Salvatore Riina: Encyclopedia II - Salvatore Riina - The Mafia War Of 1981/82

Salvatore Riina - The Mafia War Of 1981/82

The Corleonesi's primary rivals were Stefano Bontade, Salvatore Inzerillo and Gaetano Badalamenti, bosses of various powerful Palermo Mafia Families. On April 23, 1981, Bontade was machine-gunned to death, and a few weeks later, on May 11, Inzerillo was torn apart by a hail of bullets. Various relatives and associates of the pair were subsequently killed or vanished without trace, including Inzerillo's 15-year-old son, who was killed for vowing to avenge his murdered father. Badalamenti only managed to survive by fleeing Sicily.

More and more killings took place over the next two-years, with the bloodshed best illustrated by the fact that, on a single day - November 30, 1982 - twelve Mafiosi were murdered in Palermo in twelve separate incidents. The murders even extended across the Atlantic, with Inzerillo's brother being found dead in New Jersey after fleeing to the US.

Riina also ordered the murders of judges, policemen and prosecutors in an attempt to terrify the authorities. One of the most high profile slayings was of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who had first gained fame combating the Red Brigades on the Italian mainland and who was brought in to become the prefect of Palermo to try and halt the rising tide of Mafia violence. On September 3, 1982, just six-months after his arrival in Sicily, Dalla Chiesa, his wife and one of their bodyguards were shot to death in an ambush. The killer is believed to have been Pino Greco, one of Riina's favourite hitmen. An ace shot with an AK-47, and bearing the inexplicable nickname "The Shoe", Pino Greco is suspected of killing around eighty people on behalf of Riina, including Bontade and Inzerillo.

During 1981 and 1982, around a thousand Mafiosi were killed as Riina decimated his opponents and they in turn tried to fight back, and at least two hundred others vanished without trace. It was an appalling bloodbath, even with Sicily's history of Mafia violence.

One of the most horrific tales of the period was of the so-called "Room Of Death", a squalid apartment in Palermo run by one of Riina's men, Filippo Marchese. Victims were brought there to be tortured for information, then killed and either dissolved in acid or dismembered and thrown out to sea. An informant who worked alongside Marchese claimed that Marchese insisted on strangling the victims himself, although he had his underlings dispose of the bodies.

Riina employed treachery in his war, often talking rivals into joining him and then murdering them when they were no longer of any use. He even turned on his two most ruthless and loyal killers, Pino Greco and Filippo Marchese. In 1982, having decided Marchese was no longer of any use, Riina had him murdered by Pino Greco, and three-years later Riina shot Greco dead after his favourite assassin started getting a bit too ambitious for his own good.

Whilst they helped them become the most powerful clan in Sicily, the Corleonesi's tactics backfired to some degree when, in 1982, a convicted double-killer named Tommaso Buscetta became the first Sicilian Mafioso to become an informant and co-operate with the authorities. Buscetta was from a losing family in the Mafia war, and he had lost several relatives and many friends to Riina's hitmen which made him feel that becoming an informant was the only way to save himself and get his revenge against Riina. Buscetta provided a great deal of information to judge Giovanni Falcone, and he testified at the Maxi Trial in the mid-1980s that saw hundreds of Mafiosi imprisoned. Riina picked up another life sentence for murder at the maxi-trials, but it was another in absentia sentence as he was still a fugitive.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Mafia War Of 1981/82", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki