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2024-03-28T18:48:37Z
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How Not to Shoot the Mafia
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/how-not-to-shoot-the-mafia
2013-01-13T08:06:23.000Z
2013-01-13T08:06:23.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-not-to-shoot-the-mafia"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003659,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003659?profile=original" width="400" /></a><strong>Mussomeli, Sicily, once home of the legendary godfather Giuseppe Genco Russo</strong></p>
<p>By Carl Russo</p>
<p>After the spectacular capture of Corleone capomafia Bernardo Provenzano by police in 2006, Sicily braced for a blowback. If history is an indicator, observers warned, a Mafia war will break out. And it will take the form of either an internecine turf battle or a vendetta against the state. Both scenarios assured a high body count.</p>
<p>As an outsider, I could sense the dread of those uncertain days—even as the island was in full spring bloom. Yellow daisies covered the hills that drop into Mussomeli, a postcard village worth its roller-coaster approach. I had come to photograph the tomb of the region’s legendary godfather, Giuseppe Genco Russo (no relation, I assure you). When Mussomeli popped into view, I pulled my car to the side of the road to shoot the panorama.</p>
<p>Up ahead a few hundred meters stood a policeman casually talking to a man seated on a parked scooter. The officer took keen notice of me. As I jumped out of my car, he instinctively jerked into a defensive position, knees bent and ready to spring, his fierce eyes betraying fear. Quickly, I waved my camera before he went for his gun. I don’t know which of us was the more scared. I took the stupid picture and left, vowing to avoid Italian cops forevermore.</p>
<p>Twenty-four hours later I managed to piss off a pair of heavily armed agents of the Finance Guard. This is the paramilitary squad that seizes the assets of mafiosi like Provenzano. My crime? Photographing the Guard’s station house in Corleone. I should have known better.</p>
<p>To frame the shot, I planted myself across the street from the station in the shadow of some trees, then snapped a picture. At that instant, a young uniformed agent stepped outside the building and spotted me.</p>
<p>“O! O!” he shouted. That’s Italian for Hey! He swatted the air furiously with his hand which looked like he was waving goodbye but, in the south, means the opposite.</p>
<p>“Come here!” he demanded. I came out of the shadows waving my camera like the white flag of surrender.</p>
<p>“I’m only a tourist,” I yelled back as I crossed to him cautiously. He had the face of a nervous rookie fronting grit. I pictured a dingy jail cell. Interrogators singing fascist favorites. An international incident.</p>
<p>At that point an older, heavyset officer stepped out of the station, attracted by the commotion. He didn’t look scared or even angry when the younger one informed him I’d taken a picture. I noticed the array of antennae and surveillance cams that covered the razor-wired roof.</p>
<p>“I’ll explain myself,” I said, before they asked. I brought up the image on my camera screen— the only one I’d had the chance to take. “I’m an American tourist.”</p>
<p>“Passport,” the older officer requested in the routine manner of an Alitalia ticket agent. I told him it was in my car and pointed to the rental parked down the hill. He took my camera and sent me to fetch the document as he and the rookie had a hushed discussion. In the car, I quickly stashed my folders stuffed with Mafia notes and news clippings under the seat then grabbed my passport. I returned and handed it over, launching into my explanation. It was the honest truth.</p>
<p>“I was at the anti-Mafia museum [in Corleone’s old town] and they told me that Totò Riina’s former villa is now the Finance Guard’s station house.” Riina was Provenzano’s partner when they ruled the Cosa Nostra and the man most responsible for the assassination of dozens of Carabinieri, cops and judges. The Riina name, I knew, was anathema to my inquisitors. The older officer examined my passport.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004084,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004084,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004084?profile=original" width="400" /></a><strong>Photo: Mafia boss Totò Riina's confiscated villa in Corleone, Sicily</strong></p>
<p>“Russo, eh?” he said. “I have relatives named Russo in Naples.”</p>
<p>“There are a lot of Russos in Naples,” I replied in an attempt at levity. The name is the Smith of the region.</p>
<p>“That’s true,” he said, cracking a smile. Then, abruptly, “Let’s erase this picture. Are there more?”</p>
<p>“No, just the one.” I zapped the image into oblivion, relieved to be erasing my crime but sorry to lose the shot.</p>
<p>“Now look there,” he said, pointing down the hill in the direction of my car. “You see that villa? The pink one.” I saw a large, newly built house painted a garish pink. “That’s the former villa of Totò Riina.”</p>
<p>“Ah. So—,” I hesitated, “would it be possible to photograph it?”<br /> “Sure.”</p>
<p>“Without a problem?”</p>
<p>“Without a problem.”</p>
<p>“Well, I’m very sorry about this, signori,” I said, anxious to leave. The older officer handed back my camera. I trod down the hill and started shooting, noticing that the rookie, now standing alone, kept a watchful eye on me. After several exposures, I got in the car and drove back up the hill. I waved to the young officer. He glared. If you go to Corleone today, you can see the former villa of Totò Riina. But don’t photograph it! The house is the now the new headquarters of the Finance Guard.</p>
<p>San Francisco writer Carl Russo blogs at <a href="http://www.MafiaExposed.com" target="_blank">www.MafiaExposed.com</a>. His new book, <em>The Sicilian Mafia: An Illustrated Travel Guide</em> will be published by Strategic Media Books. Russo currently has a crowd-funding <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-sicilian-mafia-an-illustrated-travel-guide">campaign</a> at <a href="http://www.indiegogo.com/MafiaGuide" target="_blank">www.indiegogo.com/MafiaGuide</a>.</p>
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La Primula Rossa: The Story of Luciano Leggio (Part 3)
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-2
2011-03-05T09:30:00.000Z
2011-03-05T09:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-2"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006468?profile=original" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of">Part One</a> - <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-1">Part Two</a> - <strong>Part Three</strong><br /> <br /> By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> Following Leggio’s acquittal in the second trial, although he was subject to re-arrest to face other outstanding charges, the Attorney General in Palermo, Scaglione himself, had ruled this could only take place in Corleone. As he had no intention of ever returning there, Leggio’s freedom seemed guaranteed. He entered a number of private clinics on the mainland, ending up in Rome, and when it was time to leave, a Cadillac, supplied by Frank Coppola turned up to drive him off.<br /> <br /> Leaving the Romana di Bracci clinic, he made a visit to a lawyer. <br /> <br /> Journalist Mario Francese, in an article published in <em>Giornale di Sicilia</em> on March 10th, 1974, claimed that Leggio went to the law office of Salvatore Albano, in Rome, where he had drawn up a special power of attorney in favour of his older sister, Maria Antonina, allowing her almost a free hand in administering his estate and assets.<br /> <br /> The notorious lawyer and Leggio had worked together since the 1960s. Albano also represented Frank Coppola and Giulio Andreotti, the most famous of Italian politicians, who was arrested and tried twice for complicity in cases regarding the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Leggio surfaced a few weeks later at Cinisi near Palermo, living under the protection of Don Tano Badalamenti, the capo of the local cosca. He had courted a woman from Corleone when he was young, a woman whose family was close to that of Leggio’s. So, they had been connected through both of their families-biological and crime-for a number of years.<br /> <br /> After a period of some weeks, Leggio then moved east across the island to the province of Catania, where he stayed in hiding in a two story villa in Via Morgioni in the hills above San Giovani La Punta. The house he rented was only a short distance from the local carabinieri barracks. As in Corleone, four years before, he seemed to enjoy the risk or perhaps the challenge of living almost under the noses of the very people charge with his capture and arrest. <br /> <br /> He was joined there for a time, by Riina along with Bernardo Provenzano who was also on the run from the law. The Calderone brothers, head of the Catania cosca, organized papers for Leggio and Provenzano, in the names of Antonio and Giuseppe Farrugia. Leggio was using this identity when he was finally caught by the police in Milan, three years later. Although he was thirty-seven at this time, Provenzano could not drive, and had to commute between Catania and Palermo by train.<br /> <br /> Ironically, the two men claimed to be butchers by profession. They were probably two of the three biggest, in the history of the Mafia. <br /> <br /> In July 1971, two months after he probably shot Judge Scaglione, the short, stocky man with the limp, moved across to the mainland and settled in Milan. Pippo Calderone the capo of the local Mafia family in Catania, was under police surveillance, and it was certain that eventually they would have tracked him to the house in San Giovanni. It was time for Leggio to move on.<br /> <br /> In this period, he was operating his crime family through both Riina and Provenzano, two killers who were every bit as ruthless and deadly as he was. In a meeting with the two men in Catania, he had made the decision to appoint Riina as his regent, to arbitrate on his behalf when he was unable to attend commission meetings. <br /> <br /> By this time, the Mafia commission, perhaps set up sometime following a mob meeting at the Hotel des Palmes in Palermo in 1957, and made up of the representatives of the major families on the island, had laid down an edict that kidnappings were out of bounds.<br /> <br /> It’s more than probable in fact that in Palermo at least, going back to the end of the 19th century, there had been some formalized system to control continuity between the various cosche, a governing body of some description. This was according to evidence presented at the Court of Catanzaro. <br /> <br /> In January 1897, the eight Mafia families of the Palermo region convened in a meeting headed by Malaspina cosca boss, Francesco Siino. Unresolved matters lead to an inter-family war that went on until 1900. Siino became one of the causalities and was shot and wounded. <br /> <br /> Ermanno Sangiorgi, the Palermo chief of police, persuaded Siino to become a <em>pentito</em>, only the second Mafioso in Sicily to have turned informant, after Salvatore D’Amico, a member of the <em>Stuppaggheri</em> sect of Monreale. He was the first ever to disclose intimate details of the organization, naming structure, ranks from boss down to soldier and his testimony generated an investigation resulting in the arrest and trial of 19 members of the clan. For his help in unveiling the secret society, he was murdered in Bagheria, in 1878.<br /> <br /> Irrespective of when and how the commission started, its members decided that people who were rich enough to justify the risks in terms of kidnappings, were also often politically placed in positions of power that caused the act to be counter-productive to the political strategy of the Mafia. But kidnappings were a great source of income for the Corleonesi, now badly lacking funds. They had financed a number of costly trials, and lawyer’s fees and the usual bribes had dug deep into their reserves. <br /> <br /> So Luciano Leggio got involved in kidnappings on the Continent.<br /> <br /> Between 1961 and 1972, 372 known Mafiosi moved to Milan, or operated between the largest city in Italy and Sicily. He was one of them.<br /> <br /> From the time he moved to the mainland in 1971 and his arrest there in Milan, in 1974, information on his movements and activities is fragmented and at times, vague. Almost all of it comes to us from informants. There is evidence that through a nominee, Antonio Quartararo, that he purchased a citrus grove, Vaccarizzo, in Catania and had constructed a two-story, 400 square metre house, which had a built-in storage cell, intended to hold kidnap victims.<br /> <br /> When he first arrived in Milan he stayed at Via Steniti 6, living under the protection of Francis Turatello, aka <em>Faccia d'Angelo</em>-Angel Face-a member of the ‘New Camorra’ in Naples. Turatello’s name goes down in mob history as surely the only one who was murdered in prison (in 1981) and then disemboweled by his killer, Catania Mafioso Antonino Faro, who proceeded to eat his liver. Faro a five-times killer by the age of 28, killed Turatello under the orders of Camorrista Pasquale Barra, who in turn was following the orders of the ‘New Camorra’ boss Rafaele Cutolo. The murder created a major rift between Sicily and Naples as not only was Turatello the godson of Frank Coppola, he was personally appointed by Leggio to supervise the Corleone’s drug business in Milan.<br /> <br /> In 1971, Leggio held a council meeting at his apartment with Tommaso Buscetta, Gaetano Badalmenti and Geraldo Albertini. On the agenda were a number of items, including the development of the family’s drug-trafficking business. <br /> <br /> Other meetings with mob associates were held regularly in a restaurant and wine bar he co-owned in the Via Giambellino. Later in the year he held another sit-down meeting, this time attended by Salvatore Riina, Vincenzo Arena, Giuseppe Taormina and Salvatore Gambino. This was mainly about setting territorial boundaries in the kidnapping business he was developing. There were more meetings, including one attended by Riina, Salvatore Enea, the Bono brothers, Gerlando Alberti, Francesco Scaglione and Vincent Arena. These meetings were tracked through the use of informants, by Colonel Giuseppe Russo, a carabinieri specialist in organized crime, who would be murdered by the Mafia in 1977, while holidaying with his wife and child in the resort of Ficuzza, near Corleone.<br /> <br /> Leggio, Turatello, and other Catania mobsters, formed a gang based upon, and referred to by law enforcement, as <em>Anonima Sequestri</em> literally ‘Anonymous Kidnappers.’ Originally a Sardinian phenomenon, it had been transported to the mainland and adopted by Camorra gangsters. The Naples based version of the Sicilian Mafia may well have begun in Sardinia, in a prison in Cagliari, a port on the island, in 1200, and imported into Naples at some later time. <br /> <br /> Lombardy became the kidnapping capital of Italy. Between 1969 and 1999 there were 672 kidnappings registered by the police in the country and 158 took place in and around Milan.<br /> <br /> One of the most famous Leggio helped to architect was the abduction of the young John Paul Getty III in 1973. He was held for months in Calabria, before his tightwad grandfather coughed up the $3 million ransom after he got an ear in the mail. <br /> <br /> By this time, Leggio had been convicted by the court of appeals in Bari, in Calabria, for not committing a murder.<br /> <br /> In the strange and perverse Italian judicial system, in December 1970, he was convicted-in abstenia-of murdering Doctor Michele Navarra back in 1958. There had been no new evidence introduced to inculpate him, but he was found guilty because no crimes of the Mafia type had been committed in Corleone since his arrest in 1964.<br /> <br /> He was given a life sentence because ‘Leggio’s sinister personality had been clear in the proceedings (the trial), and the fact that he is a Capo beyond any reasonable doubt.’ <br /> <br /> In fact, the only tangible evidence that linked him to the killing was a reflector that broke off the Alfa 1900 during the shoot-out, and was found at the scene by investigators. And even this was suspect, as there was a strong possibility that the original fragments had been replaced to throw doubt on the court exhibit.<br /> <br /> The Supreme Court of Italy upheld the verdict. It was a finding based on shifting sands and broken mirrors, but it was the only way the judiciary could figure out how to lock down Leggio, a man who had evaded the law for over twenty years. <br /> <br /> Everybody knew he did it, no one knew how he did it, so they convicted him for being in effect the man who probably did it. It was a pretty shonky deal by any legal parameter, and illustrated just how low the law had sunk in its desperation to get its man.<br /> <br /> The Court of Appeals in Bari had acquitted Liggio of various homicides, but sentenced him to life for the murder of his former chief, Michele Navarra, recorded in the Antimafia Commission, <em>Relazione sull'indagine riguardante casi di singoli Mafiosi,</em> pp. 105-130; Antimafia Commission, <em>Relazione conclusiva</em>, VI legislature, doc. XXIII, n. 2 (Roma, 1976), pp. 110-117 <br /> <br /> But convicting him and grounding him where two very different matters. He entered into some of the best years of his life in the early 1970s, taking a string of bewildering alias’s-at one time he held eleven different passports-in names like Pablo Villa, Sebastiano Tarola, Antonio Tazio, Calogero Polla, Baron Osvaldo Fattori, Antoni Paranzan and Michele Di Terlizzi, among others.<br /> <br /> From some time in 1971 until September 1973, Leggio’s address was Via Cremosana 4, an apartment which belonged to a close associate, Nello Pernice. Nello, known as ‘The Negro’ because he had been born in Addis Abbaba, was a career criminal and alleged hit-man for the mob. He had been ‘made’ into the Mafia by Leggio, when they were both incarcerated at Ucciardone Prison in Palermo.<br /> <br /> Leggio roamed Europe, setting up an expanding criminal empire based on theft, embezzlement, gambling, extortion in the construction industry, and kidnapping on a grand scale. He travelled widely, without any problems from police or custom authorities. Marco Nese an Italian journalist, tracked Leggio down on one occasion and photographed him in a Swiss restaurant.<br /> <br /> Here, Leggio met up again with Gerlando Alberti, a member of the Porta Nuova Mafia family in Palermo, and along for the ride were Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore ‘L‘ingegnere’ Greco, one of the most enigmatic Mafiosi of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, to dine in the Park Hotel in Geneva, in May 1972.<br /> <br /> It’s quite possible he even visited America during this period of his life based in northern Italy.<br /> <br /> Nicholas Pileggi, the well-known author, claimed in an article he wrote in 1973 on the drug trade that a group of senior New York Mafiosi, all well-known to law enforcement, held a meeting late in 1972 in the home of a Gambino crime family capo Johnny D‘Alessio, on Staten Island. Leggio was noted as being one of the seven or eight men, including Funzie Teiri, head of the Genovese Family, Aniello Dellacroce, number two man in the Gambino Family, and Alphonse Persico brother of Carmine, boss of the Colombo’s, who attended, along with Francesco Salamone, who interestingly, was listed as the president of a company in Milan linked into Leggio and other mobsters. The Italian Financial Police believed this was a front for mob money laundering.<br /> <br /> In Milan, Leggio went generally by the name of Antonino Farruggia, the one he had used in Catania. He claimed to be an importer of wines, and ran a large wine store called Vinicola Borroni in the Viale Umbria, and the wine bar on the Via Giambellino, through his nominee, Pernice. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006879,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006879,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006879?profile=original" width="367" /></a>He had, at some time, formed a relationship with a woman called Lucia Parazana (right), a Yugoslav refugee, who worked as a nurse, (the same occupation held by Leoluchina Soressi back in Corleone!) and they moved, in September 1973, into a top floor apartment of an upmarket apartment building at Via Ripamonti 166 in the Vigentino district, about two miles from the centre of Milan.<br /> <br /> On April 5th 1973, Angelo Mangano, the police officer who had seemingly arrested Leggio in 1964, was attacked outside his home in Via di Tor Tre Teste in the eastern suburb of Casilino in Rome, along with his driver, Domenico Casella. Although both of them were shot repeatedly by three men, and badly injured, they survived. <br /> <br /> According to informants, the attackers were Michele Zazza, the infamous Camorrista, and his nephew Ciro Mazzarella along with Leggio. Enrico Bellavia in his book <em>Un Uomo D’Onore</em> claims that Angelo Nuvoletta was also one of the attackers. Bellavia relates that Leggio, Provenzano, Riina and Francesco Di Carlo, the boss of the Altofonte cosca held a meeting at which the attack was planned. Di Carlo subsequently became a pentiti and offered up this information. It may have been pay-back time for Leggio, having perhaps long held a venomous hatred for the police officer who had helped arrest him in 1964, back in Corleone.<br /> <br /> Fourteen shots were fired at the two men by the assassins, who had driven up in a yellow Alfa 2000 with Milan plates.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Cornuto</em>,’ one of them shouted. ‘<em>You’re finished being a spy</em>,’ and then the gunmen opened up. Investigators were puzzled by two things. Firstly, Mangano’s wife had received a telephone call only the previous day, threatening his life, which should have meant he was being extra cautious. Secondly, they wondered why a self-proclaimed top marksman in the state police, did not even return a shot!<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007274,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007274,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007274?profile=original" width="482" /></a>Mangano (right) later claimed he had been shot because he was about to unearth the killers of Judge Scaglione and other serious crimes linked into Leggio.<br /> <br /> Sometime in June, 1973 Leggio became the perpetrator of a particularly nasty quartet of murders.<br /> <br /> Damiano Caruso, was a soldier in the Mafia family of Giuseppe Di Cristina, in south-east Sicily, although he himself lived in Villabate. The family don of Reisi had been an informer for the carabinieri and claimed among other things that Leggio had a fire-team- <em>gruppi di fuoco</em>- of 14 assassins, who were prepared to kill anyone, anywhere, on his orders.<br /> <br /> Caruso found himself in Milan. Escaping from internal exile he came to northern Italy to meet up with many of the Mafioso who had settled here, looking for opportunities. Caruso had been one of the squad that killed Michele Cavataio in what came to be known as ‘The Viale Lazio Massacre,’ in December 1969. Along with Bernardo Provenzano, another member of the team, he was wounded.<br /> <br /> He was sent to New York to recuperate. There, he had gotten into trouble with Carlo Gambino who was then one of the most powerful mob bosses in America, and was banished back to Sicily. Caruso was a man, according to Antonino Calderone, who had unlimited courage and a huge amount of ferocity in his nature. However, he had no idea when to shut up and listen to others who had more knowledge than he had. He did whatever he wanted to, regardless of the consequences, and this would be his undoing. He once tried to kill a parliamentary deputy, hitting him with an axe, doing more damage to himself when he missed his swing, slashing his own leg. <br /> <br /> His boss, Di Cristina, ordered him on one occasion to kill a Mafioso called Candido Ciuni in the small bar the man ran on the Via Maqueda in Palermo. Caruso attacked the man in October 1970, stabbing him, though not finishing the job off properly. <br /> <br /> A week later, on Tuesday 27th, while the wounded man lay in the Civic Hospital recovering, Caruso, Raffaele and Pasquale Bovi, Pietro Ciotta and Gioacchino Marrone, walked into the building, dressed as doctors. They disabled the duty doorman, Salvatore Saglio, ran up the stairs to the second floor and in room six, machine-gunned the injured man to death, in front of his screaming wife, Antonina Orlando, who desperately tried to stop it by rugby tacking one of the gunmen. It was unique in mob killings in Sicily: shooting the victim a second time, as he recovered from the first attack. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007671,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007671,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007671?profile=original" width="202" /></a>Ciuni (right) who was 44 at the time of his death, came from Ravenusa, a small town near Riesi, the fiefdom of Di Cristina, and his family had been involved in a feud with the family of the Mafia boss since 1946. He had also publicly voiced his dissent in the killing of Vitto Gattuso, who had been shot-gunned to death while walking hand-in-hand with his small son as punishment for an infringement against Di Cristina. <br /> <br /> Ironically, and somewhat amazingly, in view of the events, there is a proverb in the town of Ravenusa that recalls:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>First they stab you and send you to hospital where they fatten you up and then kill you</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Leggio believed Caruso had been responsible for the death of a young man he was fond of, Nino Guarano. Nicknamed ‘Big Heart’ he had been part of a plot to de-throne Di Cristina, and when Caruso found out, he killed him.<br /> <br /> In addition, Caruso had robbed a jeweller in Palermo who was under the protection of Salvatore Riina, as well as stealing goods from a warehouse owned by another man of honour. Enough aggravation to get you killed by Leggio, who organized for Nello Pernice, to have Caruso removed. In typical Leggio style, one mere death wasn’t enough to satisfy his passion for murder. When Caruso’s woman came calling looking for him, Leggio murdered her, and then for good measure, raped this woman’s fifteen year old daughter before disposing of her. <br /> <br /> To round it off, a cousin had travelled to Milan endeavouring to track down Caruso, and in a fit of pique, Leggio killed him as well. This information was passed onto the authorities by Antonino Calderone.<br /> <br /> The kidnapping of wealthy industrialist Pietro Torrielli in December of 1972, set the whistles and bells going in the office of Judge Giuliano Turone, the deputy anti-Mafia prosecutor of Lombardy. The huge ransom of 1.5 billion lire was an indication that the kidnappers were probably part of a sophisticated ring. Following the release of Torrielli, the <em>Guardia di Finanza</em> (Financial Police) followed a long and torturous paper trail of documents, bank checks, money orders and telegrams that all seemed to lead to one Senor Antonio, whose name kept coming up on wiretaps the police had set up across Milan. All of their intelligence pointed to the fact that Senor Antonio was Luciano Leggio. On May 13th, 1974, a wiretap on his own phone altered the police to the fact that he was soon leaving the city on an ‘extended visit.’<br /> <br /> Plans were laid, and at 6:00 am on the morning of May 16th, the Financial Police mounted a massive containment exercise. Ten trucks containing 47 police officers arrived in the Vigentino district, sealing off all possible escape routes around the apartment at Via Ripamonti. At 6:30 am Colonel Vissicchio and Major Lombardi in charge of the arrest, accompanied by a dozen officers, climbed to the top floor of the building and hammered on the apartment door. It was opened by Leggio in pyjamas and slippers.<br /> <br /> In the background the police could hear a baby crying. It was Paolo, Leggio’s one year old son. The most wanted and perhaps feared man in the whole of Italy surrendered peacefully. The police found a revolver in his bedroom along with books on philosophy and history. It was almost an exact replica of his arrest in Corleone ten years before!<br /> <br /> Tommaso Buscetta when he gave evidence following his decision to become an informer against the Mafia, inferred that Riina had betrayed his boss in order to gain control of the Corleonesi. <br /> <br /> In an ironic twist, it’s quite possible that twenty years later, Riina after 23 years 6 months and 8 days on the run, was arrested himself because of the betrayal of one of his men, Baldassare Di Maggio.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006468?profile=original" width="428" /></a>Destined to spend the rest of his life in various prisons across Italy, and finally into the isolation of Badu e Corros penitentiary in Nuoro on the island of Sardinia, at the age of forty-nine, for Luciano Leggio (right), his life of freedom was over. But that did not stop him from running his crime family. Riina and Provenzano operated as his proxy on the cupola, with Riina gradually assuming more and more power over the Corleonesi’s affairs. <br /> <br /> Leggio sat in his prison cells across Italy, moving his killers like pawns across the chessboard of Sicily, picking up judges and prosecutors and journalist and politicians. And knocking them down one by one as it suited his agenda.<br /> <br /> Over the next twelve years, he was constantly moving between prisons and courthouses.<br /> <br /> ON July 29th 1974, he was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in connection with the 114 Trial.<br /> <br /> In November 1974, along with 31 other men, he was tried for the crimes committed by Anonima Sequestri.<br /> <br /> In 1975 he was arraigned before Judge Terranova and his conviction for the murder of Dr. Navarra in 1958 was re-confirmed.<br /> <br /> He was tried in connection with the kidnapping of Luigi Rossi di Montelera, in 1976.<br /> <br /> In 1977 he was indicted on the evidence of Leonardo Vitale, the pentiti from the Alterallo cosca, near Palermo, who pre-empted Buscetta and Contoro as the most significant Mafia informant of the 20th century, although the authorities had no real idea who and what they were dealing with, and simply had him shipped to a mental hospital for seven years.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007477,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007477,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007477?profile=original" width="304" /></a>Leggio featured at a court of appeals hearing in 1978 at Palermo, when he and Benedetto La Cara argued their cases against their 1974 sentences.<br /> <br /> In 1982 he was tried in Reggio Calabria in connection with the killing of Judge Terranova and acquitted. <br /> <br /> In November 1985 he was back in Reggio Calabria, where he appeared to be having an affair with a buxom, 41 year old blonde from Perugia, called Maria Pia Davena, although their meetings were always in prison cells or courthouse interview rooms.<br /> <br /> There were hearings regarding the murder of Judge Terranova in April 1986, moved from Calabria to Palermo, in order to have him handy for the forthcoming Maxi-trial.<br /> <br /> The Genoese police officer in charge of logistics at the trial held in Sicily, in Palermo, in a special bunker-style courthouse built onto the Ucciardone prison, would not even mention Leggio’s name in the security of his own quarters.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Leggio</em>,’ he explained to anthropologists John and Peter Schneider, ‘<em>could bury any of us</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Although he exerted his hold over some of his interests, there never was, according to Judge Giovanni Falcone, a <em>grande vecchio</em>-powerful old man, of the Mafia, who pulled the strings from the very top. The judge considered this concept an idea of great intellectual crudity.<br /> <br /> As Leggio and everyone who followed him knew, the real power lay in the Palazzo Chigi and the Montecitorio, in Rome, the heart in the body of political Italy.<br /> <br /> In one of his many trials or court hearings in the 1970s, Leggio defended his lifestyle by quoting almost word for word the Mafia definition as laid down by the famous 19th Palermitan doctor and ethnographer, Giuseppe Pitrè:<br /> <br /> <em>Mafia is neither a sect nor an association, it has no regulations or statutes. The Mafioso is not a thief or a criminal……..Mafia is the awareness of one’s own individual strength…….The Mafioso is someone who always wants to give and receive respect. If someone offends him, he does not turn to the law.</em><br /> <br /> Throughout part of his years of isolation, Leggio used a Catholic priest, Agostino Coppola, to carry messages from him to his subordinates in the Mafia. The grandson of the old don, Frank Coppola, he was, like a number of the men of the cloth in Sicily, a Mafioso himself, made into the Partinico cosca in 1969. This was confirmed to the authorities by Antonino Calderone. A man of some considerable power within the church, Coppola at one time, administered the assets of the diocese of Monreale and was the parish priest of Carini for a number of years.<br /> <br /> Coppola’s brothers, Giacomo and Domenico were Mafioso who controlled the land west of Carini towards Paterna, an area which included the Zucco Estate an area of 147 hectares and a number of buildings, including a castle. Giuseppe Russo the carabinieri colonel murdered by the Mafia in 1977, was convinced that the priest Coppola had arranged to hide Leggio on this estate for a number of months<br /> <br /> The priest had acted for Leggio’s kidnapping unit on at least one occasion when he was the emissary between the gang and the family of the young engineer, Luciano Cassina, kidnapped in August 1972 and held in captivity for six months until released on payment of a ransom of over one billion lira. For this little escapade, the priest was indicted in 1976 and sentenced to 14 years in prison.<br /> <br /> Eventually suspended and then dismissed from the church, he married into the Caruana family, the greatest drug dealers the Sicilian mob has ever known. He was the priest who in fact married Salvatore Riina and his life-long love, Antonietta Bagarella, on April 16th, 1974 either in a villa near Cinisi, or at a little church in the San Lorenzo district of Palermo, according to which source is consulted.<br /> <br /> In 1977, prison officials at the penitentiary in Lodi in the province of Lombardy, Northern Italy, discovered a plot to spring Leggio, apparently engineered by the Mafia, and the prisoner was immediately moved to another high security facility.<br /> <br /> Between 1979 and 1980 when he was incarcerated at Ucciardone in Palermo, another conspiracy to break him out of prison was uncovered, and he was again transferred.<br /> <br /> Leggio’s incarceration in prison was a lot more comfortable than a lot of his peers. Before he was sent to Badu e Corros in Sardinia, he had his meals delivered from an outside restaurant, and paid another inmate to act as his food taster, to make sure he wasn’t poisoned. At one prison he had as his protector and guard Antonino Faro, the Catania Mafioso and homicidal cannibal killer. <br /> <br /> As the years passed, Leggio grew fleshy and even sleeker in his appearance, but always kept himself smart and well-groomed. He had boxes of long, fat Toscanello Tuscany cigars delivered each week, and would sport a huge diamond and gold ring to impress his guests.<br /> <br /> He would spend his time writing poetry and reading, studying the pre-Socratic philosophers and later serious writers such as Dostoevsky.<br /> <br /> He filled his days painting, producing over 400 pictures, strong vibrant images of Corleone and the surrounding countryside, either from his memory or from postcards sent to him by friends and relatives. One of his lawyers, Pierro Arru, said Leggio‘s inspiration came from Vincent Van Gough. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008273,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008273,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237008273?profile=original" width="350" /></a>Some less than kind commentators, suggested that the paintings were in fact done by other inmates, one in particular, Gaspare Mutolo, who had shared a cell with Leggio for a period of time, claimed he painted more than half of the work that was eventually put on display, and Leggio simply added his signature to them. ‘<em>Leggio</em>’ he claimed, ‘<em>couldn’t paint a daisy</em>.’ Whatever, the works of art attracted thousands of curious sight-seers when they went on exhibition. <br /> <br /> His first collection of fifty-five paintings was displayed at the Marino Gallery on the Via Dante in Palermo in January 1988, organized by another of his lawyers, Salvatore Traina. The showing opened on Saturday 2nd, and by the following Tuesday, forty had already been sold. The proceeds of the sales, organized by his ageing sister, Maria-Antonina, back in Corleone, would go towards providing a dialysis machine in the hospital there. Some of his works were to sell for as high US$30,000. Soon, art galleries in New York, Spain and Germany were clamouring to get their hands on them.<br /> <br /> In 1992, the governor of the prison applied for an injunction to prevent Leggio sending out anymore of his paintings on the grounds that they contained secret signals to his mob associates. Leggio’s lawyer fought the action, but the Italian supreme court found in favour of the prison authorities. <br /> <br /> Early in 1986, Leggio was moved from his current prison back to Palermo as a defendant in another major organized crime investigation that became known as the Mafia maxi-trial. <br /> <br /> The biggest legal event of its kind, ever held in Sicily, it ran from February 1986 until December 1987. 464 defendants, including 4 women, faced charges, that along with their names, filled 400 pages of the court documents than ran to 8607 pages. There were 200 defence lawyers in court along with two full sets of judges and jurors to last the course.<br /> <br /> There were over 100 prisoners who appeared in the special courthouse on February 10th. One hundred and thirteen were out on bail awaiting a later trial and 115 under indictment were at large, including Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. By December 1987, the trial was over, having sentenced over 300 of the accused on a variety of charges from murder to associating with the Mafia. Leggio, secured in his own private cage during the hearings, treated the court with contempt and disdain. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008498,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008498,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237008498?profile=original" width="422" /></a>‘<em>How could I do these things I’m accused of?’ he said. ‘I have been in prison for the last twelve years. Do you wish to call my jailer to confirm that I have not been out. It is impossible that I have committed crimes</em>.’<br /> <br /> He had indeed been in prison during the steamroller rise of the Corleonesi’s to power within the brotherhood. During the blooding of the second Mafia war in the early 1980s when perhaps a thousand or more were killed, according to Judge Giovanni Falcone, he had been confined. He was incarcerated when he helped organized the take over of the heroin trafficking into America. The Mafia had murdered a former mayor of Palermo, eleven senior police officers, four judges, six public prosecutors, two famous journalists and four politicians. The dead were everywhere. It’s more than conceivable that none of these things happened without his approval and consent, and during all of this time, he was in prison.<br /> <br /> He was cleared of all counts, on this, his last trial. As usual, the judiciary couldn’t really come to terms with a man who was really a monster.<br /> <br /> On Monday, November 15th 1993, he collapsed in his prison cell at the high security prison in Sardinia. He had been here for nine years. <br /> <br /> Penitentiary Guard, Antonino Pampitta, discovered him in a routine cell-check at 8:35 am. lying on his bed, his mouth open, gasping for breath, his eyes dilated In his final years, Leggio suffered from many ailments-asthma, prostate and liver problems, along with rheumatism and bladder dysfunctions, and his endless bone problems. Three doctors worked on him, trying to keep him alive. Taken to the San Francesco Hospital on the Via Mannironi in Nuoro, he went peacefully before the ambulance arrived, as his heart turned to jelly and died on him and his kidneys and bladder finally gave in to the struggle. He was sixty-eight years old. <br /> <br /> The official cause of death was myocardial infarction. <br /> <br /> Dying quietly in bed was an option he had offered few of his enemies. <br /> <br /> His lawyer, Francesco Azzena had been appealing his sentence, on the grounds of his numerous health problems, and the fact that he had in total, served 25 years in prison.<br /> Angelo Puggioni, the owner of a well-known furniture store in Nuoro- Dania Arredamenti- had guaranteed Leggio a position as an interior designer, should his release be facilitated.<br /> <br /> The image of Luciano Leggio, one of the most virulent Mafioso of all times, effusively offering clients advice on their selection of drapes and soft furnishings, is one to be conjured with long into the night.<br /> <br /> After a postmortem, just to make sure he had died a natural death , his body was shipped by air to Sicily, arriving into Punta Raisi, Palermo airport at 1:30 pm on the 17th of November.<br /> <br /> The coffin was collected by an old, blue Mercedes hearse, and escorted by two police jeeps, the convey made its way south, through Montelepre, the haunt of the bandit Giuliano fifty years before, then across and through San Giuseppe Jato, the heartland of the Mafia for over 100 years, and into Corleone. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009452,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009452,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009452?profile=original" width="392" /></a>The hearse brought the body to the tiny church of San Rosalia in the Piazza Giuseppe Vasi. Here, parish priest Girolamo Leggio, first cousin to the dead man, performed the burial service. This and the internment, were attended by only some immediate family-his sister Carmella and cousin Giovanna Palazzo along with her husband, Francesco Zito. Maria Antonina (right) the sister who administered his estate and had been charged with allocating the proceeds of Leggio’s paintings into philanthropic endeavours, stayed at home with brother Carmelo, who had been part of Leggio’s original gang.<br /> <br /> At the cemetery on the Via Marqueda, TV camera crews and newspaper reporters filled out the available spaces. There was a strong police presence in and around the area, and many tourists, unaware of the proceedings taking place, were re-routed away from Corleone that day as the law closed down the area with roadblocks on all the main roads into the town. The streets were deserted, the shops closed down for the day. The town rested still and quiet, as though waiting for the consummation of a curse long overdue.<br /> <br /> Leggio’s partner from Milan did not attend the funeral services as neither did his son, 19 year old Paolo, who according to the media, had disowned his father. Leochina Sorisi now married and living in Genoa, wanted nothing to do with the ceremony. The only one from that period at the cemetery was a man in a grey overcoat who claimed to have been Sorisi’s cousin, and had been around during those days in 1964. He wanted, as he told a reporter, ‘to see the end of the story.’ <br /> <br /> This may have been Ludovico Benigno, who had been one of the men seen with Placido Rizzotto before he was kidnapped and murdered, all those years before.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009296,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009296,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009296?profile=original" width="455" /></a>At five minutes after four in the afternoon, the sky overcast through the fiery glow of the setting sun and a wind blowing in over the Rocca Busambra shrouded in dark clouds, dusting dried flowers from graves across the cemetery, the coffin was interred in the red, granite family vault, alongside his brother Giralamo who had been buried there in 1967. There is no name or picture on the tomb to indicate Luciano Leggio is buried here. Two wreaths, one from his sisters and brother one simply marked ‘from the grandchildren,’ are laid in place, and it is over.<br /> <br /> La Primula Rossa now lies forever, in this graveyard, only twenty five paces from the grave of Dr. Michele Navarra. Somewhere here, in this burial ground, it is rumoured, lie the remains of Calogero Bagarella, interred in secret after he was killed in the shoot-out at the Via Lazio, in 1969.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Leggio was one of the most important chiefs of the Cosa Nostra</em>,’ said Luciano Violante, chairman of the anti-Mafia Committee in the Italian Parliament. A fitting epitaph, a back-handed compliment, or perhaps a sad commentary on a wasted life. <br /> <br /> On January 29th 1994, a ceremony was held in the town of Corleone to rename Piazza Vittorio Emanuel III. After months of wrangling amongst council members, it was agreed to call the square ‘Piazza Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellini’ as a permanent tribute to the two judges murdered two years previously, by the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Hundreds of people gathered that morning in the square overshadowed by the local carabinieri barracks, where sixty-eight years earlier, Carmelo Rizzotto had been one of the dozens of suspected Mafia criminals rounded up before being deported to the Palermo prison. <br /> <br /> The re-naming was pushed through by mayor Giuseppe Cipriani who said, ‘There is more to Corleone than the Mafia.’ Sisters of the murdered judges carried out the unveiling ceremony.<br /> <br /> Ironically, the superintendent in charge of monuments for the city, was called Meli, the same name as Antonino Meli, the 68 year old judge from Caltanissetta , appointed by Rome in 1988 as chief prosecutor in Palermo to head up the anti-Mafia Co-ordinating Group, replacing Falcone and effectively putting back efforts to defeat the Mafia by years. Also, the stonemason hired to create the granite street signs for the square was called Liggio!<br /> <br /> Maybe degrees of separation, as conceived by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929; coincidence, an alignment of random points, the long arm of fate, kismet, chance; all sorts of threads run through the story of Luciano Leggio, linking together a tapestry of energy rather than fabric.<br /> <br /> It had been a long and winding road for him and the Sicilian Mafia, a road that had taken him and his criminal clan from a rustic-based enterprise into a tangled urban world of deceit, treachery and mayhem on a scale never seen before in Italy.<br /> <br /> Anton Blok said, ‘<em>Before there was the Mafia; now there is politics</em>.’<br /> <br /> It may be somewhat simplistic to infer that the Mafia changed its spots simply because it became involved in the machinations of the state. However, there is little doubt that all along, Cosa Nostra’s most exhilarating and profound attraction to its members, was and is, its complete and utter insouciance to the law. Its members could do anything they wanted, safe in the unconditional knowledge that they were protected by their own special coda. It was a short step from indifference to the law towards indifference to the state. It did however, require a quantum leap in the mob’s philosophy regarding killing as a means to an end.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237010063,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237010063,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237010063?profile=original" width="179" /></a>The <em>Little King of Corleone</em> may also have qualified for a unique if somewhat macabre appellation, as one of the greatest mass murderer of his time. His tally was probably somewhere between one to five hundred, many at his own hand, but most at his direction.<br /> <br /> He left as his legacy, the two killing machines he had nurtured and encouraged- his avatars-Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano (left), who eventually both came to represent him on the Mafia’s commission-its board of governors, creating a new precedent within the Sicilian Mafia that under certain circumstance, there could be more than one capo leading a family. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009686,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009686,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009686?profile=original" width="240" /></a>Riina (right) who became know as ‘The Beast,’ and rightly so, was eventually brought to bay in 1993, and caged forever. Provenzano, called ‘The Tractor,’ because he ran everything down in his path, kept going for another thirteen years until he was finally brought to justice in April 2006. It was reported that the townspeople of Corleone were so delighted that he had at last been brought down, they re-named a street after the date he was captured-11 Aprile.<br /> <br /> Their successor as the supreme boss of Cosa Nostra is supposed to be Matteo Messina Denaro, a man of forty-eight. A Porsche-loving, computer savvy, Latin speaking, playboy-killer, known affectionately by his peers as ‘<em>Mathew Money</em>,’ and who once bragged: ‘<em>I filled a cemetery all by myself</em>,’ he seems to be as equally evasive, and difficult to catch as Luciano Leggio was. And like Leggio, he suffers from a permanent and debilitating disease, although his is myopia. <br /> <br /> He is the capo of Castelvetrano, the same place where the bandit Salvatore Giuliano was murdered in 1950. Nothing is set in concrete however, and time will tell if he is in fact the man who has taken over from Provenzana. His story is still to be told.<br /> <br /> In 2005, talking with Gabriella Ebano, the Sicilian author and photographer, Pina Rizzotto, recalled the effect her brother’s murder had on the family. How she and her parents and sisters went with the procession to the Rocca Busambra, on December 14th 1949, and on that cold and misty morning, had witnessed his remains being reclaimed from the deep cave that was used as a burial ground by the local Mafia.<br /> <br /> How her mother, Rosina screamed in anguish and her father, Carmelo, stood with tears streaming down his face, as her brother’s head and items of his clothing were brought out by carabinieri sergeant, Orlando Notari, who had been lowered into the 35 metre chasm.<br /> <br /> Although Placido had been adopted by Rosina, his own mother Giovanna Moschitta, Carmelo’s first wife, dying of the Spanish Flu in 1918, when he was just a baby, he was always been considered by the Rizzotto’s as their eldest boy and treasured son.<br /> <br /> Every night for 57 years, Pina said she had offered a prayer for him. Her sister Salvatrice developed heart problems, and another sister Concetta, six months pregnant, lost her baby because of the stress they went through when their brother disappeared. The whole family was torn apart, and never put together again.<br /> <br /> As the investigation dragged its slow way through the courts and appeals, her brother’s remains lay boxed as evidence, 6007/63, and were never returned to the family even though they made application on five different occasions between 1952 and 1963. Her parents and all her five siblings died without being able to bury their brother and son, and in due course the remains of Placido Rizzotto disappeared into the labyrinth of the Italian bureaucracy. In 2005, Francis Forgione, president of the anti-Mafia Commission, promised there would be a major government investigation to find and return the box. It was thought to be either stored somewhere in the courthouse building in Palermo or at the Court of Cassation in Rome. Things grind exceedingly slow in Italian bureaucracy. <br /> <br /> In August 2008, human remains were found in a sinkhole on the Rocca Busambra. <br /> <br /> In March 2010, Carmelo Rizzotto was exhumed, and DNA samples were taken to match to these remains. The RIS (<em>Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche</em>) of the CID branch of the carabinieri carried out the tests in Messina. Also, found in the cave, was the skeleton of a farm animal which could indicate that after killing Rizzotto, Leggio had the body carried to the mountain by a mule, which was subsequently shot, and left with the trade unionist’s remains.<br /> <br /> The tests however, were negative, as disclosed towards the end of November 2010.<br /> <br /> After 62 years, the search for closure is still important to the members of Placido Rizzotto’s family, the trade union he represented, and in fact the state of Italy.<br /> <br /> It has not gone unnoticed that the bodies of Michele Navarra, Luciano Leggio and other Mafiosi who contributed to the murder of the young trade unionist have been buried with full civil and religious accord, whilst their young victim has still not been laid to rest.<br /> <br /> In Placido Rizzotto we see the true face of the victims of the Sicilian Mafia, and their families, representing the thousands of similar stories which lie untold across a hundred years of enforced violence, generated in order to satisfy the ambitions of those who worshipped false myths and pagan gods and destroyed everything that stood in their way. Men, who Corrado Stajano claimed, <em>were a ghastly tangle of terror, vice, brutality and death</em>.<br /> <br /> Renate Siebert in her achingly beautiful account of life and death in the Mafia, from a woman’s perspective, ‘<em>a journey into Hades</em>,’ as she describes it, hopes that women’s sensibility will help bring about the demise of a phenomenon that represents a negation of what is considered one of the higher achievements of civilization, the right of man, denied individuals through terrorism executed at every social level in Sicily.<br /> <br /> James Lee Burke notes in his book ‘<em>The Glass Rainbow</em>’: ‘<em>If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence in our skin</em>.’<br /> <br /> Surely no one is born malevolent and debased? Genetic disposition and social pressures create the schismatic shift in personality that eventually erupts as a psychosomatic earthquake, damaging everything and everyone around the fault line of that person’s presence. <br /> <br /> Then again, Anthony Burgess in his dystopian novella, ‘Clockwork Orange,’ explored the theme that perhaps we are all born evil, or at least can become perverted along the way.<br /> <br /> Luciano Leggio came into the world a baby, innocent as all are, until these changes occurred in him and turned him into the epitome of malevolence and abomination.<br /> <br /> Mark Twain believed everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anyone. If that is the case, Luciano Leggio’s moon was surely always in perpetual eclipse.<br /> <br /> Aristotle spoke of <em>hamartia</em>, the tragic flaw of man. While the modern popular rendering of hamartia is broadly imprecise and often misleading, it lends itself perfectly to the concept that in Leggio’s case, it may well have been simply that he was Sicilian, and as a result, his destiny was predestined. <br /> <br /> It is hard to find the verbs or adjectives that do justice to the nature of this man: evil, controlling, frightening, unpredictable, pernicious, deadly, capricious, cruel, predatory, aberrant, mendacious are just some that come to mind. They hint at his nature, but hardly scratch the surface of the person. <br /> <br /> He killed for fun, as a game, out of sheer malice, according to Antonino Calderone. <br /> <br /> Maybe this is all we really need to know about La Primula Rossa.<br /> <br /> If we all have our own dark dreams that keep us awake in the small hours of the morning, Luciano Leggio was surely Sicily’s, until Salvatore Riina came along to live up to his nickname ‘The Beast,’ and start the whole, heartbreaking cycle over again.<br /> <br /> Paolo Borsellino, the judge murdered by Cosa Nostra in 1992, said:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>People are dying all around me. If we deny the Mafia their existence they vanish like a nightmare</em>.’<br /> <br /> He was wrong of course. It seems more than likely, they never will.<br /> <br /> Nine years later in August 2001, Pietro Lunardi, a minister of the state under the government of Silvio Berlusconi, admitted this when he claimed: ‘<em>We have to live with the Mafia. They have always been and will always be</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Giovanni Falcone wrote about the permanent sense of mortality that engulfs the life of a Mafioso:<br /> <br /> <em> ……the constant risk of death, the low value placed on the lives of</em><br /> <em> others, but also on one’s own, force them to live continually on the alert. We</em><br /> <em> are often amazed by the incredible quantity of details that besiege the</em><br /> <em> memories of the men of Cosa Nostra. But when one lives, as they do, in</em><br /> <em> expectation of the worst, one is forced to gather even the smallest crumbs.</em><br /> <em> Nothing is useless. Nothing is a product of chance. The certainty of the</em><br /> <em> closeness of death – in a moment, a week, a year – infects them with a</em><br /> <em> constant sense of the utter precariousness of their lives.</em> <br /> <br /> Could it be that Leggio lived by his own, unethical, self-interested code of behaviour because he knew how circumscribed his life was? Surrounded by men who would kill each other without cause or conscience, all operating within an element characterised by random or formulated sudden violence. Men who, as Renate Siebert pointed out, operated in an activity obsessed by death, and were in contrast to the hagiographic image they liked to portray-rebels, negative heroes and defenders of a historical tradition- instead, contrivers of violence and assassination, which spoke more of cowardice and manipulation than any patina of honour. <br /> <br /> It’s possible that in the end, Leggio quite simply adopted Machiavelli’s guiding principle that the end justifies the means, and applied this philosophy as an excuse for his lifestyle.<br /> <br /> Whatever it was that tripped him over from peasant boy to peasant boy-killer, Luciano Leggio created a journey for himself that could only ever lead to one of two destinations: death or imprisonment. <br /> <br /> I leave the final words to the late, and great, English author, Norman Lewis who wrote one of the finest books ever on the Mafia, called <em>The Honoured Society</em>. He had been in Sicily during World War Two as part of the military occupying forces, and returned in the 1960s to travel across the island and research this social criminal phenomena that was evolving, yet again in the post-war years. Another phoenix arising, just like it had before, following the assault on its seemingly invincible being by Cesare Mori in the late 1920s.<br /> <br /> He talks about a small town near Palermo, but his observations could easily apply to Corleone or any of another hundred small places across western Sicily.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>The Mafiosi of Tommaso Natale are Bedouins in double-breasted suits and gaudy pullovers, with nomad faces and eyes still screwed up from searching the depths of hallucinatory landscapes for their straying beasts. Without realizing it, they have killed each other as far back as anyone can remember, and still kill each other, not so much out of bloodthirsty sentiment, but from economic necessity. There has never been enough to go around</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Francis Ford Coppola himself, could not have created a more evocative image.<br /> <br /> <em><strong> These are of some of the sources I used in preparing the story:</strong></em><br /> <br /> <strong> Bibliography</strong><br /> <br /> Alongi, Giuseppe. El Maffia. Palermo: Sellerio Editor. 1977.<br /> Arlachi, Pino. La mafia imprenditrice. Bologna: 1983.<br /> Arlachi, Pino. Men of Dishonour. New York: 1993<br /> Bardoni, Avril. Man of Respect. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, spa. 1988.<br /> Biagi, Enzo. Il boss è solo. Milan: Mondadoris 1990.<br /> Blok, Anton. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.<br /> Dalla Chiesa, C. Michele Navarra e la mafia del corleonese. Palermo: La Zisa, 1990.<br /> Dolci, Danilo. Fare prèsto (e bene) perchè si muore. Turin: Franscesco De Silva, 1954.<br /> Falcone, Giovanni. Cose di Cosa Nostra. Milano: Rizzoli, 1991<br /> Follain, John. A Dishonoured Society. London: Little Brown & Co. 1995.<br /> Gambetta, Diego. La mafia siciliana. Turin: 1992.<br /> Hess, Henner. Mafia. Rome, Bari: Laterrza and Figli Spa, 1984.<br /> Kermoal, Jacques and Bartolomeri, Martine. La mafia se met à table: Histories e recettes de l’honorable société. Paris: Actes Sud 1986.<br /> Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il gattopardo. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960.<br /> Lewis, Norman. The Honoured Society. New York: Putnam, 1964.<br /> Lodato, Saverio. Dieci anni di Mafia. Milan: Rizzoli, 1990.<br /> Lupo, Salvatore. Storia della Mafia. Rome: Donzelli, 1993.<br /> Lupo, Salvatore. Story of the Mafia. New York: Columbia University Press 2009.<br /> Nese, Marco. Nel Segno della Mafia: Rizzoli 1976.<br /> Pantaleone, Michele. Mafia e dròga. Turin: Einaudi, 1966.<br /> Poma, Rosario. La Mafia: Nonni e nipoli. Florence: Vallecchi, 1971.<br /> Schneider, Jane and Peter. Culture & Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press, 1976.<br /> Servadio, Gaia. Mafioso. New York: Stein and Day, 1976.<br /> Siebert, Renate. Mafia and anti-Mafia Concepts: Universita della Calabria.<br /> Secrets of life and death. London: Verso, 1996.<br /> Stille, Alexander. Excellent Cadavers. London: Jonathon Cape, 1995.<br /> Stajano, Corrado. Mafia: L’atto daccusa dei giudici di Palermo. Rome: Riuniti, 1992.<br /> Sterling, Clair. The Mafia. London: Grafton, 1990.<br /> Zingales, Leo. Provenzano. El Rey de Cosa Nostra. Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2001<br /> <br /> <strong> Newspapers articles from:</strong><br /> <br /> L’Ora. <br /> Giornale di Sicilia <br /> Corriere della Sera<br /> Il Messagero<br /> La Sicilia<br /> La Repubblica<br /> Città Nuova Corleone<br /> <br /> <strong>Official documents</strong><br /> <br /> <strong> Extracts from the testimony of:</strong><br /> <br /> Tommaso Buscetta to Judge Falcone and others, July-September.<br /> 1984.<br /> Salvatore Contoro to Judge Falcone and others, October 1984-June 1985<br /> Testimony of Antonino Calderone to Judge Falcone and others, March 1987-<br /> June 1988.<br /> Testimony of Gaspare Mutolo, February 1993.<br /> </p>
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La Primula Rossa: The story of Luciano Leggio (Part 1)
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of
2011-02-10T08:00:00.000Z
2011-02-10T08:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995290,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236995290?profile=original" width="428" /></a><br /> <strong>Part One</strong><br /> <br /> By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> <em>There is only one Mafia, neither old or young, neither good nor bad, there is only the Mafia that is a criminal association.</em><br /> <strong>Cesare Terranova. Order of Indictment gainst Luciano Leggio+115 August 1965, Antimafia: Doc.,Vol 4, t. XVII, pp 506ff.</strong><br /> <br /> Antonino Calderone, the under boss of the Catania Mafia clan in eastern Sicily, described Luciano Leggio to the authorities, as he was being debriefed by them in 1987, following his decision to cooperate with the law:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>He liked to kill. He had a way of looking at people that could frighten anyone, even us Mafiosi. The smallest thing set him off and then a strange light would appear in his eyes that created silence around him. When you were in his company you had to be careful how you spoke. The wrong tone of voice, a misunderstood word, and all of a sudden that silence. Everything would instantly go hushed, uneasy, and you could smell death in the air.</em>’ <br /> <br /> John Dickie in his book Cosa Nostra recalled, ‘<em>his features were an emblem of capricious terror</em>.’<br /> <br /> Another who knew of him, said he was a ‘<em>dog with no master, ready to go for a priest, an old woman, a policeman or anyone else.</em>’<br /> <br /> He ruled the small town of Corleone like some feudal lord of the manor, and became at times, the driving force of the Sicilian Mafia in the second half of the twentieth century, with power so absolute, he was able to exercise his will over it at times, even from the confines of a prison cell. If the pathology of power was exercised across the island by forces legal and illegal, none did it better than the man with more nicknames than any character dreamed up by Theodore Seuss, the most appropriate by far being il sanguinoso -the bloodthirsty one!<br /> <br /> Corleone translated from the Sicilian Cunigghiuni, in English means something close to ‘Lionheart.’ But the small, undistinguished community, established in the ninth century by Muslim invaders, squatting beneath rocky crags, a thousand feet above sea level, had the look more of a ghost town, with its shuttered windows, houses narrowed in on each other, crumbling buildings, and a minatory procession of deserted streets and blind alleyways scoured dry in the summer months by the hot Sirocco wind blowing in from North Africa and the Sarah Desert. Outside the town, as Tomasi di Lampedusa described it in his iconic novel on Sicily, Il Gattopardo: <br /> <br /> ‘<em>lay the boundless countryside of feudal Sicily, desolate without a breath of air, oppressed by the leaden sun</em>.’<br /> <br /> The town square stood guarded by an imposing statue of St. Francis, its hands raised to the skies, ostensibly in hope, in reality, probably in desperation. It was a place that had lived in perpetual hopelessness, as generations of its men folk had either become part of the Mafia, or had been destroyed by it. The people who lived here, measured the passing of days by the dates of men killed on the streets rather than passing of seasons. <br /> <br /> Il Giorno del Morti-the Day of the Dead- is celebrated throughout Sicily in November. Here. in the dismal nightmare of Corleone, every day would be an anniversary day. People accepted egregious behaviour as the norm rather than the exception.<br /> <br /> The cemetery was the most colourful place in town, only a short distance from the town centre. Immaculately kept, filled with flowers, its rows of graves and avenues of tombstones testimony to the busiest industry in the area.<br /> <br /> It took a writer from Brooklyn called Mario Puzo, and a Hollywood movie director called Francis Ford Coppola, to shape the name into something more, romanticizing the bleak in-hospitality of this lost part of the mezzogiorno into a fable of gangsters with heart, using the appellation of the town as a synonym to perpetrate a great myth about the Mafia. <br /> <br /> The fictitious Don Corleone of ‘The Godfather’ and the real Corleone of central-western Sicily (photo below) have commonality only in the imagination of the most ardent romantic dreamer. For the hundreds of men who died in and around this Sicilian heartland, the town’s name evoked images of a darker nature. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995895,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995895,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236995895?profile=original" /></a><br /> <br /> And none epitomized this darkness more than Luciano Leggio.<br /> <br /> He was born on a misty, winter morning in January 1925, in a hovel at 2 Via Lanza, close to the police barracks, the fourth of seven children of Rosa Maria Palazzo and Francesco Paolo, an itinerant peasant, who scraped out a living in the countryside outside the town of 11000 people. <br /> <br /> His siblings were:<br /> <br /> Maria Antonina born in 1910<br /> Girolama, born in 1913<br /> Carmela born 1921<br /> Carmelo, who was mentally retarded, born 1927 <br /> Salvatore born 1930 and<br /> Bernarda born 1935<br /> <br /> When he was eighteen, perhaps inducted by the Mafia doctor, Michele Navarra, Luciano Leggio joined the Corleone cosca, or Mafia family, which although numbering less than a hundred members, was long established as the major political and social force in the region.<br /> <br /> Agostino Vignali, a sergeant in the squad that policed the town and surrounding area in 1945, drew up a list of suspected members which totals over forty. These were people he believed to be men of honour. He knew that for every Mafioso, there was one or more of the tough young men, cagnolazzi, waiting to fill up the numbers.<br /> <br /> Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a young captain in the carabinieri, commanding the Corleone squadriglia or squadron of the military police, (Italy has a bewildering range of police departments. In addition to the military, there are: city, state, financial, forestry, border and penitentiary police,) posted to the town from northern Italy in the 1940s, recorded in his notes: <br /> <br /> ……<em>the Mafia-their unscrupulousness and reputation for violence...both are key elements in a vast network</em>. <br /> <br /> In October 1949, he produced the first post-war comprehensive dossier on the Sicilian Mafia, creating a breakdown of the Corleone cosca and indicting Dr. Navarra and Leggio in the murder the previous year, of trade union leader, Placido Rizzotto.<br /> <br /> Thirty years later, this network would destroy him and many other key figures in the judiciary, as it determined to impose its will on the government of Italy.<br /> <br /> Leggio’s talents as a killer without conscience, were quickly recognized by an organization that could never get enough men like him on their books. He had dropped out of school in the fourth grade, to avoid his parents’ plans to have him enter the priesthood, and did not learn to read or write until he was well into adulthood. By the age of 12 he was an excellent marksman, and could handle almost any firearm he was given. <br /> <br /> He soon became known locally, as cocciu di tacca, literary ‘bean on fire,’ or hot-head. He was also often referred to by his name in the Sicilian dialect: Lucianeddu.<br /> <br /> Shrewd, ruthless and cunning, but unable to read and write, there is a story handed down over the years that in his late teens, he laid the barrel of his pistol on her breast and ordered a young teacher to instruct him, and she did.<br /> <br /> All his life he was troubled by Pott’s disease, a tubercular spinal ailment-tuberculosis spondylitis-(probably caused by drinking un-pasteurized goat’s milk as a child,) that forced him into wearing a cumbersome wooden brace, which he later replaced with a solid silver one. He walked with a pronounced stoop, leading some people to refer to him as mulacciuni, in the Sicilian dialect, ‘hunchback,’ but never to his face. He was a sickly, frail, semi-cripple, pale as a sheet, Arrested in his youth, a police officer wrongly transcribed his name, and for the rest of his life, he was often referred to as ‘Liggio.’<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996481,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996481,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236996481?profile=original" width="355" /></a>In 1989, in a television interview with Enzo Biagi, he confirmed the correct pronunciation of his surname, saying he was happy to have people believe his name was Liggio (right). Disinformation is after all, the trade-mark of a good Mafioso.<br /> <br /> Leggio was at the beginning, simply a peasant-scassapagghiara-literally a thief stealing sheaves of wheat, and this is what brought about his first killing.<br /> <br /> Calogero Comaianni, worked as a guardia campestre-a rural watchman. He and two other guards-Pietro Splendido and Pietro Cortimiglia- caught Leggio and Vito Di Frisca stealing wheat, loading it onto the back of a mule, and as one source claims, <em>Comaianni kicked the little runt’s backside all the way to the carabinieri barracks in town.</em> <br /> <br /> Leggio served three months in prison for this and as he always did, never forgot. Six months later, on March 27th 1945, he tracked Comaianni across Corleone and shot him dead outside his home in Via Sferlazzo. Although the crime was witnessed by the victim’s wife, Maddalena Ribauda, and her son, Carmelo, and an accomplice of Leggio’s called Giovanni Pasqua, who later confessed and implicated him, the case against Leggio dragged on for eighteen years, and he was acquitted twice. Comaianni may have been his first mark, although it is possible he was killing before this. He was just nineteen years old when he pulled the trigger on his rifle that rainy, dark spring morning.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996082,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996082,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236996082?profile=original" width="224" /></a>A month after killing Comaianni (photo left), on April 29th, he murdered Stanislao Punzo who was the campiere, or estate guard of land owned by Doctor Corado Carruso. This guard had caught him stealing a bag of grain. He brazenly assumed the dead man’s position, and soon after forced the doctor to hand over the estate to him. He became the youngest gabelloto, or estate manager in Sicily. <br /> <br /> He was the prime suspect in a third killing that of Leolucca Piraino, killed on February 7th 1948, although Leggio was acquitted of this murder on June 21st 1950.<br /> <br /> A month later he became involved in a homicide that would have repercussions across Sicily for years to come.<br /> <br /> Leggio was the prototype of the new Mafia. He and his followers had nothing in common with the older generation of Mafioso who controlled the secret society across Sicily. For Leggio, it was all about money, making his name early as a phenomenally successful cattle thief. He was something quite new to the world of the Sicilian honoured society: a hybrid between the local home brewed mobster and a fusion of American-style gangsterism repatriated to Sicily from the United States.<br /> <br /> Italian jurist, Piero Calamandrei, believed that Sicily should be considered the ‘central incubator of American criminality.’ He could have been right. And if it was, Corleone was not just part of the incubator, but the insemination centre as well.<br /> <br /> Giuseppe Morello, born here in 1867, may well have been one of the earliest ‘mob’ bosses in America, forming a gang of criminal associates in New York around the end of the 19th century, which has since morphed into what is to-day known as The Genovese Crime Family. Gaetano Dragna, born twenty years later, moved to California, and as Tom Dragna, headed up the West Coast Mafia for many years. Gaetano Reina born the year after Dragna, came to lead the powerful Mafia clan in New York known to-day as the Luchese Family. Calogero Rao, and Giovanni Schillaci and Giacomo Amari and countless more, upped-stakes and left the town for fresh pastures in America, helping to transplant and nurture the criminal virus of the Mafia that would come to find such a welcome host in major cities across the United States.<br /> <br /> The Sicilian Mafia had no formal name, as members saw no need for one. Nonetheless, in many Italian publications the term Cosa Nostra was and is used to distinguish the Sicilian Mafia from other criminal networks that are also sometimes referred to as ‘Mafias’ (such as Camorra, the ‘Neapolitan Mafia.’)<br /> .<br /> When the American Mafioso Joseph Valachi testified before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1962, he revealed that American Mafiosi referred to their organization by the term Cosa Nostra (‘our thing’ or ‘this thing of ours’.) <br /> <br /> At the time, it was understood as a proper name, fostered by the FBI and disseminated by the media. The designation gained wide popularity and almost replaced the term Mafia. The FBI even added the article to the term, calling it La Cosa Nostra (in Italy this article is not used when referring to the Sicilian Mafia).<br /> <br /> Italian criminal investigators did not take the term seriously, believing it was only used by the American Mafia. Then, in 1984, the Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta, revealed to the anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone that the term was used by the Sicilian Mafia as well. (Dibattimento. Volume 1, P. 104.) According to Buscetta the word ‘Mafia’ was a literary creation. Other defectors, such as Antonio Calderone and Salvatore Contorno, confirmed this. <br /> <br /> It was claimed the term Cosa Nostra was exported to America by expatriated Mafioso in the early 1920s, but it is also quite conceivable that the expression actually came back into Sicily from the United States as its place of origin, with people like Charles Luciano, Frank Coppola, Angelo Di Carlo, Frank Garofalo, Vincenzo Collura and others who had been banished from America for their criminal activities. <br /> <br /> Leonardo Messina, the pentiti stated in his testimony at the Anti Mafia 11th Legislature in December 1992:<br /> <br /> <em>It is not the first time that Cosa Nostra has changed its name or skin!</em><br /> <br /> Mafiosi introduced known members to each other as belonging to Cosa Nostra (‘our thing’) or La Stessa Cosa (‘the same thing,’) e.g. ‘he is the same thing, a Mafioso, as you.’<br /> <br /> The Sicilian Mafia and its predecessors, has used a bewildering collection of names to describe itself throughout its history, such as La Fratuzzi-‘Little Brothers’ or Stuppagghiari-‘Cork Stoppers’ or Fratellanza-‘Brotherhood,’ or Mano Fraterna, or Scalione or Zuggio, or Fontana Nuova. <br /> <br /> Mafiosi are generally known among themselves as ‘men of honour’ or ‘men of respect.’<br /> <br /> For Leggio’s Mafia family boss, things were different. For him, the life was a matter of power and prestige, and being a man of substance and honour. Money was important, but came somewhat low on the list of his desires. He may have been a man apart from his peers in this generation, as according to Salvatore Lupo, author of History of the Mafia, the ‘old Mafia’ of dei giardini, worshipped two gods: wealth and the vendetta.<br /> <br /> In post war Corleone, 30 miles south-east of Palermo, the capital of Sicily, Doctor Michele Navarra was the mayor, chief medical officer, director of the local hospital, inspector of health for the area, head of the local Social Democratic party, president of the Cultivator’s Association of Corleone, a decorated Knight of Merit of the Italian Republic, medical adviser to the State Railways; more eggs than an average basket could carry.<br /> <br /> Born in Corleone on February 5th, 1905, the eldest of eight children to Giovanni, a middle-class teacher and land surveyor, he had graduated as a medical doctor in 1929 after first studying as an engineer at Palermo University. He took up a position in 1931 as a doctor at the hospital in the town. He served during the war in Trieste as an officer in the medical corps, rising to the rank of captain.<br /> <br /> On his return to Corleone in 1942, he set up as a practice doctor, and dabbled in politics, first with the Liberal Party then switching sides to the Christian Democrats, which rose rapidly to power following the 1939-45 war. To many observers, the ascension of the C.D. party was based almost entirely on the Sicily vote block which was guaranteed them by the various Mafia capos across the island, in addition to the votes in Reggio Calabria and all of southern Italy. In return of course, there would always be favours that would be required.<br /> <br /> In two short years, he consolidated his power base and rose rapidly to become a major figure in the town. It seemed he had everything, but he lusted after something else and so Navarra mortgaged his soul to the Mafia in return for a position of absolute power, and was soon to be one of Sicily’s top ten bosses, according to an Italian anti-Mafia Commission hearing held in 1971, helping run the town, collecting taxes and ministering to the needs of the community, mainly for his benefit as well as that of the local, wealthy landowners. <br /> <br /> The top men under the previous Mafia rappresentanti, Calogero Lo Bue, agreed to work under the doctor. These were: Carmelo Lo Bue, the brother of the previous don, Pietro and Calogero Majuri, Angelo Ciro, Fancesco Vintaloro, Giovanni Tromadore, Angelo Di Carlo, Michele La Torre, Giovanni and Pasquale Lo Bue, Giovanni and Antonino Majuri and Carmelo Pennino. Their acceptance of Navarra as the new boss brought the rest of the cosca into line.<br /> <br /> It is unclear just when Navarra assumed the leadership of the Corleone family. Calogero Lo Bue did not die until 1954 when he finally succumbed to diabetes. It seems reasonable however, to assume that as age and illness took their toll on him, he handed over control to the doctor some years before his death.<br /> <br /> A tall, heavy and corpulent man, unkempt and with a florid expression, Doctor Navarra went through life with a sensitive and haunted expression, and always looked as though life had done him wrong. A truly lugubrious person, he had a habit of gently clapping his hands very softly together as if in time to music, when he wanted to accentuate a point he was making. He had a passion for cards and hunting, good food and wine and the pursuit of the dynamics of diadem. <br /> <br /> The people of Corleone believed he radiated sciusciare. In the local dialect it meant that a powerful man created such authority that the very air seemed to move in his presence. It was a quality almost unreservedly bequeathed to a man of the Mafia. They also referred to him as omo de panza, omo de stanza-man with a belly, a man of substance.<br /> <br /> His face was marked by the habit of command, born from greed and arrogance. Letizia Battaglia the famous Palermo based photographer of the Mafia, recognized this look twenty years later, as she travelled the city, taking black and white images of the dead as they fell onto the streets in their hundreds, their wives prostrated with grief, and the men who made it all happen.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236997074,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236997074,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236997074?profile=original" width="212" /></a>Navarra (right) would arrange the cure of sick people on the one hand, but on the other, organize to have some of them killed when it suited his agenda. The Corleone Mafia and indeed the people in the town, referred to him as U Patri Nostra, ‘Our Father,’ and when people said his name, they made the sign of the cross. <br /> <br /> Apart from running the Ospedale dei Bianchi, the Bianchi Hospital, the management of which he assumed after the sitting head, Dr. Carmelo Nicolosi, was murdered, allegedly on his command by Leggio on April 29th 1946, (shot dead with the lupara, the sawn-off shotgun favoured by shepherds when protecting their flocks. A rumour spread that the murdered doctor had been playing loose with married women in the town, hence his sudden and extreme demise) carrying the candle on all his extra-curriculum activities and heading up the local branch of the Sicilian Mafia, he had a major interest in an illegal slaughter house located in the huge, rambling Ficuzza Forest that girdles the north and eastern slopes of the Rocca Busambra, the highest peak in Western Sicily, just to the north-east of the town. <br /> <br /> Abigeato, clandestine slaughtering of livestock, was big business in rural areas of the island after World War Two. In 1952, a raid here in Ficuzza by the carabinieri, discovered a stash of illegal stock numbering 900 cows, sheep and pigs, an enormous number for such a poor and deprived area.<br /> <br /> The doctor also operated one of the largest transport companies in the region, AST (Azienda Siciliana Trasporti) which was run by one of his brothers, Giuseppe. His two other brothers held down good jobs in the ‘real’ world. One was a banker, and the other, Salvatore, was on the medical faculty at Messina University, respected as a renowned pathologist. <br /> <br /> Dr. Navarra lived with his wife in the Piazza Sant Orsola, a little square just down the street from the Chiesa Madre, the Mother Church of the town, which stands at the junction of Via Bentivegna and Via San Martino. This church is unique in one very particular way. Fitted to a pew, five rows back from the alter, is a brass plaque commemorating the good doctor for his dedication to the poor people of Corleone. He is almost certainly the only Mafioso in history who has been so honoured by the Catholic Church.<br /> <br /> During his first two years as mayor, there were 57 murders in the town, all attributed to the business of crime. One of the more celebrated, was the killing of Placido Rizzotto, the trade unionist, dispatched by Leggio and two associates on the night of March 10th 1948. The killing was witnessed by a twelve year old sheep herder, Giuseppe Letizia, who then rushed screaming into the town’s square, babbling to the crowds gathered there, about the horror he had witnessed: <br /> <br /> A group of men dragging another man into a disused farm house, beating him repeatedly then one of these men shooting him over and over again.<br /> <br /> Taken to the hospital the next day, he was attended to personally by the good doctor, who calmed him down and administered an injection to soothe his terror. The boy died within hours. Navarra declared it was the result of ‘toxicosis’ and the youth was cremated without an inquest being held. <br /> <br /> Navarra was assisted by another hospital doctor, Ignazio Dell’Aria, who wrote out the death certificate, but was so distressed by what had happened he left the town shortly afterwards, and immigrated to Australia. Rizzotto had been killed on Navarra’s orders, to prevent union problems developing among the workers who serviced the estates that surrounded Corleone. Young Giuseppe was simply collateral damage.<br /> <br /> Corleone had been the strategic centre of the peasant reform movement Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori, ‘The Sicilian Leagues,’ since the movement was created in the1890s, supported by between three and four hundred thousand workers across the island. The first union contract with the agricultural workers and employers was drawn up here in 1893. The poverty of farm workers and their families in Sicily is hard to comprehend to-day. Some, lived and died without ever eating meat. Families of six would exist for a week on the amount of food one person would consume in to-days civilized world in one twenty-four period. According to author John Follain, ‘families cooked spaghetti and soup made from wild herbs in the same bucket of water they also used to wash their feet. A goat was allowed to roam freely through the house as if it were a holy animal because its milk saved the children from dying of tuberculosis.’<br /> <br /> Journalist Adolfo Rossi, visited Corleone in 1893. He wrote for La Tribuna, a major Italian newspaper based in Rome. On his return to his office, he put out a number of reports about what he had seen on his visit to Sicily, and in one said:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>In this island, in the middle of areas that are heaven on earth, there are others that seem like Africa, where thousands of slaves labour on land belonging to a handful of great lords. Indeed, they are worse off than those ancient slaves, who had least had their bread guaranteed.</em>’<br /> <br /> A young, altruistic believer in the freedom of the working man, Placido Rizzotto had no room for the mythology of the Mafia and their so called code of honour, even though his father Carmelo, was associated with the Corleone cosca and had been for over thirty years. <br /> <br /> Placido had arranged to meet Dr. Navarra who he thought was returning this evening on the last bus in-bound from Palermo. They were to discuss details regarding farm labourer lists that covered the Ficuzza district. It was of course, a setup. The doctor never turned up.<br /> <br /> Instead, kidnapped from the heart of the town on a busy, unusually warm March evening, thirty-four year old Placido Rizzotto (photo below left) was bundled into a Fiat 1100 parked outside the church of San Leonardo and taken north to a deserted farm estate in the Malvello district where he was shot three times by Leggio, according to the testimony of one of the men involved in the kidnapping. He was the 35th union organizer to have been murdered by the Mafia in Sicily.<br /> <br /> There was only one eye-witness to the abduction, a young man called Luca. <br /> Now 85, he recalled that night when interviewed by La Sicilia newspaper in 2005. He remembered three men manhandling Rizzotto and the unionist shouting, ‘That’s enough, let me go.’ <br /> <br /> They didn’t of course, and the rest became part of Sicily’s history.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996895,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996895,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236996895?profile=original" width="177" /></a>Carmelo, his father, along with Giuseppe Di Palermo, Placido’s brother-in-law, went the next day to the carabinieri barracks. With heavy heart, Ccarmelo reported his son missing. He feared he had been kidnapped and murdered by the mafia. He knew only to well how the honoured society worked. After all, he was one of them.<br /> <br /> Placido’s remains were subsequently recovered six hundred and forty four days later, on December 14th 1949, from a chasm in the granite mass fronting the slopes of the Rocca, along with pieces of Michelagelo Randisio and Angelo Gullota, and traces of the son of Mateo Capra, the son of Angelo Gullotta and bits and pieces of many more. Victims of the Mafia, left to rot in their own special burial place.<br /> <br /> They sent Pio La Torre to replace Rizzotto. Another young, idealistic believer in defending the rights of the poor and oppressed. The Mafia waited thirty-four years to kill him, but in the end, in 1982, they did.<br /> <br /> Although Leggio’s accomplices, Pasquale Criscione and Vincenzo Collura junior, the son of a recently repatriated American hoodlum, who had been closely connected to mobsters in New York, subsequently confessed to the murder, implicating him in the crime, he was never convicted, his case being heard by three different judges over the next thirteen years, who all acquitted him.<br /> <br /> The tip-off on the abduction and killing came from an informant, Giovanni Pasqua, (the same man who had been with Leggio when he killed Calogero Comaianni,) interred in the Uciardone Prison in Palermo. He passed on to the prison governor that Criscione and Collura were linked into the kidnapping and in turn, they confessed when arrested and taken to a carabinieri barracks outside Corleone.<br /> <br /> In the court of appeals, held in 1959, Leggio’s lawyers, Dino Canzoneri, Girolano Bellavista, Tommaso Romano and Giovanni Ruvolo, successfully argued that the confessions of Criscione and Collura in the murder of Placido Rizzotto had been obtained by the use of police brutality at the Bisaquino carabinieri barracks, on December 4th 1949, and were therefore, inadmissible. Accordingly their client Leggio, could not be part of any disclosure made under duress. He was never convicted for his part in the murder of the union activist.<br /> <br /> Navarra was arrested on April 13th 1948, (following a front page disclosure in the newspaper L’Unita that the young boy had died in mysterious circumstances,) for his involvement in the death of the boy, Leitizia, but not convicted. <br /> <br /> On the recommendation of the carabinieri officer in charge of Corleone, Colonel Alfredo Angrisani, he was sent into compulsory internal exile in Gioiosa Ionica, (Reggio Calabria), for five years. However, thanks to his contacts with friendly politicians and men in power, in particular Angelo Vicari, soon to be head of the Palermo police, he returned to Corleone in 1949. In Calabria, forming one of the first partnerships between the Sicilian Mafia and mainland organized crime, he established close relationships with charismatic 'Ndrangheta boss Antonio Macrì who headed up his own ‘ndrine, or family mob clan, in Siderno.<br /> <br /> The killing of Rizzotto had been ordered by the doctor, who had a biological thread linking him into the first killing of a union activist in Corleone, that of Bernardino Verro, who was gunned down in the town in 1915. <br /> <br /> Verro’s place in the history of the Sicilian Mafia is guaranteed on two counts:<br /> <br /> He had actually joined the Corleone branch of the Fratuzzi, the precursor to the Mafia, and worked with them against the reforms being instigated by people such as himself, before experiencing his own personal epiphany and then breaking off his connection, and when he was killed, the authorities found in his home, notebooks and diaries that were filled with information about the illegal organization, including what may well be the first ever account of an initiation ceremony, very similar to what we understand happens in the Mafia of to-day.<br /> <br /> Twelve years after his killing, on August 13th 1927, the Civil and Criminal Court of Palermo in its proceedings against Santo Termini and Vito Todaro, well-known Mafiosi in western Sicily stated in its findings:<br /> <br /> <em>There is a vast criminal organization commonly known as ‘maffia’ seeking enrichment of its members by any means that are successful. To impose itself on the hard-working people, to exploit and keep them in a state of awe and terror.</em><br /> <br /> One of Verro’s killers was believed to be Angelo Gagliano, Navarra’s uncle, although he and ten other men suspected in the plot to murder the labour unionist, were never convicted of the murder, which came as no surprise to the long-suffering inhabitants of a town that featured violent death as the special on its menu of daily despair.<br /> <br /> Gagliano’s time came in 1930 when he himself was gunned down in the never-ending struggle for domination in the Corleone underworld.<br /> <br /> Vincenzo Collura senior, the father of the man involved in the killing of Placido Rizzotto, had fled Corleone following the fascist ‘cleansing’ of the Mafia on the island in the 1920s.<br /> <br /> Benito Mussolin became Italy’s 40th prime minister in 1922. He appointed Cesare Mori as Prefect of Palermo, charging him with the eradication of the Mafia in Sicily. Over 11000 people were arrested between November 1925 and June 1929, and a countless number died in mysterious circumstances or simply disappeared while in police custody. Like a witch hunt that belonged in the Middle Ages, or a return of the Holy Inquisition of Spain, that had terrorized Sicily from 1601 until 1782, anyone remotely connected into anyone who may have been involved with the Mafia was fair game. Mori was like a cyclone sweeping across the Mafia landscape of Sicily, sucking up everything in his path. <br /> <br /> He had been present at Mussolini’s visit in 1924 to Piana dei Greci, when the mayor and local Mafia boss, Ciccio Cuccia, dismissed the need for police protection as he would ‘personally guarantee Il Duce’s safety,’ implying he was more powerful than the head of government, called his attack on the Mafia, ‘Plan Attila,’ and proceeded with wild abandon to implement whatever he seemed to think was necessary to his strategy. As many Mafia killings took place by men shooting from behind walls, he ordered that all walls on the island be reduce to three feet or less within twenty-four hours. He decreed that all stabbing or cutting weapons be barred, but allowed herdsmen to keep on carrying their short-handled axe. What followed of course, was an epidemic of murders caused by this type of weapon!<br /> <br /> People would refer to Mori who became known as ‘The Iron Prefect,’ as ‘the man with hair on his heart.’ His name actually translated literally into English as ‘die.’ He went to Bisaquino, south of Corleone, the fiefdom of the famous Mafia don, Vito Cascioferro, and gathering the people into the square, declared, no doubt with tongue in cheek:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>My name is Mori and delinquency must disappear or I shall have people killed. If Sicilians are afraid of the Mafia, I'll show them I'm the meanest Mafioso of them all</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Working in partnership with Luigi Giampietro, the Prosecutor General of Palermo, who tried and convicted many notable Mafia figures, such as Vito Cascioferro and Calogero Vizzini, according to author Salvatore Lupo, amidst terrorist excesses, the conviction of innocent defendants and political persecutions, they met and soundly beat the Mafia. <br /> <br /> As Norman Lewis remarks, however, in his inestimable account of the Mafia, ‘The Honoured Society,’ the effect of the Mori repression could only be temporary, as at best is scythed the heads off a crop of weeds when what was needed was a change in the soil and climate that produced the crop.<br /> <br /> Mori harvested well though, in one particular town. <br /> <br /> At dawn on December 20th 1926, a massive combined force of state police and carabinieri swept into Corleone to round up the known Mafiosi and their associates in the town. A list of 150 names, turned up only half, the rest having been forewarned, escaping into the mountains of Western Sicily, or finding their way out of Sicily either to the mainland, or to America. In all, during the Mori purge of Sicily, as many as 800 Mafioso created their own Diaspora of despair into New York and other major cities in the United States.<br /> <br /> The huge law enforcement roundup collected the suspects, and in chains, the men were led through the streets of the town like shackled animals, and gathered at an open area called Piano de Borgo north of the Via Bentivegna where they were loaded onto trucks and dispatched to the huge Ucciardone prison in Palermo, which became known as ‘Villa Mori’ as it filled up with his prisoners. <br /> <br /> In the years ahead it would develop another appellation: ‘The Mafia University,’ as it filled with mobsters, old and young, novices and battle-scarred vets who passed on their knowledge and experience to the tyros, helping them mature their skills and develop the skin of deceit and treachery needed for a successful career in the biggest industry on the island. <br /> <br /> One of these shackled and humiliated men, chained and sent to prison for 4 years and seven days was Carmelo Rizzotto.<br /> <br /> The man in charge of the arrest exercise was Corleone police chief, Ansalone Liborio. <br /> <br /> Sicilians have long memories, and in a country where vendetta is almost part of the island’s DNA, Liborio must have surely realized he was living on borrowed time. It ended for him on September 13th 1945. Collecting a bag of groceries, he was crossing Piazza Nace on the way to his apartment in the Institute Canzoneri, when three rifle shots echoed across the square and he fell dead onto the cobbled street, next to the fountain.<br /> <br /> Although no arrests were made ion connection with his murder, there was no way anyone would kill a top police officer in the town without the approval of the local Mafia don-Michele Navarra. The god doctor often jokingly commented that these kinds of deaths were caused by a ‘kick from a mule.’<br /> <br /> Following a government decree created on November 5th 1932, which was in fact an amnesty, fifty-six of the Mafiosi who had fled the purge of Prefect Mori, returned to the Corleone area. These included dominant characters like Salvatore Pennino, Pietro Mairui and Salavtore Gennaro, who quickly re-established themselves back into the fabric of the Mafia tapestry of the town.<br /> <br /> There were still years of conflict and confusion ahead, but according to Francesco Spano, who had been a young commissario under Cesare Mori, in his memoir, ‘Faccia a faccia con la Mafia,’ a meeting was held in September 1945 at the Tasca estate of Lucio Tosca Bordanoro, the mayor of Palermo, near Villalba, the seat of Mafia don, Calogero Vizzini, at which, ‘the ancient society of the Mafia, in which all the cosche of Sicily were represented, was duly reorganized,’ following the upheaval caused by World War Two. <br /> <br /> Vincenzo Collura had settled in New York, where he became a close associate of Mafia boss Giuseppe Profaci (to the point that he became a godfather to one of his children,) and other New York Mafiosi, in one instance, officiating as best-man at the wedding of Frank Coppola. He was deported back to Sicily in 1936 setting his sights on taking over the leadership of the Corleone cosca, but it was not to be. <br /> <br /> Although he was apparently recommended and endorsed for this post by an Italian-American gangster who was perhaps the most famous, or infamous, of his time-Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, a man himself to be deported from America back to his birth country-Sicily- in February 1946, and he was the nephew of the incumbent boss Lo Bue, Navarra perhaps had a strong ally in the form of a man called Angelo Di Carlo. (For more on this, check out <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/luckys-luck-how-charlie">Lucky's Luck</a>)<br /> <br /> Born in Corleone in 1891 and a Mafioso, (as a young butcher, he had been a suspect in the killing of Bernardino Verro in 1915) he was one of the many who had fled Mori’s purge, sometime in 1925 or 1926 when he arrived in New York at the age of thirty-five. He had lived in America for almost twenty years. A tall man, with brown eyes and a heavy build, he ran a travel agency with his brother, Galogero, in New York. The FBN targeted him as a drug trafficker, among other things, using the business as a front. It’s interesting to speculate that Di Carlo may have been instrumental in helping Dr. Navarra’s campaign to take over the Corleone cosca.<br /> <br /> AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories) commander Charles Poletti, was encouraged to recommend the re-placing of mayors into towns and villages as an urgent measure following the allied force’s occupation of Sicily. Many of these were also Mafioso. In fact, 90% of the 352 newly appointed mayors were either Mafioso or people linked into the Separatist movement which was inextricably allied to the Mafia.<br /> <br /> While AMGOT was busy helping re-establish the Mafia, wittingly or otherwise, the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) had recognized the dangers inherent in this. Captain W.E. Scotton, early in 1944, produced a report on the Mafia presence in Sicily warning of ‘the signs of Mafia resurgence and its perils for social order and economic progress.’ <br /> <br /> The OSS had allied with the Mafia as part of the invasion strategy of the Allies in their assault on Sicily, and the agency kept close to them in order to check the growth of the Italian Communist Party on the island. There was also the very real danger that the Sicilian Separatist Movement, led by Finocchiaro Aprile, in alliance with the Mafia, would use the turbulent times to try to free itself from Italian hegemony.<br /> <br /> Di Carlo was allegedly a captain in the US Marines who was assisting in this re-establishment exercise, and would have obviously supported Dr. Navarra who was in fact his cousin. It would have been a short step from backing a mayor to backing a new boss of the other side of Corleone. There is, however, doubt that Di Carlo was even in Sicily, as he was deported back to Italy sometime after 1947.<br /> <br /> Until his death twenty years later, at the age of seventy-six, he seems to have kept a relatively low profile. At one time he was involved in the management of the Palermo Racecourse at Park Favorita, and had some connection into Leggio’s activities on his estate near Corleone. He was warned by the courts in 1964 for conspiracy and meeting with ‘delinquents’ including Leggio, but nothing seems to have come of this.<br /> <br /> Antonino Sorci, known as Ninnu u Riccu, ‘Nino the Wealthy,’ from all the profits he made as a drug dealer, may well have been, along with his brother Pietro, the instigator of the ‘Mafia war’ which ravaged the centre of the city of Palermo for two years in 1956-57 as the mob struggled to control the Mercati Generali, or general produce markets, resulting in dozens of deaths. He was the personal assistant and representative of Charles Luciano, in Palermo, and confirmed at a Mafia hearing that Angelo Di Carlo was definitely a ‘man of honour.’ <br /> <br /> Following his ascension to Mafia family boss of Corleone, as a concession, Navarra granted Collura control over what was known as ‘The Lower Area’ while maintaining one of his closest confidants, Antonio Governalli as head of ‘The Upper Area.’ <br /> <br /> These areas referred to ‘The Stacks of Corleone’ the two huge limestone crags that dominate the town-Castello Soprano and Castello Sottano-that were formerly guard castles linking the walls of the medieval city.<br /> <br /> Governalli was backed by Giovani Trombadore, and Collura by Angelo Vintaloro and Antonino and Giovani Majuri, all men loyal to the doctor. He recognized Collura for what he was-a threat and a danger to his position as the boss of the town. From the day he arrived, Collura was a stone in the shoe of Michele Navarra. <br /> <br /> Fourteen years later, he would sort it.<br /> <br /> Michelangelo Gennaro had been the capo of Corleone’s Mafia until his death in 1924. Born in 1864, he was, like so many of his peers across western Sicily, an estate manager. In 1920, he created the Corleone Agricultural Club, ostensibly where like-minded farm managers could meet and discuss business. It was in fact a social club for the local mob until Cesare Mori closed it down on December 17th 1926. <br /> <br /> When Gennaro died, his place was taken by Angelo Gagliano, (another suspect in the murder of Verro,) who in turn was followed by another doctor of medicine, Marcellino Benenti, who fled Corleone in 1930 to avoid arrest by the carabinieri, and he himself, was replaced by 41 year old Calogero Lo Bue, who had been capo of the Mafia cosca in Prizzi before taking over Corleone. <br /> <br /> Before Gennaro there were others of course. When Danilo Dolci the famous author and reformist visited the town in the late 1940s, he was told of some of these. There were Mariano Coletti, and Vincenzo Crisciune, and before him, Cici Figattlu, and before him Piddu Uccedduzzu and then before him Mariano Cuddella. <br /> <br /> Giuseppe Battaglia had been a boss as far back as the late 19th century and before, having been born in1846. There had been capos of criminal groups, and bandits and then the Mafia, or as it was called the Fratuzzi, ‘Little Brothers,’ as long as memory recalled.<br /> <br /> Gagliano’s sister was Navarra’s mother, so the doctor’s pedigree helped ensure that he stepped into the job when it became vacant. His promotion was endorsed by possibly the three most powerful Mafiosi on the island-Calogero Vizzini, Genco Russo and the fearsome Vanni Sacco, boss of Camporeale who had the mayor of his town, Pasquale Almerico, shot so full of holes that when they lifted up his body, the bullets fell out like coffee beans spilling out of a bag. One hundred and eleven in all.<br /> <br /> Antonino Calderone, the pentiti from Catania, claimed Biaggio Carnevali alias ‘Funcidda’ was really the head of the Corleone family and that Navarra was simply a rising star in conflict with this meteor called Leggio. It may well have been the truth. <br /> <br /> Lampedusa in his book, describes the instability of truth in Sicily: ‘Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily: a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, annihilated by imagination and self-interest: shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves on the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.’<br /> <br /> That, and the other thing certain about Cosa Nostra, was and is, its uncertainty for its members.<br /> <br /> Luciano Leggio went quietly about building up his own crew within the family, and developing his Abigeato sideline. <br /> <br /> At some time in his late teens, he had joined up with the notorious cattle rustlers, the Barbacia family. They came from Godrano, a small village on the other side of the Rocca Busambra to the east of Corleone. They had been carrying on a vendetta with the Lorello family, also rustlers since 1918. Over sixty men would die before the feud died out itself with the shotgun murder in 1959 of ten year old Antonino Pecoraro, the last male on the Lorello side who would have been forced to carry on the grudge, had he survived. <br /> <br /> In 1944, shortly after Leggio became part of the gang, Francesco Barbacia, ‘lu zu Cicciu’ the head of the clan, disappeared and Leggio became the leader. He was only nineteen, and already known throughout the town and surrounding countryside as a sanguinoso, a bloodthirsty youth, already showing a glimpse of his violent and psychopathic nature.<br /> <br /> By his early twenties, he had amassed enough money to buy a farm of his own, a place on the vast hinterland of Corleone-Piana della Scalla-a sprawling estate lying in the shadow of the Roca Busambra mountain. His rise from peasant to power force and enforcer in the Mafia had been spectacular to say the least, most of it riding on the reputation he built up as a ruthless killer. In his early days, in the gang he was forming, his closest aides were Giovanni Ruffino, Giacomo Riina, and Calogero Bagarella.<br /> <br /> Giacomo Riina was the oldest member of the gang. Related by marriage to Leggio (through one of his sisters) and Toto Riina’s uncle, he was bon in 1908. Leggio and Giacomo Riina had been arrested in 1942 for cigarette smuggling. He had been one of the forty or so Mafiosi identified by the police sergeant in the Mafia Corleone list of 1945. Many Italian investigative reporters believed he was the brains behind the ‘new Mafia’ that emerged following the events of 1958. He was for many years, closely connected to Eminflex, the largest mattress manufacturers in Italy, and it was thought he used their billions of turnover as a conduit to launder mob cash. Law enforcement had investigated him in connection with drug smuggling, illegal arms dealing through Croatia, counterfeit currency trading, and a hijacking and a bank robbery ring involving Vincenzo Pozio, Salvatore D’Angelo, Antonio DeLuca and Angelo Pavone.<br /> <br /> It was thought by police agencies that Riina headed up the ‘Northern Branch’ i.e.<br /> the area of Milan and northern Italy, of the Corleonesi faction within the Sicilian Mafia.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236997669,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236997669,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236997669?profile=original" width="207" /></a>Italian journalist Christian Lovatelli Ravarino claimed Riina was unfathomable and among other things, perhaps the most evil Mafioso whoever lived, which is saying something! Ravarino was the only journalist to interview Giacomo Riina (right), and he recorded it on video in a restaurant in Budrio, near Bolgna in Northern Italy, where the old man was living out his time in exile.<br /> <br /> Driven by a desire to expand the parameters of his life outside the confines of a small, bucolic town like Corleone, Leggio moved into new rackets-slot machines, transport and trucking and cigarette smuggling-while maintaining a grip on the extortion and other traditional activities that were the backbone of the Mafia. He strong-armed his way into the grain and wheat markets, collecting up to 20% of every sale made in the province, and eventually cornered the market on pinball machines in the province of Palermo, running thousands of them, cranking out maybe as much as a billion lire a year from this venture alone, the equivalent of US $1.5 million, a huge amount for those days. Police Commissioner Angelo Mangano claimed Leggio simply ‘gushed money.’<br /> <br /> His standing in the claustrophobic town of Corleone was so fearsome that on one occasion when he visited a barbershop for a shave, removing his dark sunglasses, the barber took one look at his almond-shaped eyes and fainted in fear. A story perhaps apocryphal, and recalled by journalist Marco Nese in his book Nel Segno della Mafia.<br /> <br /> Years later, called to give evidence against Leggio, the hairdresser, sclerotic, trembling uncontrollably, shrieked in fear:<br /> <br /> Nienti sacciu, ‘I don’t know a thing.’ <br /> <br /> Leggio would stroll around the main square, the sun reflecting off his moon-shaped face with its thick, sensuous smirking lips, strutting his arrogant disdain for the carabinieri troops patrolling the town (below), who would watch him cautiously, as they nervously fingered their automatic rifles. Everyone knew that among the so-called men of honour, violence is the tool of power.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236997857,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236997857,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236997857?profile=original" width="443" /></a><br /> <br /> As far back as 1886, Giuseppe Algoni, in the first ever essay on the Mafia, his study:<br /> La Mafia nei suoi fattori e nelle sue manifestazioni, wrote:<br /> <br /> <em> The Mafioso dresses shabbily, adopts a demeanour of naïve, foolishly attentive geniality, patiently suffering insults and injuries, but at night, he shoots you.</em><br /> <br /> Following the disappearance of Rizzotto, and the furore it created, Leggio made himself invisible, a phenomenon that he would create many times in the years to come. His ability to disappear almost at will, resulted in the media creating a special myth about a man they began to call La Primula Rossa, the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of Corleone. While he was absent from the town, his cousins, Francesco and Leoluca Leggio, managed his affairs.<br /> <br /> He moved to Palermo and took up residence- under the personal care of Doctor Gaetano LaMantia, who surprisingly was a gynaecologist - as ‘Senore Gaspare Centineo’-at the Ospizio Marino, a private nursing home near the waterfront at Aquasanta, Here, he was waited on hand and foot by Dr. Marino an orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Pizillo a radiologist and nurses Millj Plaja and Maria Aiello . This was a place he routinely used in the years to come to have medical treatment for his various ailments, and lie low from the bothersome police. <br /> <br /> He travelled between Palermo and Corleone organizing his business interests, and early in 1955 he was the driving force behind another murder in the small town up in the hills.<br /> <br /> Late in the evening of February 5th 1955, Guido Lambertina found a body, about 50 metres from the mouth of the newly built road tunnel on State Highway 118 south of Corleone. The face of the corpse had been smashed in with a heavy object and then shot numerous times, a classic sign of Mafia revenge.<br /> <br /> By the time the police arrived there was no traces of evidence that would lead to the killers. The man was identified as Claudio Splendido, and he had been killed sometime between 4:30 pm and 8:30 pm when the body was discovered.<br /> <br /> He was employed by the contractors developing the highway, as a night-watchman and guard.<br /> <br /> His wife, Lucia Mannina and his five sons could offer no reason as to why he had been murdered.<br /> <br /> Two men, Antonino Addamo and Michelangelo Lo Bue were arrested and questioned by the police. They had been involved in thefts from the construction site in October 1954 and Splendido had reported them to the police as potential suspects. The investigation dragged on, and the men were eventually released.<br /> <br /> At the end of August 1955, magistrates investigating the killing of Splendido concluded death by assailants unknown, and the case, like so many before it, was shelved.<br /> <br /> On November 1st 1966, Angelo Mangano, director of the Regional Police, based in Palermo, received a tip-off from the wife of Luciano Raia, who was in prison for criminal association and extortion, that her husband had information for him on the killing of Splendido. <br /> <br /> Raia claimed that when he was in prison in Palermo in September 1963, he had heard a conversation between Vincenzo Riina and another prisoner. They were talking about the killing of Splendido. <br /> <br /> Leggio and his gradigghia, or gang of at least twenty men, would meet on land near the construction site Splendido guarded, and Leggio, concerned that the night-watchman had overheard incriminating conversations, and based on his previous co-operation with the local police over the thefts in 1954, ordered that he be killed.<br /> <br /> Rassettarsi la testa-Mafia slang for keeping quiet-was all important if the brotherhood were to manage its business without interruption. Men like Claudio Splendido were a constant threat and had to be removed. To Leggio, killing someone made no more impression than killing a goat.<br /> <br /> Although he was indicted for this murder fourteen years later, Leggio would wriggle free as he did on almost every homicide indictment he faced, except one. <br /> <br /> His success in avoiding prison lay in the prerogative of Italian courts to find a defendant neither guilty or innocent, rather acquit him for insufficient evidence. Based on the Scottish law of ‘Not Proven’ which dates back to 1728, in Italy it was finally abolished under a new judicial code in 1988. It was not too difficult for people like Leggio to render the evidence as insufficient by simply having witnesses removed. He was also helped by the lack of law enforcement interest or urgency in dealing with the phenomena of the Mafia. <br /> <br /> The courts of Palermo were staffed by judiciary who were in turn, fearful, cautious, anxious and lazy. There was also so many of them that investigations and trials turned into legal swamps. There were more judges and court bureaucrats in Italy than full-time firemen!<br /> <br /> The level of corruption that existed within the system was also legendary. Gaspare Pisciotta, Salvatore Giuliano’s chief aid, at his trial at the Court of Assizes at Viterbo had shouted from the dock:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>We are all one thing: bandits, Mafia and police, as the father, the son and the holy spirit.</em>’ <br /> <br /> The anti-Mafia Commission, appointed for the first time in 1963, often blamed the ‘repressive apparatus’ by accusing its members of negligence, superficiality, incompetence and lack of training. In a report of 1976, which analysed the failure of the Palermo chief of police to gather information about a Mafia summit, the anti-Mafia Commission wrote that: <br /> <br /> <em>'the complete lack of useful information is the consequence of the police forces' tendency to minimise the phenomenon of the Mafia. However’</em> - the Commission carried on - <em>‘the fact that nobody had any interest in thoroughly investigating an issue which, at first sight, ought to have stirred into action the dullest policemen of Palermo, is incredible and cannot be justified even by the most indulgent and understanding observer.’</em><br /> <br /> Luciano Raia was a soldier in the Corleone cosca, and the first acknowledged post-war informant in the history of the Sicilian Mafia. I Primo Pentito, the first penitent. He was subsequently judged insane, and sequestered in hospitals and asylums, before being released. Giving evidence at the trial of the 114, in Catanzaro in 1969, defence lawyers claimed his evidence was unreliable on the grounds that he was a homosexual. Following the trial, he fled Sicily and moved to Piedmont.<br /> <br /> The only publicised informants in the Sicilian Mafia that preceded Raia in the 20th century, were Vincenzo Di Carlo, the boss of Raffadali in Agrigento, identified by the carabinieri in 1963 as a collaboratore di giustizia, Dr. Melchiore Allegra, who had made a long and detailed confession to the carabinieri in 1937, although it did not come to light until it was published by the Sicilian newspaper, L’Ora, in 1962, and Giuseppe Gassisi who had testified against Don Vito Cascioferro in 1929. <br /> <br /> Pentimento had of course existed as long as the Mafia itself. Men of honour had always talked to the law, when it suited their purpose. They regularly accused each other of being spies, or tragediatori-truth-tellers. Leonard Vitale, another informant who testified in the 1970s, killed a member of his cosca who was spreading rumours that Vitale’s uncle (whom he revered) was a police informer. <br /> <br /> In the sense that it came to be known in the late 20th century, it was about repentance or conversion, which encompassed regret, remorse and a recognition of guilt. These standards were supposed to be met by informants against the Mafia. In practice however, the prosecutors just wanted enough solid facts to help them get the bad guys and put them away.<br /> <br /> The Mafia doctor of Corleone watched Leggio grown in stature, making alliances with powerful men outside the town, and keeping close to one in the town who had been a thorn in Navarra’s side for fourteen years. One day the doctor would fix that particular problem.<br /> <br /> On the dark, cold evening of February 24th 1957, a police officer, Nicolo Maggio, returning home from his shift, heard gun shots, and found Vincenzo Collura senior lying on the road outside number 8 Via Sant Agostino, a narrow, cobbled lane, not far from the main town square. Although still breathing, he died soon after. The autopsy indicated he had been shot three times, by three different weapons. His brother claimed he had been killed by the brothers Giovanni and Innocenzo Ferrara, who had followed Collura down the street from the square. He made his statement to the police in Campofiorito, a small, rural town, ten miles south of Corleone, as he claimed Mafiosi were always watching the police station in Corleone to see who was dealing with the law. However, like so many people had done in the past when called to give evidence, he retracted his statement and no one was indicted or charged with Collura’s murder.<br /> <br /> He was the last of three men Doctor Navarra wanted removed permanently from the landscape. Men who were close to and important to Leggio. The others were Nicola D’Allesandro, boss of Aquasanta, in Palermo, and Nino Cottone who ruled Villabate like a feudal lord. They had backed and supported Leggio in his disputes with the doctor, and traded with him on deals involving stolen cattle and hijacked commoditise. D’Allesandro went down in 1955 during a dispute involving the relocation of the citrus fruit produce market from Ziza to Aquasanta, and Cottone was bowled over by two men wielding machine guns as he arrived at his summer villa in 1956. Collura made it a trifecta and Dr. Navarra must have been feeling very comfortable as the year came to a close.<br /> </p>
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