![]() Counted among his official victims was Piersanti Mattarella, the president of Sicily, who was shot dead in his car in 1980. ![]() He also mounted more attacks on the Italian mainland in an effort to get the state to back down. Riina responded with brute force: ordering the murders of Falcone and, two months later, another judge, Paolo Borsellino. The trials represented a formal acknowledgement of how pervasive the mafia was in Sicily. The so-called Maxi trial, a series of cases beginning in 1986 that targeted the mafia, led to the indictment of nearly 500 mafiosi, many of whom who were sentenced to life in prison. His rise marked a new level of violence: he ordered the notorious murder of a 13-year old boy who was kidnapped, strangled, and dissolved in acid, to send a message to those who might turn against him – and the Italian state was forced to respond. While other mafia bosses were also brutal, Riina was less invested in maintaining peace, and less closely linked to politicians. “I have never sought revenge for my father’s death, only justice,” his son Giulio, a journalist, said on Friday. Mario Francese was the first journalist to expose the role of Riina and the Corleonesi within the Sicilian mafia and was killed in 1979. ![]() He killed all of them, hundreds of them, he literally ethnically cleansed them out of Palermo,” Dickie said. He created new alliances and staged a bloody coup using his death squads, said John Dickie, a mafia expert and author of Mafia Republic. Riina poses for a police photograph in 1993. ![]() Sicily had become a hub for the heroin trade into the US following the Vietnam war, and Riina became fixated on the narcodollars that he saw flowing to his rivals in Palermo. Riina rose to power in the mid-1970s, when he became the de facto leader of the Corleone crime family. It’s a day like the other as you can see. “When Riina was around, everybody had a job here in Corleone,” said Paolo, 77. While young people saw the death as a chance for the town to escape its corrupt reputation, elderly people recalled Riina with fondness, describing the mafia boss as a gentleman. In his birth city of Corleone, immortalised as a mafia stronghold by The Godfather book and film trilogy, responses to Riina’s death were mixed. He died while he was in a medically induced coma following cancer treatment. Riina was serving multiple life sentences after convictions for ordering 150 murders, though experts believe the true figure was much higher. Both launched a direct attack against the state and that created a backlash.” “Riina’s death marks the end of an era,” said Federico Varese, a mafia expert at Oxford University. ![]() If anyone beat Riina, it was the legacy of his most famous victim, Giovanni Falcone, the anti-mafia judge murdered in a car bomb Riina ordered in 1992. Riina was a native of the small Sicilian town of Corleone, made famous by the Godfather films. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |