Cosa Nostra was on Tuesday reeling from the latest in a succession of blows after the arrest of dozens of reputed mafiosi in the Sicilian city of Catania. They included the son of the city’s jailed ”godfather”.
The raids which netted 38-year-old Vincenzo Santapaola and 37 others came a day after police shot and killed another mafia leader, and less than a month after the capture of Cosa Nostra’s most senior commander, Salvatore Lo Piccolo. ”We are tearing apart the clans, bit by bit,” said Italy’s Interior Minister, Giuliano Amato. ”The godfathers can no longer fool themselves. We shall get them one by one.”
Vincenzo Santapaola’s father, Benedetto, or ”Nitto”, who is serving a life sentence, is one of the Sicilian mafia’s most feared and powerful leaders. Nicknamed ”The Werewolf”, he is said to be affected by the rare psychiatric condition of lycanthropy, whose sufferers believe themselves to be wolves.
Nitto Santapaola has allegedly continued to run his clan from inside prison with the help of a string of ”regents”. The wife of one was among those arrested on Tuesday. Two other women were captured.
The investigations that led to the latest round-up also triggered new charges against other imprisoned Catania mobsters. They included Antonino Faro, who is alleged to have eaten the liver of one his victims, a rival don.
Elsewhere on Sicily, an autopsy was being carried out on the body of Daniele Emmanuello, the fugitive ”godfather” of the coastal town of Gela who until his death was one of Italy’s 30 most wanted criminals. He was shot dead after flinging himself through a window in his pyjamas to avoid capture.
Like Nitto Santapaola, Emmanuello was involved in a bloody mafia war. He earned a life sentence for the murder of Emanuel Trubia, known as ”The Animal”, who was killed along with his bodyguard in a barber’s shop in 1999.
Emmanuello (43) had survived two attempts on his life. One failed because the bomb meant to kill him did not go off.
His widow, Virginia Di Fede, said he was unarmed when he died. She added: ”I never saw him treat anyone badly.”
The latest arrests have come against a background of growing resistance among Sicilian business people to the payment of protection money. In the latest of several indications that their defiance is damaging the Cosa Nostra, an attack was mounted last week on the offices of the Italian employers’ federation in the town of Caltanisetta, the centre of the entrepreneurs’ revolt.
In Rome a junior justice minister confirmed reports that he had been given 24-hour police protection because of intelligence that a contract had been put out for his assassination by the Sicilian mafia. Luigi Li Gotti was one of four politicians and lawyers fingered in public by the former ”boss of bosses”, Salvatore ”Totò” Riina. – Guardian Unlimited Â