The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Notorious mafia boss ‘Toto’ Riina
Mafia “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina has died in hospital while serving multiple life sentences as the mastermind of a bloody strategy to assassinate Italian prosecutors trying to bring down the Cosa Nostra.
Riina died the day after his 87th birthday, hours after the Justice Ministry had agreed to allow family at his bedside.
He had been in a medically induced coma following two operations in recent weeks in the prison wing of a hospital in Parma, northern Italy.
Riina, one of Sicily’s most notorious Mafia bosses who ruthlessly directed the mob’s criminal empire during 23 years in hiding, was serving the life sentences for multiple murder convictions, some dating back to the 1950s.
A farmer’s son from Corleone, a rocky hill town and Mafia stronghold near Palermo, he carved out a particularly ruthless reputation in a crime syndicate notorious for its methods.
Rival bosses were mowed down in the 1970s and early 1980s in Palermo – murders blamed on mobsters happened at the rate of one a day in the Sicilian capital in those years – as Riina rose to power.
In his campaign for supremacy, he violated many of Cosa Nostra’srulesofconduct,including no longer sparing innocent women and children from the hitmen’s bullets.
He was captured in Palermo in 1993 and imprisoned under a law that requires strict security for top mobsters, including being detained in isolated sections of prisons with limited time outside their cells.
During the height of his power, prosecutors accused Riina of masterminding a strategy, carried out over several years, to assassinate Italian prosecutors, police officials and others going after the Cosa Nostra.
The bloody campaign led to his capture as the enraged state fought back after bombs killed Italy’s two leading anti-Mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two months apart in 1992.