The downfall of Salvatore (The Beast) Riina, the Mafia’s murderous “boss of bosses,” began on College St. in Toronto, according to a noted Mafia scholar.

Rival Mafia member Tommaso Buscetta fled to Toronto and hung out on College in the late 1960s after his family was almost wiped out by Riina’s forces, Antonio Nicaso, a GTA-based author and university lecturer on organized crime, said on Friday.

Riina, also known as Toto, died in an Italian hospital early Friday. He was 87. As the head of Sicily’s infamous Cosa Nostra crime syndicate starting in the 1970s, he earned the nickname “The Beast” for his cruelty and for unleashing a war against law enforcement that claimed the lives of Italian prosecutors and police officers. Riina’s long criminal reach spilled blood across Italy and extended a black hand of extortion and trafficking across the globe.

Buscetta, who also hid out in Montreal and South America after fleeing Italy, lived in Toronto on Northcliffe Blvd. under an assumed name.

He eventually resurfaced in Italy and became a crucial Mafia turncoat who helped put Riina behind bars.

“The revenge of Buscetta was to testify against Riina,” Nicaso said.

Riina retaliated against the Italian government’s campaign to crush the Mafia by striking back hard, ordering the bombing assassinations of two of the country’s leading anti-Mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992. He also orchestrated the kidnapping, strangling and dissolving in acid of the young son of a mob informer.

In 1993, Italian authorities captured Riina in Sicily’s capital, Palermo, and judges ultimately gave him 26 life sentences. He spent a good deal of the next quarter-century in isolation, with little time outside his cell in Milan.

As Riina’s health declined rapidly in recent days after multiple surgeries, doctors placed him in a medically induced coma. Italian Justice Minister Andrea Orlando allowed Riina’s family members to visit his bedside in a hospital in the northern city of Parma on Thursday, the prisoner’s birthday. The Ministry of Justice said he died there at 3:37 a.m. Friday.

Riina had four children, one of whom, Salvo, wrote on Facebook, “You’re not Toto Riina to me, you’re just my dad.” Another of Riina’s sons is in prison for committing four murders.

Riina, short of stature but rife with nicknames — he was also called U Curtu, or Shorty, because he was 5 foot 2 — came from Corleone, a town in the Sicilian hinterland made famous as the birthplace of fictional character Vito Corleone in the “Godfather” movies.

But Riina’s butchery was all too real.

After serving time in his youth for killing a man in an argument, he became a soldier under Mafia boss Luciano Leggio. He rose through the ranks, eliminating competitors and at times running his gang in hiding, though apparently always from Sicily. By the early 1980s, Riina had solidified his dominance over the island and its global criminal activities.

His organization’s tentacles reached deep into all facets of Italian life, from small businesses forced to pay for protection, to large sectors of commerce where they skimmed millions of dollars. In Sicily, the mob had a reputation for delivering votes in exchange for favours. And nationally, Italy’s leading politicians were often accused of entanglements with the sticky, and often invisible, Mafia web.

The codes of omerta, or silence, that governed the Mafia and protected its bosses began to erode in the 1980s as rival families and informants turned state’s evidence. Enormous trials in the early 1990s resulted in the arrest and jailing of more than 300 gangsters.

But it was the murder of the two anti-Mafia magistrates, Borsellino (and five of his bodyguards) and Falcone (along with his wife and two bodyguards) that shook Italians the most and doomed Riina. Subsequent bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence in 1993 led to the crackdown on the Mafia and also contributed to the collapse of an old political guard corroded with corruption.

Upon Riina’s arrest in 1993, the mayor of Corleone at the time proclaimed it “a moment of liberation for us,” and children were let out of school to celebrate.

Buscetta testified in trials in Sicily in the early and mid-1980s, mapping out the breadth and depth of Riina’s power prior to the 1993 arrest.

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This aided the passage of anti-Mafia legislation in Italy, Nicaso said.

“Thanks to Buscetta, Italy recognized the existence of the Mafia,” he said.

In response, Riina is said to have ordered the murder of Buscetta’s two sons, his brother and 33 of his other relatives.

Buscetta’s GTA associates included Rocco Zito, a leading figure in the ‘Ndrangheta crime network, according to police sources. Zito was shot to death in 2016.

Buscetta died in 2000 in New York in a witness protection program.

Riina’s former driver, Balduccio Di Maggio, also lived under an assumed name in Toronto in the 1990s before returning to Italy to testify against Riina, Nicaso said.

“He spent at least two years in Canada, in Toronto,” Nicaso said of Di Maggio.

Di Maggio testified that Giulio Andreotti, a former prime minister who dominated postwar Italian politics, once shared an embrace and kiss with Riina. Andreotti denied it.

Bernardo Provenzano, who died last year, succeeded Riina in 1993 as the operational “boss of all bosses.”

With Riina in prison, other mobs around Italy grew in brutality and influence, including the Camorra in Naples, and the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria, which operates a worldwide drug trade.

But the specter of Riina, who rarely spoke in public, hung over the country. In one of his 1993 trials, he refused to address the claims of one of his accusers.

“He does not have my moral stature,” Riina said.