Salvatore Riina

Salvatore Riina, also known as Totò Riina (born November 16, 1930) is one of the most infamous members of the Sicilian Mafia. He was nicknamed The Beast, or sometimes Shorty (U curtu in Sicilian) due to his diminutive height, although no-one ever dared to call him either nickname to his face. During his life-long career in crime he personally killed around forty people and is believed to have ordered the deaths of upwards of a thousand more.

Crackdown

Giovanni Falcone and his colleague Paolo Borsellino were making good progress in their war against the Mafia, which naturally meant they were under the constant threat of death. They also felt that they were being hampered by colleagues and superiors, some of whom were in the pay of the Mafia.

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On May 23, 1992, Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards were massacred by a bomb planted under the highway outside of Palermo. A few weeks later Borsellino and five of his bodyguards were killed by a car bomb. Both attacks were ordered by Riina and carried out by his many assassins. The public were outraged, both at the Mafia and also the politicians who they felt had failed to adequately protect Falcone and Borsellino, and the Italian government arranged for a massive crackdown of the Mafia.

Related Topics:
May 23 - 1992 - Bomb - Highway - Car bomb - Italian

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On January 15, 1993, acting on a tip-off from an informant, armed police from the Carabinieri arrested Totò Riina in Palermo as he sat at some traffic-lights in his car (his chauffeur, Balduccio di Maggio, was the informant in question; several of his relatives were later killed for his treachery http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/68229.stm). Riina claimed to be just a poor harassed accountant, and in his ill-fitting suit, the chubby, soft-spoken 62-year-old looked to be just that. Asked about the firm he worked at, he answered that he would not mention it in order not to damage their reputation. Hauled into custody, Riina was polite and respectful towards his captors, and later thanked the police officers and court officials for treating him well, although he managed to insult their intelligence by not only saying that he had never heard of the Mafia but also by insisting that he had "no idea" he had been Sicily's most wanted fugitive for the last three-decades.

Related Topics:
January 15 - 1993 - Carabinieri - Chauffeur

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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 in 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 Sicilian authorities when it came to the Mafia.

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Although he already had two unserved life-sentences, Riina was nonetheless tried and convicted of over a hundred counts of murder, including sanctioning the slayings of Falcone and Borsellino. In 1998, Riina picked up yet another life sentence for the high-profile murder of Salvo Lima, a politician who had long since been suspected of being in league with the Mafia and who had been shot dead in 1992 after he had failed to prevent the convictions of Mafiosi in the maxi-trials of the mid-1980s. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/133525.stm

Related Topics:
Murder - 1998 - Salvo Lima - 1992

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Riina is currently held in a maximum-security prison with limited contact with the outside world, in order to prevent him from running his organization from behind bars as many others have done. Over $125,000,000 in assets were confiscated from Riina - probably just a fraction of his illicit fortune - and his vast mansion was also acquired by the crusading anti-mafia mayor of Corleone in 1997. In a move that was both practical and symbolic, this mansion was turned into a school for the local children.

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In 2004 it was reported that Riina had suffered two heart attacks in May and December the previous year. http://news.lifestyle.co.uk/people/2742-people.htm

Related Topics:
2004 - May - December

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One of Riina's close friends in the Corleonesi Clan, Bernardo Provenzano, is believed to have taken over as head of the organization.

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