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 la Belva ('the beast') and il Capo dei Capi (Sicilian: 'u Capu dî Capi, '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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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". 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". 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.