Mafia 'Boss of bosses' Salvatore 'Toto' Riina died in an Italian prison on Wednesday at the age of 87, while serving more than two dozen life sentences for his brutal crimes.

The Sicilian, nicknamed 'The Beast', succumbed to his battle with cancer at a prison hospital in Parma shortly after being put in medically-induced coma.

Riina was serving 26 life sentences and is believed to have ordered the killing of more that 150 people.

'God have mercy on him, as we won't,' an association for victims told the Fatto Quotidiano daily

The most high-profile murders he ordered were those in 1992 of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who had worked fearlessly to bring more than 300 mobsters to trial in 1987.

Riina was serving 26 life sentences and is believed to have ordered the killing of more that 150 men

Giuseppe Di Matteo who was kidnapped was strangled and his body dissolved in acid in a bid to stop his father from spilling Mafia secrets

Riina ordered the killings of fearless anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone (left) and Paolo Borsellino

The aftermath of the bomb which killed Judge Borsellino in 1992. Riina is believed to have first murdered aged 19

Judge Falcone was also killed by a car bomb, in Palermo, Sicily, in 1992. Riina becamea foot soldier for volatile and vain boss Luciano Leggio, before taking over from him

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano looks at the remains of a police car destroyed during of the assassination of top judge Giovanni Falcone during a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the murder

His reign of terror continued from behind bars and he also famously ordered the brutal murder of a 13-year old boy Giuseppe Di Matteo who was kidnapped was strangled and his body dissolved in acid in a bid to stop his father from spilling Mafia secrets.

The boys father Santino Di Matteo made a desperate trip to Sicily to try to negotiate his son's release but on January 11, 1996 after 779 days, the boy, who by now had also become physically ill due to mistreatment, was finally strangled.

The body was subsequently dissolved in a barrel of acid to prevent the family holding a proper funeral at which they could mourn and to destroy evidence, a practice known as the 'lupara bianca'.

One of his life sentences was for ordering the hit, known as the 'Lazio Street Massacre', in which five people were gunned down in Palermo shootout.

Riina also planned a hit on Rudolph Giuliani, when the former mayor of New York was a state prosecutor in the 1980s.

Giuliani, a second generation Italian immigrant, went on to become the city's mayor and a national hero for his work combatting organised crime.

Riina, who was also dubbed 'U Curtu' ('Shorty') due to his 5-foot-2-inch (1.58) height, for years denied all links to the Mafia, nicknamed 'the octopus' for its tentacled reach into all areas of society.

Salvatore Riina when he was arrested for the death of Judge Giovanni Falcone

Salvatore 'Toto' Riina in court during a preliminary hearing in Palermo, Sicily, Italy in 1993

Italy's high court caused outrage earlier this year when they ruled that Riina 'deserved to die with dignity' in his own home as he fought terminal cancer

In 2009 he broke the Mafia code of 'omerta' - a vow of silence - and surprised those who thought he would take his secrets to the grave by admitting his link to the mob.

He was caught on a wiretap earlier this year saying he 'regrets nothing' and 'they'll never break me, even if they give me 3,000 years' in jail.

He is believed to have first murdered for the Mafia aged 19 and followed that a year later by killing a man during an argument - landing him behind bars for a six-year manslaughter stretch.

Once out, he became a foot soldier for volatile and vain boss Luciano Leggio, eventually taking over from him at the end of the 1970s when the cigar-puffing fugitive was caught and jailed.

Riina went on the run himself in 1969, but continued to lead the Corleonesi clan from hiding, increasing his influence by bumping off rivals such as Filippo Marchese, a hitman who garroted his victims in a 'room of death'.

The mobster would elude police efforts to snare him for almost a quarter of a century - without ever leaving Sicily - and took charge of Cosa Nostra's key businesses, from drug trafficking to kidnapping and racketeering.

Rudolph Giuliani pictured in 1987 with his prosecutors (from left to right) John Savarese, Michael Chertoff and Gil Childers in New York

His bloody victory in the Mafia War of the 1980s was to prove his undoing however, as mobsters from defeated rival families began turning state witness against him, and police tracked him to a house in Palermo.

The justice ministry had allowed his family a bedside visit at a hospital in Parma shortly before his death.

Earlier this year, Italy's highest court ruled that due to Riina's terminal illness, he had a right to 'die with dignity' under house arrest like any other terminally ill prisoner.

The decision drew fierce criticism from across the Italy's political spectrum and wider society.

The decision was left with a parole board in the northern city of Bologna, near Parma, where Riina was being held, but failed to make a ruling before his death on Wednesday.

The mobster was married to Antonietta Bagarella, a teacher from a mafioso family. He was father to four children, one of whom is behind bars for four murders.

'You're not Toto Riina to me, you're just my dad. And I wish you happy birthday dad on this sad but important day, I love you,' one son, Salvo, wrote on Facebook on Thursday.

Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, the son of the late mafia boss, waves as he leaves his mother's house in Corleone, southern Italy (left) and is pictured (right) leaving prison in 2008

Giovanni, Riina's eldest son, followed in his father's footsteps and is now serving a life sentence in jail.

His other son, also a mobster, last year sparked outrage in Italy by giving an interview in which he described his childhood as 'nice' and refused to denounce the mob.

Salvo has written a book about growing up as the son of Italy's most wanted man, Salvatore 'Toto' Riina, and appeared on RAI's premier talkshow to promote it.

But not once during the interview did Riina criticise his father, and he refused to acknowledge the existence of the mafia, saying cryptically: 'It could be everything or it could be nothing'.

'The Beast's' other son, Giuseppe, is confined by law to the city of Padua.

Riina, due to his famed secrecy, is an enigmatic figure in Italian society. That has not stopped film makers from trying to dramatize his life on the silver screen.

In 1999, HBO produced the television film 'Excellent Cadavers' staring Victor Cavallo as Riina.

In 2007, Italian film makers produced a six-part miniseries on Riina based on his life and crimes.

Is superboss Riina's death the end of the Sicilian Mafia? With Mafia king Toto Riina's death, and heir Matteo Messina Denaro on the run, is it game over for Sicily's once all-powerful Cosa Nostra? 'Boss of bosses' Riina, who was nicknamed 'The Beast' because of his cruelty, led a reign of terror including the brutal daylight assassinations of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. He died Friday aged 87, just months after being caught on wiretaps in jail boasting afresh about his bloody crimes. 'Riina will go down in history as the man who destroyed Cosa Nostra,' Mafia expert Attilio Bolzoni said. 'With his strategy of bloody massacres in Sicily and across Italy... he turned an invisible Mafia visible, with hundreds, thousands of murders, carried out first with Kalashnikovs, then bombs.' 'For the first time in history, the state reacted mercilessly,' Bolzoni said, with the arrest of hundreds of bosses and the introduction of harsh anti-mafia laws that saw imprisoned gangsters held in utter isolation. Caught and jailed in 1993 after nearly a quarter of a decade as a fugitive, his revenge was swift: Cosa Nostra launched a series of bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence that killed 10 people. But he was unable to stop the decimation of the crime group - once nicknamed 'the octopus' for its tentacled reach into all areas of society - which was gradually supplanted by the Camorra in Naples and 'Ndrangheta in Calabria. 'An absolute monarchy' 'It's infinitely less powerful than before. After the deaths of (boss Bernardo) Provenzano and Riina, the only one at liberty is being hunted by the police,' the head of Italy's national anti-mafia body, Maurizio De Lucia, told AFP. Multi-murderer playboy Messina Denaro, one of the world's most-wanted men, is seen by many as Riina's natural heir but has been on the run since 1993. 'Cosa Nostra is a very strictly structured organisation, similar to an absolute monarchy. While the king still lives, it's not possible to think of picking a successor,' De Lucia said. 'The question now is whether the organisation is strong enough to identify and appoint an heir. Many of its bosses have been arrested, and enormous amounts of its patrimony has been seized' over the years, he said. 'We'll have to see whether Riina's death will lead to a new start - which I think unlikely - or whether it will be another step towards the crime group's demise,' he said. 'The truth' But prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio, who spent 20 years in the DDA organisation of anti-mafia prosecutors, warned the days of shootouts and car bombs may be gone, but Cosa Nostra has been growing fat instead on political deals. 'We have greatly weakened the military apparatus of the Mafia, the massacres are over, murders are rare. But the Mafia has undergone a genetic modification,' Cartosio told AFP. 'The political sector has lent itself greatly to... (organised crime's) infiltration of the social fabric' and, as a consequence, 'the Mafia presence in the political sphere is much greater than before,' he said. And the battle is not only against 'the octopus' but also the 'Stidda', a rival group formed by former Cosa Nostra members during the Second Mafia War of the early 1980s. 'The Mafia is less military, less bloody than before, but it's very efficient,' he said. Pietro Grasso, Italy's senate speaker and a former anti-mafia magistrate, stressed Friday that the battle is not over. 'Riina takes with him many mysteries that would have been essential in uncovering the facts about alliances, political links, internal and external Mafia accomplices,' he said in a post on Facebook. 'But none of us must stop searching for the truth'. Advertisement



