PROFESSIONAL KILLERS (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  Aged 63, The Pope was sentenced to life imprisonment, but released in February 1991 on appeal. In February 1992 he was re-arrested and sent to prison where he languishes to this day.

  His friends said that Michele Greco’s nephew, Giuseppe, must have been born with a gun in his hands and on 30 November 1982 he proved it when he was responsible for possibly the biggest massacre in Italian Mafia history, and that is quite a claim to fame.

  As is often the case with the Mafia, death followed hospitality. Whether it was on the east coast of America or in a tiny village in the rugged, sun-burnt land of Sicily, this was often the way it happened.

  The venue was the hiding place of the Bruscas in the Sicilian village of San Guiseppe Jato and they enjoyed dinner before the bloodbath. The perpetrators were Greco’s ‘death team’ – Mario Prestifilippo, Filippo Marchese, Gianbattista Pullarà, Giuseppe Lucchese, Giacomo Gambino and Nino Madonia. The victims were Rosario Riccobonno, boss of the Partanna Mondella Family and 20 ‘men of honour’, his soldiers. To dispose of the corpses, they used the normal method of immersing them in a bath of acid. That way they would never be found, and, indeed, they never have. That same black day, in the province of Palermo, another 50 people were murdered. The Partanna Modello and Noce Families had been well and truly annihilated.

  Giuseppe Greco may be the greatest individual killer in Mafia history. When arrested, he was charged with 85 murders, but estimates pile up more than 300 bodies at his door. Astonishingly, those estimates may be conservative.

  Born in Palermo in January 1952, not a lot is known about either Greco’s personal or family life. He was called ‘Pino’ which is a common abbreviation for the name Guiseppe and he joined the Mafia in the late 1970s. His nickname was ‘Scarpuzzedda’. His father had been known as ‘Scarpa’, meaning ‘Shoe’; consequently, Greco junior was called ‘Scarpuzzedda’, ‘Little Shoe’. He came from a Mafia background – his father was a prominent Mafioso and he was a relative of the well-known Mafia boss, Salvatore ‘Ciaschiteddu’ Greco.

  His Mafia Family was the Ciacullis run by Michele Greco, who was also known as ‘The Pope’. In the first half of the 20th century, Greco had fought Greco when the Grecos from Ciaculli had fought the Grecos from nearby Crocoverde Giardini, but in the 1940s, they had joined together to become one Family. By the 1950s they were allied to the Corleonesi and they supported Totò Riina when he became Corleonesi godfather in 1974.

  When Riina instigated what is called the Second Mafia War in 1981, the Ciacullis were at his side. Armed with his favourite weapon, the AK-47, Pino Greco personally killed dozens of their rivals. Amongst the men he shot to death were some big Mafia names – Stefano Bontade, Salvatore Inzerillo – and he was the man responsible for carrying out Totò Riina’s orders to kill carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

  After he killed Inzerillo, he heard that his victim’s 15-year-old son had vowed to take revenge on his father’s murderer, a threat not to be taken lightly in Sicily. He brutally tortured the boy, cutting off his arms, before killing him.

  One of Greco’s closest allies was Filippo Marchese who ran Palermo’s Corso de Mille and who, like Greco, was closely linked to the Corleonesi. Marchese had a room in a squalid Palermo apartment, known as the ‘room of death’, which served as a killing factory, with an estimated 100 people having died there. Greco used it often and, according to pentito Vincenzo Sinagra, he and Marchese would sometimes garrotte victims together. That involved placing a loop of rope around the neck of the victim, who had usually already been tortured, and pulling together on each end. Sinagra confessed to holding on to the feet as the victim struggled for life. When the struggle was over, the body would be thrown into a bath of acid or dismembered and dumped in the Mediterranean. Sometimes, the remains were ground down and fed to pigs. Even Greco’s friends were not safe, however, and when Riina concluded that Filippo Marchese was no further use to him, he ordered Greco to kill him. Around the end of 1982, like so many of his own victims, he was garrotted and dissolved in acid. By that time, Greco was underboss of the Ciaculli Family and was a member of the prestigious Sicilian Mafia Commission.

  Then he suddenly vanished. It was towards the end of 1985 and, in the beginning, people said he had gone to America. But that was a rumour started by Totò Riina. Worried that Greco might be becoming just a bit too ambitious, he had, in fact, ordered that Greco be killed. A lot of the younger ‘men of honour’ had begun to look up to Greco and saw him as a future boss. Riina also believed that the Ciaculli Family was no longer any use to him, especially as boss Michele Greco, was languishing in prison, having been arrested in 1986. Some weeks before his murder, Riina ordered a massacre in Piazza Scaffa, which was situated in the district controlled by the Ciaculli. Eight people were shot dead, with the objective of demonstrating that Greco’s control over his own territory was not effective.

  Greco was shot to death in September 1985 in an upstairs room of his own house by two men he had considered friends, Vincenzo Puccio and Giuseppe Lucchese. Puccio would die in a prison cell in 1980 and Lucchese was captured in 1990 and sent to prison for murders which did not include that of Pino Greco. His body, inevitably, was never found.

  At the famous Maxi Trial of 1986/87, Greco was found guilty of 58 counts of murder and given a life sentence in absentia. Of course, it was futile as, unknown to the court, he was dead by then. The informant, Francesco Marino Mannoia told the police of his death in 1988.

  Salvatore Riina

  At the end of the Second World War, the Corleone Mafia Family had almost become extinct. It was revived, however, by two men who had gone to seek their fortune in the United States in the 1920s – Angelo Di Carlo and Vincenzo Collura – who returned to rebuild the Family.

  Di Carlo, who fought as a US marine during the war, was an influential man, with strong political connections and the ear of the most important Sicilian mobsters, men such as Calogero Vizzini from Villalba, Genco Russo from Mussomeli and Vanni Sacco from Camporeale. He gained their approval for his cousin Michele Navarra to become head of the Corleone Family. Collura would be underboss and Leoluca Leggio consigliere.

  But it was not a decision welcomed by all of the Family, and it was particularly resented by Collura who had wanted the job for himself. There were also young Family members, such as Leoluca Leggio’s nephew, Luciano, who had ambitions of his own.

  It was around this time that Salvatore ‘Totò’ Riina was introduced to the Mafia after committing a murder for them at the age of 18. Known as ‘Shorty’ due to his lack of height – he was five feet two inches in his stocking soles – but never, of course, to his face, Riina would become one of the Sicilian Mafia’s most vicious and cold-blooded killers. He is thought to have been personally responsible for at least 40 murders and to have ordered many hundreds more.

  His next murder, however, got him a jail sentence. In 1949, he shot dead Domenico Di Matteo during an argument, was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison for six years. His sentence served, he returned to Corleone, working for Leggio as an enforcer. When Leggio finally made his bid for the top, Riina was one of the team that ambushed and killed boss Navarra in August 1958. During the next five years, 140 members of the two rival Corleonesi factions would die.

  Riina became underboss to Leggio and the fugitive Bernardo Provenzano took the position of consigliere. Remarkably, all participants in the war, including Riina, Leggio and Provenzano, were absolved by the Italian state and were free to carry on with business as usual – extortion, corruption and heroin-trafficking. In 1969 Leggio and Totò were arrested for murder, but were acquitted after witnesses and jurors had presumably been intimidated. Later that same year, when he was indicted once again for murder, Riina had no option but to go on the run. He would remain a fugitive for 23 years. Nonetheless, in 1974, when Leggio was finally convicted of Navarra’s murder, it was Riina’s turn to be boss, fugitive or not.

  In the 1970s it became obvious that the real money lay in the her
oin trade and not in the traditional Mafia rackets of loan sharking and extortion. Riina set his sights on gaining control of the refining and exporting to America of heroin and went to war with the other Families to achieve his goal. He had a number of public officials assassinated – judges, prosecutors, policemen – ensuring that the blame fell firmly on his rivals. The fact that he and Provenzano and others were invisible, as they were in hiding, helped deflect state interest away from them and onto the more visible Mafia bosses who could often be seen socialising with mayors and public officials. The killings were more often than not also carried out on his rivals’ territory, reinforcing the authorities’ suspicions.

  The Second Mafia War that started in 1981 was an attempt by Riina and the Corleonesi to destroy their rivals once and for all. The blood-letting was astonishing and before the end of 1983 almost 1,000 Mafiosi and members of their families lost their lives. Stafano Bontade and Salvatore Inzerillo, both bosses of powerful Palermo Mafia clans, were both killed and the Corleonesi, once a small and insignificant Family insultingly described as ‘peasants’ by their rivals, took control of the Sicilian Mafia. Riina reinforced his position by murdering Corleonesi allies such as Filippo Marchese, Guiseppe Greco and Rosario Riccobono. Meanwhile, in order to frighten the authorities there was a slaughter of judges, policemen and prosecutors, one of which was the killing of the carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

  The tide began to turn in 1983, however, when Thomas Buscetta became the first Mafia pentito informant. He had lost many friends and members of his family in the Second Mafia War and wanted not only to save his own skin, but also wreak revenge on the man responsible for all the deaths – Totò Riina. The Maxi Trial, a huge Mafia trial in the mid-1980s, supervised by the prosecutor, Giovanni Falcone, saw Buscetta get his chance. Hundreds of Mafiosi went to prison and Riina collected another life sentence, but it was handed out in absentia as he was still a fugitive.

  The life sentences were piling up, but they did not deter Riina. In 1989 he ordered the deaths of several more of his allies – Ciaculli boss Vincenzo Puccio and Puccio's two brothers who, he had learned, were plotting to overthrow him; never a wise move where Totò was concerned.

  The prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were under no illusions that they were marked men. Their work was delivering results that were hurting the Mafia greatly and that was enough to force them to live under constant threat of death. Sometimes that was not the only problem. Their work was often held up by colleagues and even superiors who were on the Mafia payroll. Everywhere they or their families went, they were accompanied by a police escort, but even the added security did not save them. On 23 May 1992, there was revulsion in Italy when Falcone, his wife and three police bodyguards were killed by a car bomb on a road just outside Palermo. To add to the horror, just a few weeks later, Borsellino and five policemen were killed by another car bomb. The press and the public were naturally outraged that the state had failed to protect these men and the authorities were finally forced to take decisive action.

  On 15 January 1993, the Palermo police intercepted a car waiting at a red light. Inside was a plump, quietly spoken 62-year-old man in a crumpled, badly fitting suit who, when asked what he did for a living, claimed to be an accountant. When asked for the name of the firm for whom he worked, he refused to say, for fear, he said, of causing damage to their reputation. When he was taken into custody, he claimed never to have even heard of the Mafia, let alone to have been the leader of it. As for being told that he had been Italy’s most wanted man for more than 30 years, he expressed total surprise. But the game was finally up. Totò Riina had at last been captured, betrayed by his chauffeur, Balduccio di Maggio. Di Maggio would live to regret his action when a number of members of his family later were murdered as a result.

  The media went crazy. News broadcasts were full of it and one newspaper pasted the words ‘The Devil’ across a photograph of Riina on its front page. Astonishingly, however, it emerged that he had been living in Palermo all the time he had been a fugitive from the law. He had received medical attention and his four children had all attended local schools under their own names. He had even enjoyed a honeymoon in Venice without being identified. Of course, there were many who claimed the Sicilian authorities, with their ambivalent attitude to the Mafia, had known where he had been all the time and had only finally taken action because of public and media pressure.

  There was immediate and indiscriminate retaliation from Riina’s men, however. Bombs went off in tourist locations and ten people lost their lives, amongst them an entire family. Giovanni Brusca, the man who had detonated the bomb that had killed Giovanni Falcone, claims that Riina gave instructions that the children of informants were now legitimate targets and Brusca confessed to torturing and killing the 11-year-old son of a man who was scheduled to give evidence against Riina.

  Brusca turned pentito following his arrest in 1996 and provided an alternative version of Riina’s arrest. He claimed that Mafia bosses had tired of Riina’s leadership and that they had done a deal with the carabinieri. Bernardo Provenzano, himself a fugitive from the law, had been instrumental in his capture, exchanging Riina for a valuable collection of material incriminating him in many crimes, kept by Riina in his apartment in Palermo. Although this has never been confirmed, and in fact was flatly denied by the carabinieri commander General Mario Mori, many were puzzled by the fact that the apartment was not searched immediately and surveillance of it was halted only six hours after the arrest. It took the authorities 18 days to seal off the apartment and search it. The delay was said to have been caused by a ‘misunderstanding’.

  Riina had already been given two life sentences in absentia, but was tried and convicted of hundreds of others, including the sanctioning of the murders of Falcone and Borsellino. In 1998, he was back in court, charged with the 1992 murder of politician Salvo Lima. Lima had been suspected of Mafia connections and was shot dead for not preventing the Maxi Trial in the mid-1980s. In 2004 Riina had two heart attacks, but the convictions did not stop. April 2006 saw his conviction, 13 years after his arrest, for the 1970 murder of the journalist Mauro De Mauro.

  In line with the new, harsh treatment of Mafia prisoners, Riina is held in a maximum security prison and, in order to prevent him from carrying on his business activities from behind bars, his only contact with the outside world is with his lawyer. More than $125,000,000 in assets was confiscated from him, his home in Corleone being turned into a school for local children by an anti-Mafia mayor.

  When Riina was courting his wife-to-be Ninetta, it is said that her family were horrified at the thought of her being married to a man such as him. He is reported to have responded by telling friends: ‘I don’t want any woman other than my Ninetta, and if they don’t let me marry her, I’ll have to kill some people.’ Needless to say, the wedding went ahead and their union produced four children. He is said to have been a dedicated family man. He must have been, as his two sons followed in the old man’s footsteps. Twenty-four-year-old Giovanni was jailed in 2001 for four murders he committed in 1995. In 2004 Giuseppe Riina went to jail for 14 years for a variety of crimes amongst which were Mafia association, extortion and money laundering.

  In 2006 the Corleone town council had T-shirts made with the legend ‘I love Corleone’ printed on them in an attempt to dissociate the town from its Mafia connections. However, a relative of Riina sued the mayor, claiming that the Corleone Family actually owned the copyright of that particular phrase.

  Bernardo ‘The Tractor’ Provenzano

  Italian news broadcasts on 11 April 2006 contained scarcely believable news. Firstly, the right-centre government of Silvio Berlusconi, the longest-serving Italian prime minister since the war, had lost the general election to a shaky leftist coalition led by Romano Prodi but, secondly – almost knocking the election off the front pages – Bernardo Provenzano, the 73-year-old Sicilian Mafia Godfather, the ‘Ghost of Corleone’, who had been a fugitive
for a remarkable 43 years, had been captured.

  It had begun two days previously, when the surveillance team that kept a constant watch on the Provenzano family home in the Sicilian hilltop village of Corleone saw a white plastic bag being carried from the house. An agent photographed the bag from a distance before it was followed on a tortuous route, passing through a dozen different pairs of hands to arrive, on 11 April, at its destination, a shepherd’s hut only about a mile away from where it had begun its journey.

  The authorities were certain they were finally onto something and early on the morning of the 11th, anti-Mafia prosecutor Marzia Sabella and others who had been involved in the hunt for Provenzano for years, waited at the high court in Palermo for news. Meanwhile, near Corleone, numerous pairs of powerful binoculars trained on the hut followed the shepherd who owned it, as he arrived carrying the bag. He went inside and a short while later came out without it.

  For Renato Cortese it was the defining moment of his police career. For seven years he had led the team hunting Provenzano. Now, at last, the Sicilian Godfather was perhaps within their grasp. He ordered the van that he was in and which had been waiting at a distance, to be driven towards the hut, reminding the driver to move slowly in order to keep the noise of the engine down. Beside him was the woman officer known as ‘The Cat’ because of her grey-green eyes and because she possessed an extraordinary cat-like ability to take her targets by surprise. She had already used her talent for surprise to capture a number of important Mafiosi.

  As the van approached the hut, Cortese watched carefully as the shepherd busied himself in the yard as if nothing was happening. But Cortese suddenly realised that the shepherd had become aware of the activity a short distance away and it would only be a matter of time before he shouted out a warning to their quarry inside the hut. It was now or never.