Breaking: Mafia `boss of bosses’ Riina dies at 87
Toto Riina, the jailed former head of the Sicilian Mafia, died early Friday in a special hospital ward for prisoners a day after turning 87.
Riina, who was serving multiple life sentences for murder, passed away at 3:37 am (0237 GMT) in Parma, the northern city where he had been detained for years, the Italian news agency ANSA said.
The cause of death was not given, but Riina was suffering from kidney cancer and heart and brain problems. In July, courts turned down a request for his release from prison on health grounds.
“Riina’s end is not the end of the Sicilian Mafia, which remains an extremely dangerous criminal organization,” the head of the Italian parliament’s anti-Mafia committee, Rosy Bindi, said.
According to media reports from the last 24 hours, Riina had recently entered into a coma following two operations, and the Justice Ministry had authorized his relatives to be at his bedside.
“For me you are not Toto Riina, you are my dad. And on this day that for me is sad but important, I wish you a happy birthday dad. I love you,” his son Giuseppe Salvatore wrote on Facebook on Thursday.
Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, known as Salvo, is also a convicted mobster, and is on probation after having served an 8 year, 10 month prison sentence for Mafia membership.
His father led the Sicilian Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, until his arrest in Palermo in 1993, after spending 24 years as a fugitive. His brutality earned him the nickname “The Beast.”
Also known as “The Boss of Bosses,” Riina masterminded dozens of high-profile murders in the 1980s and 1990s, including those of anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
He never repented or cooperated with investigators, and his death deepens a leadership crisis in Cosa Nostra, which is believed to be currently operating without an overall chief.
“The organization is undoubtedly in a stalemate as it awaits a new leadership structure [which will come] only after the final departure […] of Riina, Provenzano and Bagarella,” Italy’s anti-Mafia agency wrote in its annual report in June.
Bernardo Provenzano replaced Riina as Cosa Nostra chief, but he was arrested in 2006 and died last year aged 83. Leoluca Bagarella, Riina’s 75-year-old brother-in-law, was arrested in 1995 and is in prison.
Matteo Messina Denaro, 55, is currently the top Sicilian Mafia fugitive – a man on the run since 1993.
The extent of his authority over the entire organisation, as well as his whereabouts, is not clear.
“The Palermo [Mafia clans] do not recognize him” as leader, the head of the anti-Mafia research centre Giuseppe Impastato, Umberto Santino, told RAI state radio.
Even decades after his arrest, Riina was still being tried for Mafia crimes, including for a 1984 train bomb attack that killed 16 people and an alleged non-aggression pact between Cosa Nostra and Italian authorities in the 1990s.(dpa/NAN)
