One of Italy’s most feared mobsters, who led powerful Cosa Nostra, dies in hospital while serving multiple life sentences

Salvatore “Totò” Riina’s son was 17 years old when his father ordered him to strangle a kidnapped businessman in the countryside – a killing that would mark the boy’s formal entry into the Cosa Nostra.

It was just one example of the murderous reign of terror that Riina, who died in a prison hospital bed early on Friday morning, inflicted on Italy for nearly four decades as the “boss of bosses” of the Sicilian mafia.

Nicknamed “the Beast” because of his cruelty, Riina was an unrepentant criminal who not only assassinated his criminal rivals on an unprecedented scale in the 1980s and 90s, but also targeted the prosecutors, journalists, and judges who sought to stand in his way.

In the end, it was Riina who was defeated.

The Sicilian mafia is far weaker now, left in disarray by Riina, who sought unsuccessfully to lead it from his prison cell in Parma. The crime syndicate still exists, and still shapes people’s social and economic lives in parts of Sicily, but it is a shadow of what it once was, undermined by the relentless scrutiny of Italian police and prosecutors and unable to regain its dominance of the illegal drug trade.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Riina was a native of the small Sicilian town of Corleone, made famous by the Godfather films. Photograph: Reuters

If anyone beat Riina, it was the legacy of his most famous victim, Giovanni Falcone, the anti-mafia judge murdered in a car bomb Riina ordered in 1992.

“Riina’s death marks the end of an era,” said Federico Varese, a mafia expert at Oxford University. “You can compare him to [the Colombian drug lord] Pablo Escobar. Both launched a direct attack against the state and that created a backlash.”

Riina was serving multiple life sentences after convictions for ordering 150 murders, though experts believe the true figure was much higher. He died while he was in a medically induced coma following cancer treatment.

In his birth city of Corleone, immortalised as a mafia stronghold by The Godfather book and film trilogy, responses to Riina’s death were mixed. While young people saw the death as a chance for the town to escape its corrupt reputation, elderly people recalled Riina with fondness, describing the mafia boss as a gentleman.

“When Riina was around, everybody had a job here in Corleone,” said Paolo, 77. “These men gave us jobs. I knew him. I knew him very well. It’s a day like the other as you can see. But not a day to celebrate.”

Riina rose to power in the mid-1970s, when he became the de facto leader of the Corleone crime family. Sicily had become a hub for the heroin trade into the US following the Vietnam war, and Riina became fixated on the narcodollars that he saw flowing to his rivals in Palermo.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Riina poses for a police photograph in 1993. Photograph: Reuters

He created new alliances and staged a bloody coup using his death squads, said John Dickie, a mafia expert and author of Mafia Republic. “He assassinated his rivals. He killed all of them, hundreds of them, he literally ethnically cleansed them out of Palermo,” Dickie said.

Mario Francese was the first journalist to expose the role of Riina and the Corleonesi within the Sicilian mafia and was killed in 1979. “I have never sought revenge for my father’s death, only justice,” his son Giulio, a journalist, said on Friday.

While other mafia bosses were also brutal, Riina was less invested in maintaining peace, and less closely linked to politicians. His rise marked a new level of violence: he ordered the notorious murder of a 13-year old boy who was kidnapped, strangled, and dissolved in acid, to send a message to those who might turn against him – and the Italian state was forced to respond.

The so-called Maxi trial, a series of cases beginning in 1986 that targeted the mafia, led to the indictment of nearly 500 mafiosi, many of whom who were sentenced to life in prison. The trials represented a formal acknowledgement of how pervasive the mafia was in Sicily.

Riina responded with brute force: ordering the murders of Falcone and, two months later, another judge, Paolo Borsellino. He also mounted more attacks on the Italian mainland in an effort to get the state to back down.

It did not.

Riina was arrested in Palermo in 1993. Counted among his official victims was Piersanti Mattarella, the president of Sicily, who was shot dead in his car in 1980. His brother, Sergio, now serves as Italy’s head of state.

Although Riina was the subject of special measures to to cut off his ability to communicate from prison, he still made attempts, and never ceded his title of the boss of bosses.

In July, as his cancer worsened, a court denied his family’s request to transfer him home to Sicily. Doctors said he was still lucid, and he was caught on wiretap this year saying he regretted nothing.

“They’ll never break me, even if they give me 3,000 years,” he said.

Many rivals of Riina fled to the US during his years of terror, some of whom have came back to try to re-establish the Cosa Nostra’s dominance.

The last time the crime network’s governing committee met was in 1993. “To the best of our knowledge they have tried twice and everyone trying to attend has been arrested both times,” Dickie said.

Corleone was deserted on Friday except for people who had gathered at the main square. A local priest said he agreed with church authorities in Palermo, who have already determined that Riina would not be given a church funeral.

“I can understand the suffering of Riina’s family with this loss. But he was the head of the the mafia and no sign of redemption ever came from him,” said Don Luca Leone.