Original subtitles

1992,

a massive explosion kills Italy's leading mafia prosecutor.

It was an act of revenge

ordered by one of the most ruthless bosses

in the history of the Italian Mafia.

Some called him the Short One.

His enemies called him the Beast.

The rise and fall of Salvatore "Toto" Riina

is a story of the most dramatic period

in the history of Italian organized crime.

Though the Sicilian Mafia is only one of several

criminal syndicates in Italy,

under Riina's guidance it achieved

a position of unprecedented power,

and subverted the highest levels of the Italian government.

He erased mafia traditions

and destroyed the code of silence

as he brought the Sicilian Mafia onto the world stage.

But his bloody quest for power

beard one unplanned consequence,

the most effective mafia prosecution in history.

Toto Riina's story began in the small town of Corleone,

a poor farm town less than an hour's drive from Palermo.

The origins of both Riina and the mafia are found here

in the hard, desperate life of rural Sicily.

Historically, if you're looking at the roots of the mafia

in Sicily and in Italy, you can trace it back

to really the history of this country being overrun

by a whole bunch of different cultures,

the French, the Spanish, Venetians.

There's never been much of a law enforcement

apparatus on the island, it's very rural.

In fact, it's very much like a feudal system,

and this is the mafia came from.

In fact, many countries that have

an organized crime tradition had feudal roots initially

in its historical origins.

In Sicily, almost all the land was owned

by a small number of landowners,

and most of the population were impoverished peasants

who didn't own any land,

and the landowners either lived in the big cities of Sicily

or they lived on the mainland of Italy,

and their managers of these estates

who used force and began to run these estates

in the absence of the landlords

are the origins of the mafia.

Riina understood violence from a young age.

It has been reported that Riina's fate was sealed

in 1945 at the age of 15.

During an evening out with friends,

he argued with another boy,

settling the dispute by shooting him in the leg

and leaving him to bleed to death.

He spent the next several years in prison,

and when he was freed, he discovered

that he had earned acceptance and a new future

with the Corleonesi Mafia

in the emerging world of post-war Italy.

His timing couldn't have been better.

World War II, the invasion of Italy was underway,

and Mussolini's fascist dictatorship was under siege.

Mafia collaboration helped ease the allied forces'

move through Sicily.

Persecuted under Mussolini's regime,

the mafia prepared for a better future.

When the Allied forces occupied Sicily,

the allies were particularly concerned

to put people in power who could restore order,

who were not associated with fascism

and were not associated with communism.

They actually installed many mafia figures

in positions of power in towns around Sicily.

It's not clear if they did so intentionally or not,

or if the mafia was particularly shrewd

in exploiting a new power vacuum

in order to return to power.

As Palermo was made the regional capital of Sicily

and Sicily was made an autonomous region

of the Italian state,

a great deal of government money flowed into Palermo,

and the mafia was very quick to follow that money.

And there was a building boom in Palermo itself,

and the mafia went into the real estate business

in a very major way.

Profits and power.

By the early 1960s, the Sicilian Mafia

enjoyed an unprecedented abundance of riches.

Inevitably, there was a frantic scramble for power

among major mafia families,

a violent war in the battle for domination

that laid the groundwork for the rise of Toto Riina.

The mafia's war against itself

attracted national attention in 1963,

when seven police officers were murdered

in a car bomb attack.

Public outrage led to the first

large scale mafia crack down in Italian history.

Nearly 2,000 mafia members were arrested,

including most of the major bosses.

Many were forced to flee the country.

Even Toto Riina, by now second in command

of Corleonesi boss, Luciano Leggio, was captured,

only to be acquitted a short time later.

The mafia soon decided to disband its ruling commission

and assume a low profile.

They formed a temporary governing body

of three major mafia bosses, including Luciano Leggio.

In time, public attention shifted elsewhere,

and with it the government's appetite

for a continuing war against the mafia.

Slowly, the Sicilian Mafia began to rebuild.

In prison for life, and beset by health and legal problems,

Luciano Leggio eventually

granted his seat on the triumvirate to Toto Riina.

Leggio had, I think, escaped

from a medical clinic where he was in Rome,

and then was arrested definitively in 1974

in a hideout in Milan, and has been in custody ever since.

So gradually, although he never officially

was stripped of his power,

the day-to-day operation of the Corleonesi Mafia

was then taken over by Riina.

And so, gradually with the passing of time,

Riina became the effective head of the Corleonesi Mafia.

Though the mafia officially frowned

on narcotics trafficking,

an unofficial network had developed

to take advantage of the new market in the United States,

the market for heroin.

The authorities called it the Pizza Connection.

Once again, Riina would find himself

in an ideal position at a critical time.

The Pizza Connection case came to light

because of our relationship

with the Italian law enforcement agencies,

and our determination that some of the people

that we were identifying, along with DEA,

as being involved in heroin traffic in the United States

did not really belong

to any of the American organized crime groups,

but in fact, could be traced back to the homeland,

largely to Sicily and to Southern Italy.

And we started to develop this intelligence

that they were not part of La Cosa Nostra,

but were a separate entity functioning in the United States,

and sometimes without even the sanction

or approval of the American La Cosa Nostra.

So we found it to be largely an independent element

that had moved into the United States

because of the very lucrative drug trade here

and was operating here autonomously, by and large.

Former assistant US Attorney, Richard Martin,

recalls early assumptions about the Sicilian Mafia.

The interesting phenomena for the Sicilian Mafia

is that they were, compared to the American Mafia,

way behind.

They were an agrarian-based organization

that had really small involvement in things

that we traditionally associate the American Mafia with,

that is labor corruption, construction,

industries like that.

The Sicilian Mafia was not really actively involved.

What changed all of that was the cigarette trafficking,

and then the narcotics trafficking,

and took them from sort of backwards,

agrarian-based feudal sort of organization

to a multinational business

that generated billions of dollars,

and that change had a dramatic effect

on the structure of the Sicilian organization.

The Sicilian Mafia

was bringing in more money than it could launder.

One story tells of an apartment

rented simply to store cash profits.

Once again, mafia families would compete for ultimate power.

But now, Riina and the Corleonesi Mafia would leave the war.

Riina's involvement in heroin smuggling was not direct.

He, being from Corleone, had few natural connections

to the original narcotics traffic,

and he didn't have boat captains who had access,

he didn't have the laboratories, and he didn't have

a network of people in the United States to ship to.

What he did was to take over those families

that had those connections

and to substitute his own people,

or to force people who had those connections into his ambit

by killing off their bosses

and putting in their place his lieutenants.

Therefore, he got control of a business

that was not naturally one within his territory.

And by the end of 1981 or 1982,

when the Pizza Connection was really at its height,

it was Riina who was controlling the Sicilian Mafia.

Riina consolidated his power in various ways.

First by trying to undermine and isolate

certain of the more powerful bosses in Palermo

whom he regarded as his principal rivals

through kidnappings that were unauthorized,

kidnapping people who were supposed to be

under the protection of other bosses,

by killing law enforcement people

without the authorization of the commission

in ways that irritated and in some cases

humiliated other bosses,

and by cultivating economic relations

with people inside of other families

and fomenting discord between the different families.

Who was this man who placed so much fear

into so many people?

The truth about Salvatore Riina is much more complicated

and much more chilling than the commercial movie images

of godfathers and mafia Dons.

Riina does not speak Italian well,

speaks no other languages, to my knowledge,

and has really not traveled outside of Italy and Sicily,

and made no effort to be involved in

or interested in international matters

other than narcotics trafficking.

At the same time, he had, has an extraordinary memory.

Remembers the names and places of everything that happens,

and had a tremendous ability to put into operation

a plan that allowed his people to go around,

become involved in families and take them over.

People say that he never forgot any slight or any favor,

and would reward those who favored him

and eliminate those who had slighted him.

He's stocky and looks rough, as distinct from

the people who he eliminated on the commission,

who had been able to circulate in legitimate society,

present themselves as businessmen,

and Riina never did that, never tried to do that.

He is known among his fellow mafiosi

as an extremely tough, cruel man,

a person not given to random violence,

but a person of great suspicion and instinct,

and an ability to, whose sort of fundamental instinct

is to eliminate anyone who might be of danger to him.

Inzerillo was one of the key members

of the Sicilian Mafia, one of the commission members,

and controlled a substantial amount of the narcotics.

Inzerillo believed that by doing business with Riina,

and by owing money to Riina,

Riina would have an economic reason to keep him alive.

Instead, Riina,

at a meeting that was scheduled for a payment,

killed Inzerillo,

and thereafter killed all of his male family members,

including one of his young sons, who at one time had said

that he would have vengeance on Riina.

Riina, along with one of his killers,

took that boy and chopped off his arm,

and while the boy was bleeding to death,

told him that you will never use this arm to go after Riina.

He then fed the arm to the pigs and killed the boy.

That was the kind of message of violence

that had a tremendous impact on the families in Palermo.

And even though Riina's group was smaller in numbers

and less well known, they were successful

and took over the mafia.

Riina's rule went against

all of the traditions of the mafia.

Killing children and women was only part of his strategy.

Turning family against family,

making a travesty of loyalties within families,

and trafficking narcotics further undermined the culture

of solidarity and omerta, the code of silence

that had protected the mafia for so long.

Though the origins of the Sicilian Mafia

are lost in history, many historians suggest

that the fierce blood ties that characterize the mafia

were forged through the many invasions

Sicily suffered for hundreds of years.

Secret societies formed to maintain a resistance

and a measure of control over their homeland.

Riina's destruction of this ancient spirit of brotherhood,

which had insulated mafia members for generations,

changed the very nature of the organization.

Through fear, through intimidation,

through murder and treachery,

Riina's reign of terror had taken hold.

Mafia involvement in refining and smuggling heroin

had a dramatic consequence on the people of Italy.

Deaths from overdose rose from eight in 1974

to thousands by the late 1980s,

with an estimated 200,000 Italian addicts.

The Sicilian Mafia had helped to create a social crisis.

This was a problem when suddenly

the sons of wealthy families across Italy,

the sons of government officials

and daughters of business people and bureaucrats

were finding syringes in their homes

and having children die of overdose.

This became a problem

that was too big for the government to ignore.

Add to that the fact

that in order to protect this new business,

the mafia was beginning to kill

over curious police officials

who were looking for heroin refineries

and trying to crack down on the drug trade,

and add to this the fact that the Corleones

were beginning to kill the other mafia bosses

and the hundreds of people

who stood behind those mafia bosses

in order to consolidate those problems,

and suddenly you begin to have an awareness in Italy

that this problem is much bigger than you ever imagined.

The government's first steps were tentative.

The dangers both politically and physically

made success uncertain.

In a climate of great danger

and a history of violent retaliation,

a native son of Palermo

was brought into the new mafia investigations.

Giovanni Falcone led a new kind of investigation

that soon drew the attention of the Italian people,

members of the mafia, and Toto Riina himself.

He started out as a bankruptcy investigator

looking into fraudulent bankruptcies,

and used those same techniques of financial investigation

to attack the mafia by tracing the money

and proving that individuals who had no jobs

and no legitimate source of income

could not reasonably have acquired the multimillion dollars

that were passing through their accounts

and reflected in their properties.

He was able to trace movements of narcotics

that were seized, connect them to those people,

show the bank transfers,

and demonstrate that the Sicilian Mafia

was actually in charge of traffic to the United States.

Because at that time it was impossible to get members

of the Sicilian Mafia to talk,

the fact that the mafia began to go into the heroin business

meant that it had to deal with people

outside of its organization who were much less reliable

than people within the organization,

so that, for example, they would have to corrupt,

let's say, an airline employee

who would agree to bring a bag from one country to another.

That person, because that person

wasn't a professional criminal and was easy to scare,

you arrest that person and you threaten

to keep them in jail for the rest of their life,

and suddenly they're talking to the police

and telling you everything they know.

So he would take advantage of all of these people

in order to find new areas of weakness

within the organization,

ways of breaking into the organization

through its expansion,

and he did that very effectively

in some of these early cases and won convictions.

At the same time that Falcone was pursuing

the heroin connection from the financial side from Sicily,

we in the United States were pursuing

the same traffickers up the chain of distribution

through and back to Sicily.

And in 1982, Falcone came to New York

and I was introduced to him

with my friend and thereafter trial partner, Louis Freeh,

and we saw in him something quite different

from what we expected.

We saw a professional, intelligent, well-prepared magistrate

who knew this organization better than we did,

and we saw in him the possibility of exchanging information,

and for the first time really,

putting together an international effort

to combat this organization.

The Italian-American Working Group was formed

to exchange operational case information,

and to learn better from each other

how we could better penetrate these seemingly connected

drug trafficking organizations.

It evolved into an apparatus at the highest policy level

where the United States and Italy

coordinated their activities.

It resulted in the Maxi trials in Italy,

the Pizza Connection cases,

and even some of the commission cases

here in the United States.

In his 30-year career with the FBI,

former Associate Deputy Director of Investigations,

Oliver "Buck" Revell, was deeply involved

in the anti-mafia investigation.

The very first meeting of the Working Group

was right after the assassination of General Dalla Chiesa,

who was a hero in Italy, and was the prefect of Palermo,

and he had been killed by the mafia,

and that was weighing heavily on our heads

when we came together in Quantico in October of 1982.

And I remember the eloquent speeches

that the Italians made about how they needed help

because this menace was so strong

that even their senior officials were at risk,

and we were very empathetic to that need and that concern.

Dr. Falcone was particularly effective

in conveying the concern of the Italians

that their whole system was so penetrated

they needed help to cleanse themselves of this menace.

Even as the mafia struck back,

investigations on both sides of the Atlantic

began to gain momentum.

1984 marked a dramatic breakthrough

in the capture of Tommaso Buscetta,

a former high ranking member of the Sicilian Mafia,

whose hatred of Salvatore Riina

drove him to a stunning decision.

Buscetta had been a member of the mafia

since shortly after World War II,

and had seen the mafia change over those years,

and when the war broke out between

two factions of the mafia,

he was allied with the faction that was losing,

and even though he tried to leave Palermo,

go to South America and escape the battle,

a lot of his family members were killed.

Therefore, when he was extradited back to Italy in 1984,

he was fearful that

more of his family members would be killed,

and he decided that the mafia

had betrayed its own principles,

and that the way that he could best

protect his family and himself was to cooperate.

But Buscetta would speak to only one man,

a fellow Sicilian, Giovanni Falcone.

Though they had never met,

Falcone's reputation was well known in the mafia.

He was a man who wouldn't quit.

He was a man who would finish the job.

What happened when the two of these people got together

was that they saw in each other,

one, the information that could destroy the mafia,

and the other, a person who was capable

of mounting the attack,

and they treated each other with great respect,

and I think had a good understanding, each of the other.

Certainly Falcone never excused Buscetta's conduct,

but treated Buscetta with understanding and thoughtfulness,

and gave all of the serious attention to what he said

that it deserved.

Early on in their relationship,

Buscetta asked Falcone for a cigarette,

since he was a prisoner he didn't have access to cigarettes,

and Falcone gave him the cigarette,

and gave him the remainder of the cigarettes

in the package he had already opened.

And at a later time, Buscetta explained to him

that had Falcone given him an unopened pack of cigarettes,

that might've seemed too much

and almost humiliating to Buscetta.

But since the pack was already opened,

it was somehow an acceptable gift.

This seems very trivial,

but these are ways in which two people measured one another,

and Falcone instinctively understood who Buscetta was,

what culture he had come from,

and what the way of behaving with Buscetta should be.

He was the first Sicilian Mafia member

to ever testify in a court of law, in Italy,

against the mafia.

But more, he identified more than 400 members of the mafia,

drew an ornagram of the entire organization,

identified the members of the commission,

explained how they operated, explained how the structure

made those people who were on the commission

responsible legally for what the soldiers did.

And through Buscetta,

Falcone was able to structure an indictment

that made all of those people responsible

who had ordered the killings of hundreds of mafia members,

politicians, judges, and police officers

in the preceding 10 years.

His evidence simply opened the skin of the organization

so that at one time

they were able to identify the entire structure.

Buscetta gave investigators

their first look into the structure of the mafia.

He explained how the lowest soldier on the street

was part of a team headed by a captain.

The captains in turn reported to the family leadership.

There was an underboss, a boss who headed the family,

and perhaps one or two consiglieri, or counselors.

The 30 families that ruled Palermo

were divided into 10 districts.

Each district consisted of three families.

Each district would elect a representative

to serve on the commission that ruled the mafia,

which was responsible for laying down policy,

mediating disputes, and handing down decisions

regarding important murders.

Though the idea was to create a democratic organization,

Buscetta explained, in practice,

authority was actually imposed

by the man who had taken control, Toto Riina.

For the first time, prosecutors could prove

a direct connection between the actions of mafia soldiers

and the rule of the beast.

Buscetta's confessions drove a vast new crackdown

on the Sicilian Mafia,

leading to the arrest of hundreds of mafia members.

Some would follow his example

and become government witnesses.

Law enforcement's grasped tightened

as Italy prepared for a trial of unprecedented proportions.

Visiting Palermo at the time of the Maxi Trial

was looking at a city under siege.

There were extra law enforcement

brought in from all over Italy to help supplement

the law enforcement personnel that resided in Sicily.

Judges, investigators were under constant armed guard

with bodyguards.

You could go and see the streets,

could see a street where a judge lived

because the whole street was closed off.

But Salvatore Riina wasn't concerned.

The government's efforts had been defeated before,

and certainly would be defeated again.

But what he didn't recognize is that what had happened

during the period of time that Falcone was after the mafia

is that a great public support had developed

behind doing something about the mafia.

People were fed up with what was going on.

They were fed up with people like Riina.

They had lost that sense of support

that the mafia had traditionally had,

where the mafia helps poor people

and helps them solve problems,

and looks out for them,

helps them in their times of need and so on.

The mafia was not being seen that way.

The mafia was being seen as a predatory organization,

and that the only people being helped were those themselves,

and perhaps some of the highest level people

in the Italian government.

Government resources poured into Palermo

as prosecutors prepared to undertake

perhaps the largest trial in Italian history.

A fortified stadium-like courthouse

was built to protect participants,

tanks and army troops surrounded the perimeter.

The prosecutor's office was provided

with all the support it needed

to make certain the trial would move forward.

If planes were needed to take prosecutors

from Palermo to Brussels,

or from Palermo to Thailand, or Palermo to New York,

the plane was there.

These people now had 24-hour security around them.

There was a helicopter

that was surveying the streets of Palermo

on the routes that Falcone would travel

to and from his home.

There was a sense that these people were too well protected

to be assassinated,

and therefore, all of this created the atmosphere

that encouraged people to talk,

and that allowed these people to work undisturbed

and be able to bring the trial off.

They had cages built for the defendants,

they had glass booths, they had hundreds of guards.

It was just tremendously secure situation

to try these mafia members.

And the mafia members throughout the trial

would spit at the authorities and yell obscenities,

and in one case,

one of them actually stapled his lips together

to show he would not break the code of omerta,

the code of silence.

But it was a tremendously successful government attack

on organized crime,

and much of it was because of Thomas Buscetta.

A lot of the information that came out of this also linked

government and industrial figures in Italy to the mafia.

So it was a turning point.

The 1987 Maxi Trial

would prove to be a major victory.

Of the 450 defendants, over 300 were convicted.

Riina, though a fugitive since shortly after

being freed from prison in 1969,

was convicted in absentia,

and shared the sentence of many leading mafia bosses,

life in prison.

What had seemed impossible only a few short years before

was now a reality.

Assured that appeals will be heard by parties

favorable to the Sicilian Mafia,

Salvatore Riina remained confident.

Some convictions were overturned,

and Buscetta's assertion of a ruling commission

was brought into doubt.

Riina meanwhile continued to live freely,

seemingly beyond the reach of law enforcement.

What happened after the Maxi Trial

is very strange and very indicative

of the way things went in Italy at that time.

The trial ended in this great victory,

and yet, the head of the investigative office of Palermo

decided to retire after the trial,

and was assured by government sources that Giovanni Falcone

would replace him as head of the office,

guaranteeing continuity in the mafia investigations.

Instead, an elderly magistrate on the verge of retirement,

with no experience in mafia trials,

was made the head of his office

and Falcone was rejected for the position.

And so, here finally Italy finds a group of prosecutors

who are willing and able, and successful

in prosecuting the mafia,

and instead of being rewarded

with positions of greater responsibility,

more resources to continue what they're doing,

they are denigrated publicly,

actually put under investigation

for completely frivolous and meaningless charges,

and their life is made almost impossible,

so that the investigations under this new

and very ill-prepared chief of staff come to a virtual halt.

Falcone was frustrated.

Though his work had been hailed during the Maxi Trial,

now it seemed that the lessons of the 1960s

had been forgotten.

Riina and the mafia had nothing to fear from the government,

and certainly nothing to fear from Falcone.

When it was learned that Falcone

had been invited to work in Rome

with the new Minister of Justice, his removal from Palermo

was seen as proof of his ultimate failure.

In Rome however, Falcone would prove even more dangerous

to the mafia than ever before.

He began to plan an even wider assault against the mafia,

and when the Italian Supreme Court

declined to reverse a Maxi Trial conviction,

sealing the fate of hundreds of jailed mafiosi,

it was Riina's strategy, not Falcone's that had failed.

Mafia members were furious

and became like a kind of wounded beast

after the convictions.

They were furious.

They were furious at their friends in power

whom they felt had let them down,

and they were determined to make them pay.

Riina began his new campaign of violence

with the murder of Salvatore Lima in March, 1992,

the most powerful politician in Sicily,

and one of the mafia's closest friends in government.

It was Riina's warning to the Christian Democratic Party

whose policy of peaceful coexistence with the mafia

was now politically unworkable,

they had refused to protect the mafia

at the time of its most important trial.

Less than three months later,

the Sicilian Mafia took another step

in its escalating battle against the government.

It proved to be Toto Riina most costly mistake.

For Giovanni Falcone, receiving a death threat

was part of the job,

including at this in this conference Rome

only two weeks before his death.

But threats wouldn't deter him from his work.

Every time we had a meeting,

I would pull him aside and we would talk about his safety,

and he assured me that he was taking precautions

and that he had an excellent bodyguard,

and he had an entire group assigned to him for protection,

and that he was doing all that was humanly possible

to protect his life, because he knew that he was a target,

but that he had to go forward.

Anybody who knew what he was doing

and what had happened to his two prior bosses,

who had been executed,

knew that he was in danger all the time.

He was protected by bodyguards and bulletproof cars,

lived in an apartment that was really more like a bunker.

His office could only be entered through a series of doors,

with cameras looking at who was entering.

But he was philosophical about it.

He was certainly not fatalistic.

Believed that the enemy was after him,

but wanted to accomplish what he could, as long as he could.

The mafia had planned this killing very carefully.

They had people in Rome

who were able to communicate by cellular phone

the moment that Falcone left his office,

and someone waiting at the airport

could then communicate to people in Palermo,

the plane has taken off and it's heading toward Palermo.

There were people waiting outside the airport

to signal his arrival.

And then, a couple of miles from the airport,

a squad of mafiosi had placed

an enormous quantity of explosives in a kind of drain pipe

that was underneath the highway itself,

so that then, on a signal from someone else,

they then detonated this truly massive

quantity of explosives.

Falcone was murdered on Memorial Day weekend in 1992.

I was at one of my best friend's weddings.

I was going to be his best man that day,

and I got a phone call from Louis Freeh,

who had heard the news,

and I was upset, and naturally distressed,

but not terribly surprised.

Although we thought that by taking the position

that he had taken about a year before in Rome,

that he had left Palermo,

he was having an impact on justice nationally in Italy,

and that perhaps he had escaped the mafia.

I think he should be remembered as a hero,

and not just for law enforcement, but for everybody.

His life and his career proved the efforts of one man

can make a difference in the lives of people.

He was a remarkable man,

a man who truly believed in justice.

Public reaction to the death of Giovanni Falcone

took on the dimensions of a national tragedy.

Disbelief, shock, and outrage swept the country.

It seemed as if Riina and the mafia were winning the war.

People blamed the government in part,

and it was part of stimulating

a kind of popular and civic revolt in Palermo,

in many cities in Sicily,

and in many cities throughout Italy.

For example,

in a series of demonstrations in Palermo itself,

women around the city began to hang sheets, in some cases,

with written banners on them,

outside of their windows and on their balconies

where they normally hung their laundry,

and these sheets were meant to signify protest

against the killings.

And they vowed that they would continue

hanging out these sheets in these signs of protest

until the killers of Falcone were brought to justice.

Buscetta talked again to prosecutors

and began to talk about members of the mafia

who had connections with politicians in Sicily,

in a way that he had chosen not to do in 1984

because, as he said to Falcone

and is included in his questioning,

he didn't believe that the system in Italy

was ready to digest that information.

Buscetta's new revelations were astounding,

reaching through Parliament and implicating

the office of seven-term Prime Minister Andreotti.

To continue Falcone's work,

another legendary mafia prosecutor

was appointed as his replacement.

A childhood friend who had worked with Falcone

through years of investigating the mafia, Paolo Borsellino,

who shared both Falcone's determination to win the struggle

and the fierce support of the Italian people.

But two months later,

as Borsellino arrived outside his mother's home,

another explosion rocked Palermo.

As stunned Italy watched yet another funeral,

and a sense of even greater outrage took hold.

Government officials who attended the funeral

as Borsellino bodyguards were assaulted by furious crowds.

The bodyguard service itself rebelled against

the government's poor efforts to protect them.

The public demanded the strongest response yet

against the mafia.

Immediately, 7,000 army soldiers were sent to Sicily

to show that the government and not the mafia was in charge.

New laws were passed

that created a witness protection program in Italy,

encouraging hundreds of mafia members

to become government witnesses.

So that you had two categories of people

who turned against Riina.

Members of the losing faction who had managed to survive

cooperated against him,

and members of the winning group,

or those people who had been co-opted

because they were part of the narcotics traffic.

But the most interesting group

and the people who had the freshest information

were his bodyguards and drivers

who feared that they were about to be killed,

or learned that they were about to be killed,

and decided the only way to save themselves

was to cooperate against Riina,

so that as time went on, he created

an increasing number of people

who were ready to cooperate against him.

Finally, on January 15th, 1993,

with little fanfare and no resistance,

police arrested Salvatore "Toto" Riina

as he drove unarmed through the streets of Palermo.

At first, he claimed to be an itinerant farm hand

on visit to the city,

but soon it was clear, this was the beast.

In February, 1999, Salvatore "Toto" Riina

was sentenced to life in prison

for the murder of Paolo Borsellino.

Added to convictions for the murder of Giovanni Falcone

and many other mafia crimes,

Riina's fate was sealed several times over.

Though he will never see freedom again,

the mafia is still very much alive.

As we move into the late 20th century,

the mafia really is in a bit of disarray,

not only in Sicily, but in America and other areas

that have been basically sources of power.

New crime fighting techniques by the government

have put some of the leaders behind jail.

As they farther and farther away

from their traditional roots, a lot has been lost

as far as the relationships between the mafia groups,

as well as this predilection of informers to come out.

This is totally against the traditional code.

And so, if anything, this new phenomenon of the informant

has allowed basically the mafia

to turn in on itself and destroy itself.

Salvatore Riina lived free for over 20 years,

confident in the mafia's control and secure in his freedom,

never betrayed by those who believed the myth

that the mafia defended the poor

from those who would exploit them.

In his bloody quest for power,

Riina destroyed that myth, perhaps forever.

Would the Sicilian Mafia return to the position it once had?

Recent history has shown that organized crime

can be defeated,

but only if law enforcement continues the struggle,

and only if the people demand it.

I'm Robert Stack.

Thanks for joining us.