End of Cosa Nostra?
Rome – With Mafia king Toto Riina’s death, and heir Matteo Messina Denaro on the run, is it game over for Sicily’s once all-powerful Cosa Nostra?
“Riina will go down in history as the man who destroyed Cosa Nostra,” Mafia expert Attilio Bolzoni said of the death of Toto Riina.
“With his strategy of bloody massacres in Sicily and across Italy, he turned an invisible Mafia visible – with hundreds, thousands of murders, carried out first with Kalashnikovs, then bombs.
“For the first time in history, the state reacted mercilessly,” Bolzoni said, with the arrest of hundreds of bosses and the introduction of harsh anti-mafia laws that saw imprisoned gangsters held in utter isolation.
Riina was unable to stop the decimation of the crime group, which was gradually supplanted by the Camorra in Naples and Ndrangheta in Calabria.
“It’s infinitely less powerful than before,” the head of Italy’s national anti-mafia body Maurizio De Lucia said.
Multi-murderer playboy Messina Denaro, one of the world’s most-wanted men, is seen by many as Riina’s natural heir but has been on the run since 1993.
“Cosa Nostra is a very strictly structured organisation, similar to an absolute monarchy. While the king still lives, it’s not possible to think of picking a successor,” De Lucia said.
“The question now is whether the organisation is strong enough to identify and appoint an heir.”
But prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio warned the days of shootouts and car bombs may be gone, but Cosa Nostra has been growing fat instead on political deals.
Pietro Grasso, Italy’s senate speaker and a former anti-mafia magistrate, stressed that the battle is not over.
“But none of us must stop searching for the truth”. –