Salvatore "Totò" Riina (16 November 1930 – 17 November 2017) was an Italian mobster and boss of the Sicilian Mafia. He is known for a ruthless murder campaign that reached a peak in the early 1990s with the assassinations of Antimafia Commission prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, resulting in widespread public outcry, legal change and a major crackdown by the authorities. He was also known by the nicknames ('the beast') and (, 'the boss of bosses').
Riina succeeded Luciano Leggio as head of the Corleonesi criminal organisation in the mid-1970s and achieved dominance through a campaign of violence, which caused police to target his rivals. Riina had been a fugitive since the late 1960s after he was indicted on a murder charge. He was less vulnerable to law enforcement's reaction to his methods, as the policing removed many of the established chiefs who had traditionally sought influence through bribery. In violation of established Mafia codes, Riina advocated the killing of women and children and killed innocent members of the public solely to distract law enforcement agencies.
Hitman Giovanni Brusca estimated he murdered between 100 and 200 people on behalf of Riina. Although this scorched-earth policy neutralized any internal threat to Riina's position, he increasingly showed a lack of his earlier guile by bringing his organisation into open confrontation with the state. As part of the Maxi Trial of 1986, Riina was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for Mafia association and multiple murders. After 23 years of living as a fugitive, he was captured in 1993, provoking a series of indiscriminate bombings of art galleries and churches by his organisation. His lack of repentance subjected him to the stringent Article 41-bis prison regime until his death on 17 November 2017.
Early life and career Riina was born on 16 November 1930, and raised in a poverty-stricken countryside house in Corleone, in the then-province of Palermo. In September 1943, his father Giovanni found an unexploded American bomb and attempted to open it to sell the powder and metal, but in doing so, set it off, killing himself and Riina's seven-year-old brother Francesco, while injuring his other brother Gaetano.Enrico Deaglio, Raccolto rosso: la mafia, l'Italia e poi venne giù tutto, Feltrinelli, 1993, p. 158. At the age of 19, Riina was sentenced to a 12-year prison sentence for having killed Domenico Di Matteo with a handgun in a fight; he was released in 1956.
The head of the Mafia family in Corleone was Michele Navarra until 6 August 1958, when he was shot dead by a trio of gunmen with submachine guns on the orders of Luciano Leggio, a ruthless 33-year-old Mafioso, who subsequently became the new boss. Together with Riina, Calogero Bagarella and Bernardo Provenzano (who were the three gunmen in Navarra's slaying), Leggio began to increase the power of the Corleonesi.
In the early 1960s, Leggio, Riina and Provenzano, who had spent the previous few years hunting down and killing dozens of Navarra's surviving supporters, were forced to go into hiding due to arrest warrants. Riina and Leggio were arrested and tried in 1969 for murders carried out earlier that decade. They were acquitted because of intimidation of the jurors and witnesses. Riina went into hiding later that year after he was indicted on a further murder charge and was to remain a fugitive for the next 23 years.
On 16 May 1974, Leggio was captured and imprisoned for the 1958 murder of Navarra. Although Leggio retained some influence from behind bars, Riina was now the effective head of the Corleonesi. He also had close relations with the 'Ndrangheta, the Mafia-type association in Calabria. His compare d'anello (a kind of best man and trusted friend, typical of the Southern Italian tradition) at his wedding in 1974 was Domenico Tripodo, a powerful 'Ndrangheta boss and prolific cigarette smuggler.E ora la 'ndrangheta supera cosa nostra: Intervista a Enzo Ciconte , Polizia e democrazia, November–December 2007
The Corleonesi's primary rivals were Stefano Bontade, Salvatore Inzerillo and Tano Badalamenti, bosses of various powerful Palermo Mafia families. Bontade and Inzerillo's assassinations in 1981 by Riina's Corleonesi instigated a period of up to a thousand murders known as the Second Mafia War. By the end of the war, the Corleonesi were effectively ruling the Mafia, and over the next few years Riina increased his influence by eliminating the Corleonesi's allies, such as Filippo Marchese, Giuseppe Greco and Rosario Riccobono. In January 1981, Tommaso Buscetta fled to Brazil to escape the brewing Second Mafia War.
Mafia leadership
Allegations of political influence Prior to Riina's faction becoming the dominant force on the island, the Sicilian Mafia were based in Palermo, where they controlled large numbers of votes, enabling mutually beneficial relationships with local political figures such as mayors of Palermo Vito Ciancimino and Salvatore Lima. Ciancimino, who was born in Corleone, corruptly allowed untrammelled property development on the well-known valley known as the "Golden Bowl" (Conca d'Oro), amassing a vast fortune in the process. Lima granted a valuable monopoly concession on tax collection to Mafia businessman Ignazio Salvo, and was instrumental in Rome-based Giulio Andreotti becoming a force in national politics. In his turn, Salvo acted as financier to Andreotti.Follain, J., Vendetta, 2012
These connections caused some to suspect that Riina had forged similar links with Andreotti, although the courts acquitted Andreotti of associations with the Mafia after 1980.'Kiss of honour' between Andreotti and Mafia head never happened , The Independent, 26 July 2003 Baldassare Di Maggio alleged that Riina met with the then Prime Minister Andreotti at Salvo's home in 1987 and greeted him with a "kiss of honour".Stille, Excellent Cadavers, p. 392Le dichiarazioni di Baldassare Di Maggio, in Sentenza Andreotti Andreotti dismissed the charges against him as "lies and slander … the kiss of Riina, mafia summits … scenes out of a comic horror film". Veteran journalist Indro Montanelli doubted the claim, saying Andreotti "doesn't even kiss his own children"., Time, 3 June 1996 Di Maggio's credibility had been shaken in the closing weeks of the Andreotti trial, when he admitted killing a man while under state protection. Appellate court judges rejected Di Maggio's testimony., The Independent, 26 July 2003
Strategy of violence
Whereas his predecessors had kept a low profile, leading some in law enforcement to question the very existence of the Mafia, Riina ordered the murders of judges, policemen and prosecutors in an attempt to terrify the authorities. A law to create a new offence of Mafia association and confiscate Mafia assets was introduced by Pio La Torre, secretary of the Italian Communist Party in Sicily, but it had been stalled in parliament for two years. La Torre was murdered on 30 April 1982. In May 1982, the Italian government sent Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a general of the Italian Carabinieri, to Sicily with orders to crush the Mafia. However, not long after arriving, on the evening of 3 September 1982, he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in the city centre with his wife, Emanuela Setti Carraro, and his police escort, Domenico Russo. In response to public disquiet about the failure to effectively combat the organisation Riina headed, La Torre's law was passed ten days later.Inside The Mafia , National Geographic Channel, June 2005.
On 11 September 1982, Buscetta's two sons from his first wife, Benedetto and Antonio, disappeared, never to be found again, which prompted his collaboration with Italian authorities. This was followed by the deaths of his brother Vincenzo, son-in-law Giuseppe Genova, brother-in-law Pietro and four of his nephews, Domenico and Benedetto Buscetta, and Orazio and Antonio D'Amico. Buscetta was arrested in São Paulo, Brazil once again on 23 October 1983, and extradited to Italy on 15 July 1984. Buscetta asked to talk to the anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, and began his life as an informant, referred to as a pentito.
Christmas Massacre Buscetta was the first high-profile Sicilian Mafioso to become an informant. He revealed that the Mafia was a single organisation led by a Commission, or Cupola (Dome), thereby establishing that the top tier of Mafia members were complicit in all the organisation's crimes.Follain, p. 19–21 Buscetta helped judges Falcone and Paolo Borsellino achieve significant success in the fight against organized crime that led to 475 Mafia members indicted, and 338 convicted in the Maxi Trial.
In an attempt to divert investigative resources away from Buscetta's key revelations, Riina ordered a terrorist-style atrocity in the form of the 23 December 1984 Train 904 bombing; 17 people were killed and 267 wounded in the Apennine Base Tunnel. It became known as the "Christmas Massacre" (Strage di Natale) and was initially attributed to political extremists. It was only several years later, when police stumbled on explosives of the same type as used in Train 904, while searching the hideout of Giuseppe Calò, that it became apparent that the Mafia had been behind the attack.Rapido 904: "Un intreccio tra mafia, camorra e politica" , Il Fatto Quotidiano, 27 April 2011
Assassination of Falcone and Borsellino As part of the Maxi Trial, Riina was given two life sentences in absentia. Riina pinned his prospects on the lengthy appeal process that had frequently set convicted mafiosi free, and he suspended the campaign of murders against officials while the cases went to higher courts. When the convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court of Cassation On 30 January 1992,Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and the Procura of Palermo , Peter Schneider & Jane Schneider, May 2002, essay is based on excerpts from Chapter Six of Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia and the Struggle for Palermo, Berkeley: U. of California Press the council of top bosses headed by Riina reacted by ordering the assassination of Salvatore Lima (on the grounds that he was an ally of Giulio Andreotti), and Giovanni Falcone.
On 23 May 1992, Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and three police officers died in the Capaci bombing on highway A29 outside Palermo. Two months later, Borsellino was killed along with five police officers in the entrance to his mother's apartment block by a car bomb in via D'Amelio.Interview of agent Vullo the day after the massacre. Both attacks were ordered by Riina. Ignazio Salvo, who had advised Riina against killing Falcone, was himself murdered on 17 September 1992. The public was outraged, both at the Mafia and also the politicians who they felt had failed to adequately protect Falcone and Borsellino. The Italian government arranged for a massive crackdown against the Mafia in response. Riina was given a life sentence for each of Falcone's and Borsellino's murders, in 1997 and 1999 respectively.
Claims of negotiations with the government