Salvatore Riina
Sicilian ‘Boss of Bosses’ whose reign of violence finally compelled the Italian state to crack down
SALVATORE RIINA, who has died of cancer aged 87 in the maximum security prison at Parma where he had been held in solitary confinement for more than two decades, was the most violent Italian Mafia leader in history. He killed at least 40 people personally and is thought to have ordered the deaths of hundreds more. His nicknames were “La Belva” (The Beast) because of his brutality and “Totò u Curtu” (Totò the Short) because of his diminutive stature. He was only 5ft 2in tall and yet during the 1980s rose from obscurity to become head of Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian Mafia), after provoking a bloody civil war between the Mafia families of Sicily in 1981-82.
The Sicilian author Vincenzo Consolo wrote of him: “To look at his swollen fingers and his neckless head, and his out of breath spongy face … to look at his inscrutable eyes, like rotten rubber, deprived of light, takes you back into the past … And you wonder how is it possible that such a man … could have taken command of an organisation like Cosa Nostra.”
Once Riina became Capo di tutti i capi (Boss of Bosses) he compelled Cosa Nostra – against the wishes of the older Mafia families – to add drug trafficking to the traditional core businesses of protection and construction.
The sickening violence Cosa Nostra unleashed in the 1980s and 1990s compelled the Italian state to use everything in its power to destroy it once and for all. Cosa Nostra, which had always tried to work within the political system by infiltrating and corrupting it, now, in reaction to the repression, declared war on the state.
Salvatore Riina was born on November 16 1930 in Corleone, a picturesque but poverty stricken agricultural town 37 miles south of Palermo on the road to Agrigento. He was the second of six siblings – three boys and three girls. His mother Maria Concetta and father Giovanni owned three hectares of land which they cultivated. He left school aged eight to work in the fields.
In September 1943 – nine weeks after the Allied invasion of Sicily – his father found an unexploded Allied bomb on his land and brought it home. Watched by his three sons, he tried to open it and extract the explosive. The idea was to re-sell it. But the bomb exploded, killing both him and his youngest son, Francesco, aged seven. Salvatore, aged 12, and the other brother, Gaetano, were injured but survived.
So Salvatore, barely a teenager, now became the effective head of the Riina household and began to work for Luciano Leggio, a young local Mafioso, stealing cattle and grain. At 18 he was sworn into the Honoured Society, like so many Sicilians, at a secret initiation ceremony.
But in 1950, aged 19, he shot dead another man in Corleone during a brawl and was sentenced to 12 years in prison for manslaughter. He served six years and while in prison attended lessons. On his release, he became engaged to Antonietta Bagarella, who was still only 14 and would go on to graduate from university and become a school teacher.
Immediately, Riina took up where he had left off with Leggio, who by now was determined to take over the Corleone Mafia. To do this, Leggio – whose nickname was “U Professuri” (The Professor: he was virtually illiterate but harboured intellectual pretensions) – had to kill its undisputed boss, Michele Navarra, a former Army captain and physician, whose nickname was “U Patri
Nostrum” (Our Father).
On August 2 1958, Navarra’s car was ambushed in broad daylight by 14 of Leggio’s men armed with sub-machine guns who opened fire, killing him and his passenger, a young doctor whose wife was pregnant. The assassins included Riina, who was 27, and Bernardo Provenzano, nicknamed
“Binnu u tratturi” (Bernard the Tractor), who was 25. These two young men would later become the leaders of Cosa Nostra in Sicily during the 1980s and remain so for some 20 years.
The murder of Navarra caused a five-year-long civil war within the Corleone Mafia which was won by “the Professor” Leggio and his more violent faction. In 1963 Riina was once again imprisoned for several years and after his release condemned to house arrest. In 1969, however, he decided to go into hiding.
Not that being on the run hindered him. Far from it. For it was now that he began his bid to take power. He, Leggio and Provenzano formed an alliance with Vito Ciancimino, the Mayor of Palermo, who had like them been born in Corleone.
Together the four Corleonesi subjugated the old Palermo Mafia families, who nicknamed them “I
viddani” (the peasants). In 1974, when Leggio was eventually arrested and jailed for life for the murder of Navarra, Riina became the boss of the Corleonesi and swiftly escalated the use of violence.
This led to the so-called Second Mafia War of 1981-82, which the Corleonesi won and which crowned Riina Capo di tutti i capi. The carnage left more than 1,000 people dead, mainly Mafiosi, but also General Carlo Dalla Chiesa, who had been sent to Sicily to deal with the Mafia after defeating the communist Red Brigades on the mainland.
Dalla Chiesa and his wife were murdered by gunmen on the night of September 3 1982 in Palermo as they drove to a restaurant in their car. The assassins also killed a police officer in the escort car behind them. Riina and his number two Provenzano were later given life sentences in absentia for ordering these murders.
The Mafia family in the Godfather films of Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by Mario Puzo, is named after Corleone where Riina was born. As a result, the town has achieved cult status. But an abyss separates Marlon Brando’s patrician Godfather and his stylish son (Al Pacino) from the real-life version. Traditionally, Mafia bosses in Sicily were high-profile members of the community with close ties to politicians whom they kept on side with bribes and the guarantee of votes. They rarely needed to use violence. Riina and Provenzano, on the other hand, used violence as a first not a last resort.
In 1984 Tommaso Buscetta became the first senior Mafioso to become a supergrass and break the Mafia code of silence (omertà). He was from a rival clan and the Corleonesi had killed two of his sons plus relatives and friends, and he wanted revenge. His testimony was crucial to the first Mafia Maxi Trial, which took place inside a purpose-built, rocket-proof bunker court house in Palermo in 1986/87.
He told Italy’s leading anti-mafia prosecuting judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, that the Sicilian Mafia was a unified organisation run like a big company by a board of directors – the Cupola. The numerous Mafia families were branch offices, he explained, run from the centre.
Buscetta described Riina to judge Falcone thus: “To look at he seems a peasant, Doctor Falcone, but he’s intelligent, and cunning, and he’s sick with ‘sbirritudine’ (paranoia about surveillance)”.
Cosa Nostra reacted to Buscetta’s betrayal of omertà by ordering the bombing of a Naples-milan train on December 23 1984; it was detonated by remote control while the train was inside a 12-mile-long tunnel, killing 16 and wounding 266. The Maxi Trial went ahead regardless and as a result 360 of the 474 Mafiosi put on trial were convicted (many, such as Riina and Provenzano, in absentia) and in January 1992 the convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s decision enraged Riina, who immediately ordered the assassination in rapid succession of the Christian Democrat Euro MP Salvatore Lima – the righthand man in Sicily of seven-times prime minister Giulio Andreotti, he was shot dead – and then of the two top anti-mafia judges: Falcone, whose wife and three police officers died with him when a bomb hidden under the road was remotely detonated as he and his police escort passed over it; and Borsellino, plus five police officers, killed by another bomb hidden inside a parked car at the entrance to the Palermo apartment block where his mother lived – this one detonated when Borsellino pressed the electronic door bell.
These deaths caused such outrage in Italy that the country’s political class united to launch a massive crackdown on the Mafia. Within less than a year police arrested Riina, thanks, said prosecutors, to a tip-off from another supergrass.
The Mafia boss was arrested on January 15 1993 at the fortified, palatial villa in Palermo in which he had lived with his family for at least 20 years right under the noses of the police. From that day until his death he remained in prison. It is hard to believe that the police had not known where he had lived all those years.
The Mafia retaliated by launching a series of bomb attacks, including one outside the Uffizi gallery in Florence which killed five people including a seven-week-old girl. But the bomb attacks ceased because – it is believed – Provenzano, who soon became the new Capo di tutti i capi, felt that such violence was counter-productive.
Riina, it transpired, had received regular medical attention during his years on the run and had even been on honeymoon with his wife to Venice after their marriage in 1974 (which took place in church but was never registered at the town hall). His four children were all registered under their real names and his wife worked as a teacher. After his arrest, she and the children returned to live in Corleone.
Riina was tried and convicted of more than 100 murders. About $125 million dollars worth of his assets were confiscated, probably only a fraction of the total. His two sons, Giovanni and Giuseppe, became Mafiosi: Giovanni Francesco, born in 1976, was arrested in 1996 for the murder of four people and sentenced to life. He has been in jail ever since and is held in Terni prison where his father’s successor as the boss of Cosa Nostra, Provenzano, was initially held after his own arrest in April 2006; he died in prison in 2016.
There has always been talk that Provenzano himself, via intermediaries, had also been involved in tipping off the police as to Riina’s whereabouts in 1993 because he objected to his violence. Provenzano’s betrayal was denied by Riina’s youngest son, Giuseppe Salvatore, born in 1977, in an interview with Oggi in 2012. Giuseppe was jailed for eight years for Mafia association, extortion and money-laundering, released on parole in 2012 and confined to live in Padua in north-east Italy. His father loved music, growing vegetables and keeping animals, he added.
Riina’s two other children are daughters.
Salvatore Riina, born November 16 1930, died November 17 2017