Italian Mafia’s ‘boss of bosses’ dies at 87
ROME — Salvatore Riina, the Mafia’s murderous “boss of bosses,” who earned multiple life sentences and the nickname “the Beast” for his cruelty and for unleashing a war against law enforcement that claimed the lives of Italian prosecutors and police officers, died early Friday in a hospital in the northern Italian city of Parma. He was 87.
The Ministry of Justice announced his death. He had recently undergone surgery and been placed in a medically induced coma.
As the head of Sicily’s infamous Cosa Nostra crime syndicate since the 1970s, Riina, known as Totò, had a long criminal reach that spilled blood across Italy and extended a black hand of extortion and trafficking across the globe.
He retaliated against the Italian government’s campaign to crush the Mafia by striking back hard, ordering in 1992 the bombing assassinations of two leading anti-Mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. He also orchestrated the kidnapping, strangling and dissolving in acid of the young son of a mob informer.
In 1993, Italian authorities captured Riina in Sicily’s capital, Palermo, and judges gave him 26 life sentences. He spent a good deal of the next quartercentury in isolation.
Family members were allowed to visit Riina in the hospital Thursday, his birthday.
He had four children. One of Riina’s sons is in prison for committing four murders.
Riina, who was rife with nicknames, came from Corleone, a town made famous as the birthplace of fictional character Vito Corleone in the “Godfather” movies. But Riina’s butchery was all too real.
After serving time in his youth for killing a man in an argument, he became a soldier under Mafia boss Luciano Leggio. He rose through the ranks, eliminating competitors and at times running his gang in hiding, though apparently always from Sicily. By the early 1980s, Riina had solidified his dominance over the island and its global criminal activities.
Upon Riina’s arrest in 1993, the mayor of Corleone at the time proclaimed it “a moment of liberation for us.” Children were let out of school to celebrate.