Michele Navarra

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Dr. Michele Navarra (January 5, 1905 - August 2, 1958) was a powerful member of the Sicilian Mafia. He was a qualified physician and headed the Mafia Family from the town of Corleone.

[edit] Biography

Michele Navarra came from a middle class background; his father was a teacher and landowner. However, Navarra drifted into the Mafia when he married a woman who had many relatives within that criminal organization. He became the boss of Corleone in the early 1940s.

In 1943, the U.S. Military granted Navarra the right to collect the military vehicles abandoned by the Italian army following the allied invasion of Sicily in World War II. Navarra used these to start a trucking company, which was vital to some of his operations involving the theft of livestock.

Navarra became the top doctor at the hospital in Corleone after his predecessor, Dr. Nicolosi, was conveniently murdered. One of the most notorious crimes Dr. Navarra was involved in was that of a youth who witnessed a mafia murder. The boy went to a police station to make a statement but was understandably shocked at what he had witnessed. The police asked Navarra to give the boy a sedative to calm him down, but instead Navarra injected the youth with poison, killing him and thus eliminating a witness.

Navarra and his close ally, Luciano Leggio went into hiding after that crime. Leggio was a young and ambitious mafioso who had plans to take over the Corleone clan himself as the leader of a powerful faction of younger mafiosi within the family. Navarra tried to have Leggio killed in mid 1958, but the hitmen hired for the task did a poor job and Leggio escaped with just minor injuries. The event left Leggio and his followers with the knowledge that they were as good as dead if they did not strike back soon.

A few weeks later, on August 2, 1958, Dr. Navarra and a fellow doctor (who was not a mafia member) were both shot to death on an isolated country road as they drove home in Navarra's car. Luciano Leggio thus became the boss of the Corleone mafia. Navarra's killers were Bernardo Provenzano and Salvatore "Toto" Riina.[citation needed] Riina became the leading Mafioso in 1974 after the imprisonment of Leggio.

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