Former “boss of bosses” Toto Riina, one of the most feared Godfathers in the history of the Sicilian mafia, has died in hospital while serving multiple life sentences as the mastermind of a bloody strategy to assassinate Italian prosecutors and law enforcement officers trying to bring down the Cosa Nostra.
Riina, who is thought to have ordered more than 150 murders, had been in a medically induced coma after his health deteriorated after two operations for cancer.
He died in the prisoners’ wing of a hospital in Parma in northern Italy just before 4am on Friday, a day after he turned 87, according to the country’s main dailies and Ansa news agency.
Nicknamed “The Beast” because of his cruelty, Salvatore “Toto” Riina led a reign of terror for decades after taking control of Cosa Nostra, the island’s powerful organised crime group, in the 1970s.
He notoriously ordered the murder of a 13-year old boy who was kidnapped in an attempt to stop his father from revealing mafia secrets. The boy was strangled and his body dissolved in acid. When a fellow mafiosi turned state witness, Riina ordered the deaths of 11 of his relatives in retaliation.
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Prosecutors accused Riina, who was captured in 1993 after a tipoff from a rival, of masterminding a strategy, carried out over several years, to assassinate Italian prosecutors, police officials and others who were going after Cosa Nostra when he allegedly held the helm as the so-called boss of bosses.
The deadly campaign ultimately backfired on Cosa Nostra and after bombs killed Italy’s two leading anti-mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two months apart in 1992, the state stepped up its crackdown on Sicily’s mafiosi.
Riina was captured in a Palermo apartment six months after Borsellino and his police escorts were killed by a car bomb. A native of Corleone, a Sicilian hilltop town near Palermo and a mafia stronghold, he refused to collaborate with law enforcement after his capture.
In July, a court denied a request by Riina’s family to transfer the convicted mobster to house arrest because of his ailing health.
Doctors said at the time that the former boss was “lucid”. He had been caught on a wiretap this year saying he “regrets nothing … They’ll never break me, even if they give me 3,000 years” in jail.
“God have mercy on him, as we won’t,” an association for victims told the Fatto Quotidiano daily.
Riino, the son of a poor farmer, was born on 16 November 1930 in Corleone, which would become synonymous with the mafia thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s popular Godfather film trilogy.
He was young when his father and a brother were blown up trying to extract gunpowder from an unexploded American bomb in 1943. By the time he was 19, he had killed his first victim.
Riino started out as a foot soldier to boss Luciano Leggio before moving up through the ranks, going on the run in 1969 but continuing to lead first the Corleone clan then the entire mafia from his hiding place.
Riina’s family had been given permission by Italy’s health ministry on Thursday for a rare visit to say goodbye.
“You’re not Toto Riina to me, you’re just my dad. And I wish you happy birthday, Dad, on this sad but important day. I love you,” one of his sons Salvatore wrote on Facebook.
