Salvatore Inzerillo

Salvatore Inzerillo ( August 20, 1944 – May 11, 1981) was an Italian member of the Sicilian Mafia, also known as Totuccio (a diminutive for Salvatore).

He rose to be a powerful boss of Palermo's Passo di Rigano family.

He became a member of the Sicilian Mafia Commission in 1978, succeeding his uncle Rosario Di Maggio, and formed a strong alliance with Bontade against the growing power of Totò Riina and the Corleonesi who were increasingly challenging the established Mafia families of Palermo.

Salvatore Inzerillo ordered the killing of prosecuting judge Gaetano Costa who signed the 53 arrest warrants against the Spatola-Inzerillo-Gambino clan and their heroin-trafficking network in May 1980, Costa was murdered on August 6, 1980 by a gunman who escaped in a motorcycle driven by an accomplice.

Inzerillo acted without asking permission from the Mafia Commission to prove he could commit a murder in rival territory (that of Giuseppe Calò) just as the Corleonesi.

A prolific heroin trafficker, he was killed in May 1981 by a firing squad of the Corleonesi family led by Totò Riina during the Second Mafia War who opposed the established Palermo Mafia families of which Inzerillo was one of the main proponents.

Inzerillo was born in Palermo.

He married his cousin, Giuseppa Di Maggio, the daughter of his mother's brother, Rosario Di Maggio – the boss of the Passo di Rigano Mafia family.

Through a string of marriages the Inzerillos were related to the Di Maggio and Spatola families in Palermo and the Gambinos in New York.

He had two sons, Giuseppe and Giovanni.

Inzerillo was a close ally of Stefano Bontade and Gaetano Badalamenti and a relative of the New York City Mafia boss Carlo Gambino.

On May 11, 1981, Inzerillo was shot to death after leaving his mistress' house in Palermo.

When he was about to get into his armored Alfa Romeo Alfetta, from a parked Renault van (that was stolen the night before) driven by Giuseppe Marchese, Giuseppe Greco, Antonino Madonia and Giuseppe Giacomo Gambino (who was armed with an automatic Shotgun) opened fire through the van door killing him in a hail of bullets.

For the murder the hitmen used an automatic Shotgun and two AK-47 rifles, the same type of rifle that the evening before was used to shoot against the windows of a jewerly store in Palermo to test the penetration power against the armored glass of the shop, at the time the Kalashnikov wasn't commonly used among criminals and it was difficult to obtain from common arms smugglers, it was used three weeks before by Giuseppe Greco to murder Stefano Bontade.

The deaths of these two bosses started the Second Mafia War that lasted three years and saw hundreds of mafiosi killed as Toto riina and the Corleonesi decimated their rivals in order to take over Cosa Nostra by sheer Brute Force.

At Inzerillo's funeral, his teenage son Giuseppe vowed to avenge his father, and not long after, most probably in June 1981, the boy was kidnapped, tortured and killed.

A number of informants, including Tommaso Buscetta, said that it was Giuseppe Greco who abducted the youth and shot him through the head, after he hacked his arm off with a machete symbolically removing the arm the youngster had vowed to shoot Riina with.

Santo Inzerillo, the brother of Salvatore, was strangled on May 26, 1981, when he came to a meeting to ask clarifications about the killing of his relatives.

One of the other brothers, Pietro Inzerillo subsequently turned up murdered in New Jersey, in January 1982.