Salvatore "Salvo" Riina (born 16 November 1930), called Totò 'u Curtu (Sicilian: '"Totò the Short"'; Totò is another nickname for "Salvatore"), is an Italianmobster and the former chief of the Sicilian Mafia, known for a ruthless murder campaign that reached a peak in the early '90s, when the deaths of Antimafia Commissionprosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino caused widespread public revulsion and led to 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 the bosses").
Riina succeeded Luciano Leggio as foremost boss of the Corleonesi faction of the criminal organization in the early 1980s and achieved dominance by a campaign of violence, which caused police to target his rivals. As a fugitive Riina was less vulnerable to the law enforcement reaction to his methods, and police removed many of the older type of boss, who had operated by influence peddling and bribery. Favoured assassin Giovanni Brusca estimated he murdered 100-200 people on Riina's orders. Riina also advocated, in violation of traditional Mafia codes, the killing of women and children, and killed uninvolved members of the public solely to distract law enforcement. Although his scorched-earth policy neutralized any internal threat to his position, Riina increasingly showed a lack of his earlier guile by bringing his organization into open confrontation with national authorities. After decades living as a fugitive he was captured, which provoked a series of indiscriminate bombings of art galleries and churches. Riina is currently being held on the stringent Article 41-bis prison regime, one of several measures that resulted from his defiant strategy.
Giovanni Brusca (born 20 February 1957 in San Giuseppe Jato) is a former member of the Sicilian Mafia. He murdered the anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone in 1992 and once stated that he had committed between 100 and 200 murders but was unable to remember the exact number. He was sentenced to life in prison in absentia, captured in 1996 and started to cooperate with the authorities.
A pudgy, bearded and unkempt mafioso, Brusca was known in Mafia circles as "U' Verru" (in Sicilian) or Il Porco or Il Maiale, (In Italian: The Pig, The Swine) or "lo scannacristiani" (people-slayer; in Italian dialects the word "christians" often stands for "human beings"). Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia turncoat who had cooperated with Falcone’s investigations, remembered Giovanni Brusca as "a wild stallion but a great leader."[1]
Capture and arrest[edit]
Riina reprimanded Balduccio Di Maggio, an ambitious Mafioso who had left his wife and children for a mistress, telling him he would never be made a full boss. Knowing Riina would order the death of subordinates whom he considered unreliable, Di Maggio fled Sicily and collaborated with the authorities. At the entrance to a complex of villas where a wealthy businessman who acted as Riina's driver lived, Di Maggio identified Riina's wife. On 15 January 1993, Carabinieri arrested Totò Riina in Palermo. He had been a fugitive for 23 years.[19][20][21]
"Personality and profile[edit]
Due to his habits of secrecy and evasiveness, Riina's personality remains enigmatic. 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 soft-spoken and a dedicated father and husband. Riina was highly persuasive and often highly sentimental. He followed the simple codes of the brutal, ancient world of the Sicilian countryside, where force is the only law and there is no contradiction between personal kindness and extreme ferocity. "His philosophy was that if someone's finger hurt, it was better to cut off his whole arm just to make sure", Calderone said.[35]
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 it to back off in its crackdown against the Mafia, including acts such as bombing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In fact, during the months after Riina's arrest, there was 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. Brusca subsequently tortured and killed Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 11-year-old son of Santo Di Matteo, an informant in a failed attempt to silence the boy's father, who had been giving testimony against Riina."
Riina was a Scorpio. His favoured hitman was on the notorious Cusp of Sensitivity (Pisces and Aquarius).
Baldassare Di Maggio was likewise a Scorpio. It was the same disloyalty that Riina had criticized in him that had acted in accordance with Justice against Riina. The police had been of little help up until this point.
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 Italian authorities to the Mafia.
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.[24][25]
Dm.A.A.
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