Notorious Sicilian Mafia “boss of all bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina has died from cancer in jail, aged 87.
Riina was serving 26 life sentences and is believed to have ordered more than 150 murders.
The head of the feared Cosa Nostra spent nearly a quarter of a century on the run before being jailed in 1993. He ordered more murders from jail.
As well as kidney cancer, he was said to have been suffering from a heart condition and Parkinson’s disease.
Riina had been in a medically induced coma and his family had been given special permission to visit him in the prisoners’ wing of the hospital in Parma, northern Italy.
Riina was born in 1930 to poor farmers in Corleone, Sicily – the birthplace of Don Corleone, the fictional Godfather in Francis Ford Coppola’s film trilogy.
His father was killed when he was 13 and at 19 he joined the local Mafia, committing murder to gain entry. He spent six years in prison.
When he got out, he helped local mobster Luciano Leggio kill Corleone’s Mafia boss. Along with childhood friend Bernardo Provenzano, he then led a hit squad targeting Mafia boss Michele “the Cobra” Cavataio in Palermo, giving the Corleone clan a foothold in the Sicilian capital.
When Leggio was arrested in 1974, Riina became boss. Under his leadership, the clan came to dominate the Cosa Nostra crime group in the 1970s, as its fortunes blossomed, buoyed by a booming trade trafficking heroin to North America.
He was a wanted man, but evaded justice for 24 years, remaining all the while on the island of Sicily.
