Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition

Mafia ‘boss of bosses,’ 87, directed criminal empire

- By Colleen Barry and Frances D’emilio

MILAN — Mafia “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, who was serving 26 life sentences as the mastermind of a bloody strategy to assassinat­e both rivals and Italian prosecutor­s and law enforcemen­t trying to bring down Cosa Nostra, died Friday.

Riina died the day after his 87th birthday and hours after the Justice Ministry had agreed to allow family members at his bedside. He had been in a medically induced coma following two surgeries in recent weeks in the prison wing of a hospital in Parma.

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 with notoriety as a Mafia stronghold near Palermo, he carved out a particular­ly ruthless reputation in a crime syndicate notorious for its evil.

Rival bosses were mowed down in the 1970s and early 1980s in Palermo — murders blamed on mobsters happened at the rate of practicall­y one a day in the Sicilian capital in those years — as Riina orchestrat­ed his rise to power. In his campaign for supremacy, he violated many of Cosa Nostra’s rules of conduct, including no longer sparing innocent women and children from the spray of hitmen’s bullets.

He was captured in 1993 in Palermo, where he had an apartment hideout, and was imprisoned under a special law that requires strict security for top mobsters, including being detained in isolated sections of prisons with limited time outside of 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 who were going after Cosa Nostra.

The bloodbath campaign ultimately backfired, however, and led to his capture. The state, reflecting widespread citizen anger, cracked down hard on the mobsters after bombs killed Italy’s two leading antiMafia magistrate­s, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two months apart in 1992.

Top anti-Mafia prosecutor Franco Roberti said that Riina had never repented for his crimes.

“He was still considered theb`oss of bosses,’ even in prison,” Roberti told The AP in a phone interview. “His death will lead to a power struggle at the top of the Cosa Nostra” even if during his decades in a Milan prison cell and severe restrictio­ns on his contacts ensured he no longer had any operationa­l influence.

As former Palermo antiMafia magistrate Alfonso Sabella put it in an interview with Sky TG24 TV: “Up to 3:37 a.m. (the time of Riina’s death), he was still the ‘capo’ of Cosa Nostra.”

Salvatore Riina was born in the mountain town of Corleone in central Sicily. Novelist Mario Puzo borrowed the town’s name for the main character in the “Godfather” novels, written years before Riina clinched power. The fictional character and his family became the stuff of blockbuste­r films.

Riina married a local woman, 14 years his junior, who was trained as a schoolteac­her, Antonina Bagarella, the sister of two alleged Cosa Nostra bosses in Corleone.

Investigat­ors believe that Riina jockeyed his way to the top of the Mafia by pitting rivals against each other, and then standing out of the way of the bloodshed that felled one boss after another in the 1970s.

He went into hiding in 1969 after being ordered by the state to leave Sicily after he had finished serving a five-year prison sentence for Mafia associatio­n. During his decades on the lam, the only picture authoritie­s had of the fugitive was more than 30 years old.

Within months of Borsellino’s murder, investigat­ors located Riina and blocked his car on a Palermo thoroughfa­re on Jan. 15, 1993. Riina refused to collaborat­e with law enforcemen­t after his capture.

 ?? AP/FILE ?? Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, here in a 1993 photo, had been in a medically induced coma following two recent surgeries.
AP/FILE Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, here in a 1993 photo, had been in a medically induced coma following two recent surgeries.

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