Italian mobster and chief of the Sicilian Mafia dies a completely different death when compared to that of his rivals. Here are the details.
Former “boss of bosses” Toto Riina, one of the most feared Godfathers in the history of the Sicilian Mafia, died early Friday, the 17th of November.
Salvatore “Toto’” Riina, the unrepentant “boss of all bosses” of the Sicilian Mafia, has died aged 87 in jail where he spent 24 years for leaving a trail of blood across Italy.
Riina was born in 1930 to poor farmers in Corleone, Sicily – the birthplace of Don Corleone, the fictional Godfather in Francis Ford Coppola’s film trilogy.
Known as “u curtu” or “the short one” for his small stature, he was born in the hillside town of Corleone in 1930. He committed his first murder when he was just 18 and rose to become the undisputed godfather of Cosa Nostra in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nicknamed “the Beast” because of his cruelty, Riina was an unrepentant criminal who not only assassinated his criminal rivals on an unprecedented scale in the 1980s and 90s, but also targeted the prosecutors, journalists, and judges who sought to stand in his way.
Among Riina’s victims were Piersanti Mattarella, the president of Sicily, who was killed in 1980, as well as Pio La Torre, a Communist party leader assassinated in 1982 for designing legislation that introduced the crime of “Mafia conspiracy”. But his most infamous crimes came in 1992 when he ordered the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two of the leading anti-Mafia judges. The murders shocked the nation and triggered a massive counter-offensive against Cosa Nostra by the Italian state from which it has never really recovered.
In the end, it was Riina who was defeated.
He was said to have been suffering from a heart condition, Parkinson’s disease as well as kidney cancer.
Riina had been in a medically induced coma and his family had been given special permission to visit him in the prisoners’ wing of the hospital in Parma, northern Italy.
“After [Riina] nothing was the same. The Mafia stopped shooting to dedicate itself, without a unitary organization, to business, public contracts, drugs, the new landscape of the global economy, and deals with politicians. But without that criminal ferocity that Riina’s death has now consigned to history,” Il Giornale di Sicilia, the island’s main newspaper, wrote on Friday.
The Sicilian mafia is far weaker now, left in disarray by Riina, who sought unsuccessfully to lead it from his prison cell in Parma. The crime syndicate still exists and still shapes people’s social and economic lives in parts of Sicily, but it is a shadow of what it once was, undermined by the relentless scrutiny of Italian police and prosecutors and unable to regain its dominance of the illegal drug trade.
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