Salvatore Riina
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Salvatore Riina, also known as Totò Riina (born November 16, 1930, Corleone) is a member of the Sicilian Mafia who became the most powerful member of the criminal organisation in the early 1980s. Fellow mobsters nicknamed him The Beast due to his violent nature, or sometimes The Short One due to his diminutive height (La Belva and U curtu in Sicilian respectively) although apparently they never called him these nicknames to his face. During his life-long career in crime he is believed to have personally killed around forty people and to have ordered the deaths of upwards of a thousand more.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Riina and his Mafia faction, the Corleonesi, waged a ruthless campaign of violence against both rival mobsters and the state which culminated in the assassination of two judges. This caused widespread public revulsion of the Mafia and led to a major crackdown by the authorities, resulting in the capture and imprisonment of Riina and many of his associates.
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[edit] Rise to power
Riina was raised in Corleone, and joined the local Mafia clan at the age of eighteen, after he committed a murder on their behalf. The following year he was arrested after shooting a man dead during an argument and subsequently served six years in prison for manslaughter.
The head of the Mafia Family in Corleone was Michele Navarra until 1958 when he was shot to death on the orders of Luciano Liggio, a ruthless 33-year-old mafioso who subsequently became the new boss. Together with Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano (who were two of the gunmen in Navarra's slaying), Liggio began to increase the power of the Corleonesi. Because they hailed from a relatively small town, the Corleonesi were not a major factor in the Sicilian Mafia in the 1950s, at least not compared to the major Families based in the capital, Palermo. In a gross underestimation of the mobsters from Corleone, the Palermo bosses often referred to the Corleonesi as i viddani - "the peasants".
In the early 1960s, Liggio, Riina and Provenzano, who had spent the last 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 due to intimidation of the jurors and witnesses. Riina went into hiding later that year after he was indicted on a further murder charge and he was to remain a fugitive for the next twenty-three years.
In 1974 Luciano Liggio was arrested and imprisoned for the murder of Michele Navarra sixteen years previously, and although Liggio retained some influence from behind bars, Riina was now the effective head of the Corleonesi.
During the 1970s Sicily became an important location in the international heroin trade, especially with regards to the refining and exporting of the narcotic. The profits to be had from heroin were vast, and exceeded those of the traditional activities of extortion and loan-sharking. Totò Riina wanted to take control of the trade and was to do so by planning a war against the rival Mafia Families.
During the late 1970s, Riina orchestrated the murders of a number of high-profile public officials, such as judges, prosecutors and members of the Carabinieri. As well as intimidating the state, these assassinations also helped to frame the Corleonesi's rivals. The Godfathers of many Mafia Families were often highly visible in their communities, rubbing shoulders with politicians and mayors, protecting themselves with bribes rather than violence. In contrast, Riina, Provenzano and other Corleonesi were fugitives, always in hiding and rarely seen by other mobsters, let alone the public. Consequently, when a policeman or judge was killed it was the more visible Mafia Families who were the subject of official investigations, especially as these assassinations were deliberately carried out in the territory (or 'turf') of the Corleonesi's rivals rather than anywhere near the town of Corleone itself.
[edit] The Mafia War of 1981 to 1983
The Corleonesi's primary rivals were Stefano Bontade, Salvatore Inzerillo and Gaetano Badalamenti, bosses of various powerful Palermo Mafia Families. On April 23, 1981, Bontade was machine-gunned to death, and a few weeks later, on May 11, Inzerillo was torn apart by a hail of bullets. Various relatives and associates of the pair were subsequently killed or vanished without trace, including Inzerillo's 15-year-old son, who was killed for vowing to avenge his murdered father. Badalamenti only managed to survive by fleeing Sicily after the Corleonesi had him expelled in the late 1970s.
More and more killings took place over the next two-years, with the bloodshed best illustrated by the fact that, on a single day - November 30, 1982 - twelve Mafiosi were murdered in Palermo in twelve separate incidents. The murders even extended across the Atlantic, with one of Inzerillo's brothers being found dead in New Jersey after fleeing to the U.S.
Riina also ordered the murders of judges, policemen and prosecutors in an attempt to terrify the authorities. One of the most high-profile slayings was of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who had first gained fame combating the Red Brigades on the Italian mainland and who was brought in to become the prefect of Palermo to try and halt the rising tide of Mafia violence. On September 3, 1982, just six months after his arrival in Sicily, Dalla Chiesa, his wife and one of their bodyguards were shot to death in an ambush. The killer is believed to have been, among others, Pino Greco, one of Riina's favourite hitmen. An ace shot with an AK-47, and bearing the nickname "Little Old Shoe" due to his father's nickname "Shoe", Pino Greco is suspected of killing around three hundred people on behalf of Riina, including Bontade and Inzerillo.
During 1981 and 1982, around a thousand Mafiosi were killed as Riina decimated his opponents and they in turn tried to fight back. This number included at least 160 Mafiosi and their associates who completely vanished, victims of what is known as lupara bianca (Sicilian for "White Shotgun"), whereby the body is completely destroyed or buried so that it is never found. It was an appalling bloodbath, even with Sicily's history of Mafia violence.
Many of the victims who were never found died in the so-called "Room Of Death", a squalid apartment in Palermo run by one of Riina's allies, boss of the Corso dei Mille Family Filippo Marchese. Victims were brought there to be tortured for information, then killed and either dissolved in acid or dismembered and thrown out to sea. Vincenzo Sinagra, who worked alongside Marchese and later became an informant, claimed that the Corso dei Mille boss insisted on strangling the victims himself, although he had his underlings dispose of the bodies.
Riina employed treachery in his war, often talking rivals into joining him and then murdering them when they were no longer of any use. Amongst them was Palermo boss Rosario Riccobono who had sided with the Corleonesi at the outset of the war in 1981. In November 1982, Riccobono and eight of his men vanished without trace, three more of his associates were gunned down in a nightclub and his brother, Vito Riccobono, was found decapitated. It was some years later before informants explained what had happened, that Riina had arranged for Riccobono and virtually his entire Mafia Family to be wiped out after deciding Riccobono had outlived his usefulness. Riina even turned on his two most ruthless and loyal killers, Pino Greco and Filippo Marchese. Around the end of 1982, having decided Marchese was no longer of any use, Riina had him murdered by Pino Greco. Three years later Riina had Greco killed after he decided his favorite assassin was getting a bit too ambitious for his own good.
Whilst they helped them become the most powerful clan in Sicily, the Corleonesi's tactics backfired to some degree when, in 1983, a convicted double-killer named Tommaso Buscetta became the first Sicilian Mafioso to become an informant, or pentito, and co-operate with the authorities. Buscetta was from a losing family in the Mafia war, and he had lost several relatives and many friends to Riina's hitmen; becoming an informant was the only way both to save himself and get his revenge on Riina. Buscetta provided a great deal of information to judge Giovanni Falcone, and he testified at the Maxi Trial in the mid 1980s that saw hundreds of Mafiosi imprisoned. Riina picked up another life sentence for murder at the Maxi Trial, but it was another in absentia sentence as he was still a fugitive.
In 1989 Riina arranged the murders of a number of his allies, including Ciaculli boss Vincenzo Puccio and Puccio's two brothers. Apparently Vincenzo Puccio had been planning to try and overthrow Riina as head of the Sicilian Mafia but the Corleonesi boss had found out about the plot.
[edit] Crackdown
Giovanni Falcone and his colleague Paolo Borsellino were making good progress in their war against the Mafia, which naturally meant they were under the constant threat of death. They also felt that they were being hampered by colleagues and superiors, some of whom were in the pay of the Mafia.
On May 23, 1992, Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards were killed by a bomb planted under the highway outside of Palermo. A few weeks later Borsellino and five of his bodyguards were killed by a car bomb. Both attacks were ordered by Riina and carried out by his many assassins. The public were outraged, both at the Mafia and also the politicians who they felt had failed to adequately protect Falcone and Borsellino, and the Italian government arranged for a massive crackdown of the Mafia.
On January 15, 1993, acting on a tip-off from an informant, armed police from the Carabinieri arrested Totò Riina in Palermo as he sat at some traffic-lights in his car (his chauffeur, Balduccio di Maggio, was the informant in question; several of his relatives were later murdered for this [1]). Riina claimed to be just a poor harassed accountant, and in his ill-fitting suit, the chubby, softly-spoken 62 year old looked to be just that. Asked about the firm he worked at, he answered that he would not mention it in order not to damage their reputation. Hauled into custody, Riina was polite and respectful towards his captors, and later thanked the police officers and court officials for treating him well, although he managed to insult their intelligence by not only saying that he had never heard of the Mafia but also by insisting that he had "no idea" he had been Sicily's most wanted fugitive for the last three decades. Other accounts also say that Riina kept on shouting "communists!" to the policemen arresting him and to the court processing him.
The public's delight at Riina's arrest (one newspaper had the sensationalistic headline "The Devil" pasted over Riina's mugshot) was dampened somewhat when it was revealed that, during his thirty years as a fugitive, Riina had actually been living at home in Palermo all along. He had obtained medical attention for his diabetes and registered all four of his children under their real names at the local hospital. He even went to Venice on honeymoon and was still unspotted. Many cynically declared that the authorities only arrested Riina because they were under public pressure to do so after the Falcone/Borsellino murders, and saw the ease with which Riina had evaded justice for so long as an example of what many regarded as the apathetic - if not actually complicit - attitudes of the Sicilian authorities to the Mafia.
[edit] Controversy about Riina's arrest
Giovanni Brusca – one of Riina's hitmen who personally detonated the bomb that killed Falcone, and later became an informant after his 1996 arrest – has offered a controversial version of the capture of Totò Riina: a secret deal between Carabinieri officers, secret agents and Cosa Nostra bosses tired of the dictatorship of the Corleonesi. According to Brusca, Bernardo Provenzano "sold" Riina in exchange for the valuable archive of compromising material that Riina held in his apartment in Via Bernini 52 in Palermo.
The Carabinieri’s ROS (Reparto Operativo Speciale) persuaded the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office not to immediately search the Riina’s apartment, and then abandoned surveillance of the apartment after six hours leaving it unprotected. The apartment was only raided 18 days later. The delay was caused by a "misunderstanding" over the surveillance.[1]
This version of Riina’s arrest has been denied by Carabinieri commander, general Mario Mori (at the time deputy head of the ROS). Mori, however, confirmed that channels of communication were opened with Cosa Nostra through Vito Ciancimino – a former mayor of Palermo convicted for Mafia association – who was close to the Corleonesi. To sound out the willingness of Mafiosi to talk, Ciancimino contacted Riina’s private doctor, Antonino Cinà. When Ciancimino was informed that the goal was to arrest Riina, he seemed unwilling to continue. At this point, the arrest and cooperation of Balduccio Di Maggio led to the arrest of Riina.
In 2006, the Palermo Court absolved Mario Mori and Captain "Ultimo" (Sergio De Caprio) – the man who arrested Riina – of the charge of aiding and abetting the Mafia.
[edit] In jail
Although he already had two unserved life-sentences, Riina was nonetheless tried and convicted of over a hundred counts of murder, including sanctioning the slayings of Falcone and Borsellino. In 1998, Riina picked up yet another life sentence for the high-profile murder of Salvo Lima, a politician who had long since been suspected of being in league with the Mafia and who had been shot dead in 1992 after he had failed to prevent the convictions of Mafiosi in the Maxi Trial of the mid 1980s. [2]
Riina is currently held in a maximum-security prison with limited contact with the outside world, in order to prevent him from running his organization from behind bars as many others have done. Over $125,000,000 in assets were confiscated from Riina - probably just a fraction of his illicit fortune - and his vast mansion was also acquired by the crusading anti-Mafia mayor of Corleone in 1997. In a move that was both practical and symbolic, this mansion was turned into a school for the local children.
In 2004 it was reported that Riina had suffered two heart attacks in May and December the previous year. [3]
In April 2006, a full thirteen years after his arrest, he was on trial for the murder of a journalist, Mauro De Mauro, who vanished without trace in 1970. [4]
One of Riina's close friends in the Corleonesi Clan, Bernardo Provenzano, was believed to have taken over as head of the organization. Provenzano was arrested on April 11, 2006, in the countryside near Corleone after forty-three years in hiding.
[edit] Family and personality
Salvatore Riina married his wife Ninetta (sister of Leoluca Bagarella) in 1974, and they had four children. His two sons, Giovanni and Giuseppe, followed in their father's footsteps and have since joined him behind bars. In November 2001, 24-year-old Giovanni Riina was convicted of committing four murders in 1995 [5]. On December 31, 2004, Riina's youngest son, Giuseppe Riina, was sentenced to fourteen years for various crimes, including Mafia association, extortion and money laundering [6]. One of his daughters, however, was elected class representative in her high school, where she was able to return, aged 21, when the family came out of hiding after her father's arrest. In 2006, the council of Corleone created T-shirts reading I love Corleone in an attempt to dissociate the town from its famous Mafiosi, but an in-law of Riina - the brother of Riina's daughter's husband - began an attempt to sue the Corleone mayor by claiming the Riina family owned the copyright to the phrase.[2]
Thanks to his natural habit of being secretive and evasive, Riina remains enigmatic with regards to his personality. An informant, Antonino Calderone, described Riina as being "unbelievably ignorant, but he had an intuition and intelligence and was difficult to fathom ... very hard to predict". He said Riina was softly-spoken and was a dedicated father and husband. One of the more bizarre anecdotes Calderone related was that of Riina giving a tearful eulogy at the funeral of Calderone's murdered brother, even though Riina himself had ordered the killing. Calderone also said that, when Riina set his sights on marrying his sweetheart, Ninetta, the young lady's family objected to the union. Calderone quoted Riina as saying "I don't want any woman other than my Ninetta, and if they [her family] don't let me marry her, I'll have to kill some people." Ninetta's family soon dropped any opposition to Riina's matrimonial plans.
Giovanni Brusca claimed that, during 1991 and early 1992, Riina contemplated acts of terrorism against the state to get them to back off in their crackdown against the Mafia, including acts such as bombing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In fact, during the months after Riina's arrest, there were a series of bombings by the Corleonesi against several tourist spots on the Italian mainland, resulting in the deaths of ten people, including an entire family. Brusca also quoted Riina as declaring that the children of informants were legitimate targets, and indeed Brusca subsequently tortured and killed the 11-year-old son of an informant in a failed attempt to silence the boy's father who had been giving testimony against Riina.
Although Riina's criminal actions were geared towards the acquisition of wealth and power, his treachery and the sheer number of murders he either committed or sanctioned seem excessive even by the standards of other gangsters. This may suggest that he was a psychopath, but his clandestine nature even after capture, and refusal to say much more than protestations of innocence, mean any profound theories about his psychological state are really only speculation.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Jamieson, Alison (1999). The Antimafia: Italy's Fight Against Organized Crime. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-71900-X.
- ^ Owen, Richard. Mafia family sues over Godfather town T-shirt, The Times (UK). September 14, 2006
[edit] References
- Dickie, John (2004). Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-82434-4.
- Robb, Peter (1998). Midnight in Sicily. London: Harvill. ISBN 1-86046-465-3.
- Stille, Alexander (1995). Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-03761-7.
