Salvatore Riina

Salvatore Riina (November 16, 1930 – November 17, 2017), called Totò (sicilian diminutive of Salvatore), was an Italian mobster and chief of the Sicilian Mafia, 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 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 di 'i capi, "the boss of bosses").

Riina was born on November 16, 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 with an handgun Domenico Di Matteo in a fight; he was released in 1956.

The head of the Mafia family in Corleone was Michele Navarra until August 6th, 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 three of the gunmen in Navarra's slaying), Leggio began to increase the power of the Corleonesi.

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 blameless 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.

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.

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.

On May 16, 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.

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.

Between 1981 and 1984, the Second Mafia War was instigated by Riina, and Bontade and Inzerillo, with many associates and members of both their Mafia and blood families, were killed.

There were up to a thousand killings during this period as Riina and the Corleonesi, together with their allies, wiped out their rivals.

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.

January 1981, Tommaso Buscetta fled to Brazil to escape the brewing Second Mafia War.

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.

As part of the Maxi Trial of 1986, Riina was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for Mafia association and multiple murders.

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.

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 November 17, 2017.