Stajano, Corrado. Mafia: L’atto daccusa dei giudici di Palermo. Rome: Riuniti, 1992.<br /> Sterling, Clair. The Mafia. London: Grafton, 1990.<br /> Zingales, Leo. Provenzano. El Rey de Cosa Nostra. Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2001<br /> <br /> <strong> Newspapers articles from:</strong><br /> <br /> L’Ora. <br /> Giornale di Sicilia <br /> Corriere della Sera<br /> Il Messagero<br /> La Sicilia<br /> La Repubblica<br /> Città Nuova Corleone<br /> <br /> <strong>Official documents</strong><br /> <br /> <strong> Extracts from the testimony of:</strong><br /> <br /> Tommaso Buscetta to Judge Falcone and others, July-September.<br /> 1984.<br /> Salvatore Contoro to Judge Falcone and others, October 1984-June 1985<br /> Testimony of Antonino Calderone to Judge Falcone and others, March 1987-<br /> June 1988.<br /> Testimony of Gaspare Mutolo, February 1993.<br /> </p>
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Profile of Cosa Nostra boss Stefano Bontade
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/cosa-nostra-boss-stefano
2010-11-18T21:51:19.000Z
2010-11-18T21:51:19.000Z
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<div><p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236977480,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p><br /> By Angelo Carmelo Gallitto<br /> Posted in 2003<br /> <br /> Stefano Bontade was born on April 23, 1939 in Palermo. His father was Francesco Paolo “Don Paolino” Bontade, the boss of Santa Maria di Gesù family, one of the most powerful families of the city of Palermo. Born in 1914, he was a farmer and he ran the fields and the wells around Villagrazia, Santa Maria di Gesù, and Guadagna neighbourhoods, which before the 1960s were rural areas. He was introduced into organized crime by his father, Stefano’s grandfather, and quickly became one of the most powerful bosses of Palermo area. His word was the “law” for the people. He was designated boss after the death of Andrea Messina, the old boss of Santa Maria family.<br /> <br /> Stefano was introduced into Cosa Nostra very early and in 1964, when he was 25, he became the official boss of the family because of his father’s disease. At the beginning of 1970s he took part in the triumvirate, with Gaetano Badalamenti and Luciano Leggio, which ran Cosa Nostra for a few years, before the Commission was reorganized after the repression of the State.<br /> <br /> Thanks to his politics and freemasons connections, Stefano was a real authority inside Cosa Nostra; he was in friendship with Salvo Lima, once Palermo’s mayor, Giovanni Gioia, senator of DC party, and several others, including Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. But when his power seemed to be untouchable, an obscure enemy was on the rise: the “Corleonesi” led by Totò Riina. They wanted to replace him, his political connections and his business, including drug trafficking and cigarettes smuggling. The Bontades had a lot of refineries around Palermo province, one of these was directly ran by Giovanni Bontade, brother of Stefano, murdered in 1988. The first signals Riina sent to Bontade were the kidnappings of Pino Vassallo, son of an important entrepreneur, Luciano Cassina, son of the Count Arturo, and Luigi Corleo, one of the richest of Sicily, father-in-law of Salvo’s from Salemi. The mafia war reached the top on April 23, 1981, when Stefano was shot to death while he was driving his armoured car. After him about 900 “men of honour” were killed in Palermo from 1981 to 1983; that was the end of the last member of the “Old Mafia”.</p>
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A Kiss is Just a Kiss
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/a-kiss-is-just-a-kiss
2010-11-10T21:14:18.000Z
2010-11-10T21:14:18.000Z
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<div><p><span style="font-style:italic;">‘Man lives with the society he finds around him.’</span><br /> <br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Salvatore Lima, Christian Democratic politician,</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Murdered by the Mafia, March 1992.</span> <br /> <br /> By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> If he was right in what he said, it happened on the afternoon of September 20th 1987; if it did happen, it represented very bad taste, at least. It is not after all a crime to kiss the boss of the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps very bad taste, but hardly a crime, However, the deeper implications of this embrace between two people, went far beyond the boundaries of personal behaviour.<br /> <br /> Although one of the men, Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina was the undisputed head of what could perhaps be called the most significant organized crime association in the world, the other recipient of the kiss was a man once referred to as ‘the finest political mind in Europe.’<br /> <br /> He had served the Italian government for over forty years. A member of the Christian Democratic Party, which was born out of the ashes of World War Two, he had held a variety of ministerial positions, including premier, foreign minister and seven times prime minister, holding cabinet posts in thirty governments since 1948. His name was Giulio Andreotti. <br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236977276,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Giulio Andreotti</span></div>
<p><br /> On that day in September 1987, he had come to Palermo to give two speeches at the annual Friendship Festival of the Sicilian branch of the DC party. Sometime during the day, if the story is true, between the first and second presentation, he went to a palatial home at number 3, piazza Vittorio Veneto, the residence of Ignazio Salvo, one of the richest businessmen and most powerful Demochristians on the island. <br /> <br /> He and his late brother, Nino, had made their fortunes by operating a government sponsored private concession, as esattorie, agents collecting taxes in western Sicily—a primitive, but unbelievable lucrative operation and one that was supposedly also, a great source of corruption. The Antimafia Commission in 1976 had stressed that this tax revenue system was parasitic and a nest where the Mafia thrived. The brothers had been allowed to retain 10% of all taxes they gathered, as against the standard 3.3% levied in mainland Italy. <br /> <br /> The two men had been identified by the Carabinieri in the early 1960’s as Mafiosi, but by the mid 1970’s, had risen to such a level of political power and wealth as to be seen to be above suspicion. At the time of the alleged meeting between Riina and Andreotti however, Ignazio Salvo was under house arrest, awaiting his appearance in the Mafia maxi-trial that would run in Palermo, from February 10th 1986, until December 17th 1987.<br /> <br /> The man who would claim to be at the confluence of this political and Mafia power embrace on that sunny afternoon, September 20th 1987, Baldassare (Balduccio) Di Maggio, the reporter of the meeting, had started out life as a mechanic, before embarking on a career as a soldier in the Mafia cosche, or family, of Bernardo Brusca, based in San Giuseppe Jato, a small town located almost midway between Palermo and Corleone. <br /> <br /> He had done his first homicide for the Mafia in 1981. Four-month’s later, he was initiated into the cosche by Brusca himself. By 1986, his personal killing count had risen to twenty-four; he had burned down the house of an ex-mayor of Palermo, done significant business in drug trafficking, and was involved in extortion in the construction business.<br /> <br /> He became a personal favourite of Salvatore Riina, who himself was close to Brusca, and Riina often said of Di Maggio, Baldo’s in my heart. He made him his chauffeur and bodyguard. But things aren’t always what they seem, especially in the Mafia.<br /> <br /> When Bernardo Brusca and his son, Giovanni, were sent to prison, Di Maggio became acting head of the cosche. It was a good time for him; he prospered, built himself a million dollar villa complete with swimming pools and original art works to decorate the walls. Then it all turned sour. Tiring of his wife, he fell for a girl that Brusca junior also lusted after. It started to turn nasty when Giovanni came out of prison in 1992 and wanted to take back his crime family. Riina presided over a sit-down between Di Maggio and the young Brusca. <br /> <br /> When it was over, the Sicilian godfather kissed Di Maggio saying, ‘ Balduccio non e’ un’avancia buttat via!’ (Baldo’s not some old orange to chuck away!)<br /> <br /> But Di Maggio knew a Judas kiss when he saw one, or at least, tasted it. He knew “Toto” Riina was at his most devious and dangerous when he came across like an old country boy. He read the lines not they way they were written but the way they were spoken. Uncle ‘Toto‘ had Baldo in his heart and would surely have him killed in due course. The Godfather’s link to the Bruscas was far more important than his affection for his driver. They were after all, his oldest and closest allies.<br /> <br /> Taking his pregnant girl friend, he fled to Canada, but unable to get a visa, they returned to Italy, heading north to Novara, which lies close to Milan, where Di Maggio had friends.<br /> <br /> The police arrested him there on January 8th 1993, and the thirty-nine year old Mafia boss sat down with the provincial commander of the Novara constabulary, Lieutenant Colonel Vincenzo Girliani, and started talking. He became another pentito, an informer, one of over two thousand who have emerged from the tortured killing fields of the Mafia in Sicily, since the first one, Leonardo Vitale, told an unbelieving Italian court about this thing, Cosa Nostra, called thing, in 1973. <br /> <br /> The thought of being returned to Palermo’s Ucciardone Prison, populated by Riina’s killers, was what finally turned Di Maggio. I’m a dead man, but I’m a man of honour, and I can give you Riina, he said. And he did. He provided information that helped a special team of carabinieri, known as the ROS- Reparto operative Speciale, under the command of Brigadier Mario Mori- track down the most wanted criminal in Italian history. On January 15th 1993, Salvatore Riina was arrested in a Palermo suburb. He had been on the run from the law for over twenty-three years. He was also a monster of the first order, known across the Sicilian landscape as the beast.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236977871,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Salvatore Riina</span></div>
<p><br /> He was born November 16th 1930, in Corleone, the small desolate town, set among the dry and barren landscape south of Palermo. He was one of five children of a poor peasant labourer. Riina never attended school, working first as a child then as a youth, in the fields of the vast estates that surrounded the town. He committed his first recorded crime in 1948, killing a man and wounding another in a brawl over a woman. He served only 6 years of a 16-year sentence, and on his release was taken under the wing of Luciano Leggio, who most likely brought him into the Corleone cosche. <br /> <br /> Leggio was one of the most formidable and deadliest of Mafiosi, who grabbed control of the Corleone family after slaughtering its head, Dr. Michele Navarra in June 1958. With Riina by his side, Leggio pumped over a hundred bullets into Navarra, his car driver, another unfortunate doctor who just happened to be along for the ride that day.<br /> <br /> Over the next five years, Leggio, along with Riina as his second-in-command, purged the Corleone family of its Navarra henchmen, killing at least 140 men in the process. With Leggio as the undisputed head, and Riina as his pit bull, the Corleonisi presented the younger, more viscous face of Cosa Nostra, earning for the town that nurtured it, a unique sobriquet from the Mafia’s American counterparts. They referred to it as Tombstone.<br /> <br /> The seat of power for the Sicilian Mafia had always been Palermo, where at least nine different families operated, competing with each other for the spoils from smuggling, kidnapping and the huge rewards growing out of the contracting boom, fuelled by massive government subsidies following the end of the second world war. These cosche’s looked down on the Corleonisi, treating them as viddami, or peasants, as they waged their own internal wars. These culminated in the incident at Ciaculli in 1963, when seven carabinieri where blown to pieces by a bomb planted in a car. The deaths sent shockwaves through the Mafia, and an unprecedented crackdown by the authorities. 10,000 extra police flooded Sicily and over 1000 Mafiosi were arrested. Included in this sweep, were Leggio and Riina. They went to trial eventually, in 1969, and were acquitted.<br /> <br /> In 1970, Leggio was again arrested, and this time, tried and convicted of the murder of Michele Navarra, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He disappeared before the verdict could be rendered, living the good life in exile until the police caught him in 1974. Moved to a top security prison on the island of Sardinia, he died there in November 1993.<br /> <br /> <br /> Riina, after his 1969 acquittal, was deemed an undesirable, and ordered off into exile for four years to a village near Bologna, on the mainland. He never surrendered himself to the authorities however, disappearing on July 7th 1969. It was the last time that the police would see him until that morning in Palermo in 1993. <br /> <br /> In that almost quarter of a century, there had been many changes in the Mafia. Something akin to a tsunami wave had swept away the old order, replacing it with a monstrous killing machine that would destroy literally anything that would dare to stand in its path - - police officers, politicians, judges, reporters, parliamentarians, even little children. Between 1979 and 1982, the ferocious Corleone Mafiosi killed all the top authorities in Sicily: the President of the regional parliament, the prefect, the chief prosecutor, the top investigative judge, and the head of the opposition Communist party. <br /> <br /> There was even worse to come in the next ten years up to 1992. They killed the head of the Palermo investigative office, the head of the Palermo fugitive squad, an anti-Mafia investigator based in Palermo, the prosecutor of Palermo, businessmen, bureaucrats, Salvatore Lima, a top aid to Andreotti and then in two short months committed perhaps the most infamous assassination of all, destroying in massive bomb blasts, Judges Giovanni Falcone in May and Paolo Borsellino in July.<br /> <br /> Giovanni Falcone had become a symbol in Italy’s prolonged and often fruitless struggle against the Mafia. He had long been on Riina’s hit-list because of his triumphs against the secret society, including the 1986 Palermo maxi-trial, which indicted 338 Mafiosi. Borsellino took over the job of the Sicilian standard bearer of the anti-Mafia crusade on Falcone’s death, and from his first hour in office, his days were also numbered. <br /> <br /> The murders of Falcone and Borsellino were a watershed in Italy’s recognition of just how much a state of siege existed in Sicily. Public revulsion and anger at the massacre of these two brave and resolute magistrates helped remove once and for all, the mystique that had surrounded the Mafia for so many years. They were seen at last, to be simply savage, unmitigated killers, without conscience or scruples of any kind. A monstrous killing machine and Riina was the engine driver at the controls. And then there was the kiss.<br /> <br /> The disclosure of Di Maggio about the meeting between Andreotti and Riina was to say the least, of more than passing interest. It was an event that could be likened to President Ronald Regan meeting John Gotti in that chintzy little room above The Ravenite, and exchanging hugs and kisses. <br /> <br /> Riina, arguably, the most notorious mobster in the world, cohabiting with a man who represented law and order at the highest level, a man who had been the actual head of a country. Could it possibly have happened?<br /> <br /> At a famous trial in 1947, following the massacre of peasant farmers and their families enjoying a Labour Day picnic at Portella della Ginestra, one of the defendants had cried out in his statement, ‘Mafia, police, state, they are all one body, like Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’ <br /> <br /> Did the meeting between Andreotti and Riina simply confirm that this unholy trinity was still alive and well forty years later?<br /> <br /> Andreotti’s link into the Mafia had first been disclosed in 1985 by the ‘Prince of Turncoats,’ Tommaso Buscetta, the Palermo mafioso, who was the first major pentito. After the extermination of the greater party of his biological family, and his cosche by the rival Greco-Corleonesi families between 1981 and 1984, he decided to collaborate with the authorities. Over the years, a further twenty-six Mafiosi would give evidence linking the politician to the secret society. But the evidence of Di Maggio was the most startling.<br /> <br /> On that balmy, September afternoon, he drove a white VW Golf turbo to a warehouse in Palermo, picked up his master, Riina, and delivered him to that address in the piazza Vittorio Veneto. Another Mafiosi met them, a man who he remembered was called Rabito, Salvo’s personal assistant, who led them through the building, and into a room with a parquet floor covered by a big carpet. The room was stuffed with bookcases and tables and sofas, and the walls were hung with painting. On one chair he recognized Senor Salvatore Lima, arguably the most powerful Christian Democratic politician in Sicily. The ex-mayor of Palermo, he had been mentioned by the Italian Parliament anti-Mafia commission 149 times, and had been described as one of the pillars of the Mafia. On another chair sat the Honourable Giulio Andreotti, who he recognized without a shadow of a doubt. His testimony was quite explicit:<br /> <br /> ‘I shook hands with the parliamentarians and kissed Ignazio Salvo…Riina, on the other hand, kissed all three persons, Andreotti, Lima and Salva.’ <br /> <br /> And there was the kiss: a sign of respect, a bonding between and a confirmation among men of equals, an embrace that would come to shake the very foundation on which stood the history and democracy of one of the oldest, civilized countries in the world. On that hot, summer Sicilian afternoon, the small, fragile, hunchbacked minister of foreign affairs rising from the velvet softness of the sofa, to be enfolded by the equally small, but thickset and stocky uncouth mass murderer, who had terrorized part of Italy for almost a quarter of a century. lo Zio Giulio, Uncle Giulio, as he was known in the Mafia, and ‘Toto’ the beast, its omnipotent head.<br /> <br /> The Palermo chief prosecutor, Giancarlo Caselli, compiled a dossier on Andreotti, and in February 1995 laid 96 formal charges against the life senator, alleging his association with the Mafia, not in the passive tense, but as a man active within its power structure. <br /> <br /> The case began on March 27th. 1993 when the office of the Palermo Public Prosecutor requested authorization to investigate Andreotti. The indictments ran to 90,000 pages and Andreotti was ordered to stand trial in September 1995. The thrust of the prosecutor’s case was that Andreotti, in exchange for a key bloc of Sicilian votes, delivered by the Mafia, aided and abetted them from his position of vast influence in Rome, serving in essence, as the Mafia’s protector. <br /> <br /> The major witnesses against the defendant were Mafia informers, including Di Maggio; the prosecution devoting seven pages of their indictment testimony to that kiss. It was a long and torturous litigation that came to be known in Italy, as ‘The trial of the Century.’ There would be 250 hearings, 340 witnesses, and 800,00 procedural pages of testimony spread over the next six years.<br /> <br /> In 1996, Andreotti went on trial again, this time, in Perugia, 150 miles north of Rome, accused in the complicity in the murder of investigative journalist, Mino Pecorelli, who had been gunned down in March 1979. <br /> <br /> A poll in Italy at the time of the trials, showed 67% of the population believed that Andreotti was in bed with the Mafia, but that 54% were sure he would be acquitted; perhaps Italians were simply resigned to that fact that crime and politics in their country were long time bed-fellows. The Sicilian Mafia is perhaps the original and incomparable prototype of what organized crime and politics can achieve when working hand-in-hand. <br /> <br /> On September 24th, 1999, Andreotti was acquitted on the murder charge in Perugia, and a month later, a panel of three judges in Palermo, also acquitted him in his trial on the Mafia conspiracies charges. The complex Italian judiciary process was unable to accept proof of guilt, based as it was almost entirely on the words of the penitenti. <br /> <br /> The public were less than impressed by the fact that Di Maggio for example, had been awarded 500 million lira by the government (less than 200,000 US dollars), and that while in the state protection program, he had somehow been able to stalk, and murder an opponent. <br /> <br /> Riina is serving twelve consecutive life sentences for his life of crime and terrorism. It is save to assume he will never be released. Things wouldn’t get better either. In November 2001 his eldest son, Giovanni, was convicted in the homicide of Giuseppe Giammona, killed in Corleone, on January 28th. 1995, along with his sister, Giovanna and her husband Francisco Saporito, and sentenced to life in prison. The younger son, Giuseppe, went down in December 2004 for 14 years on various charges. Things would not turn out so hot for Di Maggio as well. <br /> <br /> He was arrested on October 14th. 1997 for accessory to murder. In the May of 1996, he had slipped away from his police guard, and travelled to Altofonte, a small town eight miles from Palermo, and on August 30th. had murdered Giuseppe Carfi, a brother-in-law of local Mafia boss, Andrea Di Carlo. Less than six months after Di Maggio’s arrest, on March 21st. 1998, his brother, Emmanuelle, was riddled with eleven bullets while driving on a highway near Palermo. Within two years, Di Maggio would be confined to a wheel chair, suffering from progressive paralysis, the government moving him from prison to prison, as it agonized over whether or not to release him on compassionate grounds.<br /> <br /> Andreotti finally gave up politics and retired from public life. Although his last Hurrah in 2008, helped to tumble the Italian government and the resignation of Romana Prodi, making way for the re-election of Silvio Bersculoni, a man who has almost as many connections to the Mafia as Andreotti himself. He writes regular articles for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and apparently keeps himself busy even at the age of ninety-one. If ever there was a survivor it is him. Italians would say, <br /> <br /> ‘He’s behind everything, but he’s so smart, he never gets caught’ <br /> <br /> There was even a popular song about him, and one of its lines went: ‘Who stole the cake? Andreotti. Who’s behind the Mafia? Andreotti.’<br /> <br /> But some things never change. Visit the bleak and barren countryside near Corleone today, and you will still see herds of sheep, goats, cattle and horses being driven by men on mules, everyone carrying a lupara, the traditional Mafia sawn-off shotgun, slung over his shoulder. These are the operators in the old-style Mafia, ripping off the landowners and the contadini, the peasants, with their schemes of extortion, rustling and whenever necessary resorting to violence and murder.<br /> <br /> In an interview before he died, Judge Falcone said, ‘The Mafia is a human phenomenon, and like all human phenomena, it has a beginning, it has a peak and it has an end.’<br /> <br /> It may have been wishful thinking.<br /> <br style="font-style:italic;" /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Mafia is oppression, arrogance, greed, self-gratification, power and hegemony above and against all others. It is not an abstract concept, or a state of mind, or a literary term. It is a criminal organization regulated by unwritten but iron and inexorable rules. The myth of a courageous and generous ‘man of honour‘ must be destroyed, because a Mafiosi is just the opposite.</span><br /> <br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Caesar Terranova, Italian magistrate murdered by</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">the Mafia, September 25th. 1979.</span></p>
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