Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Greco - Mafia executioner

Notorious hitman thought to have committed at least 80 murders

Giuseppe 'Pino' Greco was one of the
Sicilian Mafia's most notorious killers

The notorious Mafia hitman Giuseppe Greco, who was convicted posthumously on 58 counts of murder but whose victims possibly ran into hundreds, was born on this day in 1952 in Ciaculli, a town on the outskirts of Palermo in Sicily.

More often known as ‘Pino’, or by his nickname Scarpuzzedda - meaning ‘little shoe’ - Greco is considered one of the most prolific killers in the history of organised crime.

The nephew of Michele Greco, who lived on an estate just outside Ciaculli and rose to be head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission - a body set up to settle disputes between rival clans - Pino Greco is generally accepted to have been responsible for 80 deaths, although some students of Cosa Nostra history believe he could have committed more than 300 killings.

Most of Greco’s victims were fellow criminals, the majority of them killed during the Second Mafia War, which began in 1978 and intensified between 1981 and 1983 with more than 1,000 homicides, as rival clans fought each other and against the state, with judges, prosecutors and politicians prominent in the fight against organised crime themselves becoming targets.

Greco, in fact, was convicted at the so-called Maxi Trial in the late 1980s of the murder of General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, Italy’s counter-terrorism chief, who was shot to death in his car in Palermo in 1982 after being sent to Sicily with a brief to end the conflict.

General Carlo Alberto dalla was Greco's most high-profile
victim among the scores of murders he committed

In 1983, also in Palermo, he planted and detonated the car bomb that killed magistrate Rocco Chinnici, his two carabinieri escorts and the porter of the building where Chinnici lived.

As a young man, Greco was academically bright, excelling in the study of Latin and Greek, but his family background meant that his life in crime was effectively preordained. His father was also a contract killer, whose nickname Scarpa - ‘shoe’ - gave rise to Giuseppe’s nom de guerre.

The exact point at which he became part of the Mafia is not known but by 1979 he was sitting alongside his uncle, Michele, on the Commission, as the Ciaculli clans formed a powerful alliance with the Corleonesi, led by Salvatore 'Toto' Riina and Bernardo Provenzano.

It was on behalf of Riina and Provenzano, who instigated the internecine conflict that was to prove so deadly, that Pino carried out his reign of terror, working closely in particular with Filippo Marchese, a notorious Corleonesi hitman who ran the so-called Room of Death, an apartment in Palermo where victims would be taken to meet their fate.

Giuseppe Lucchese, who for a
time was Greco's partner in crime

Such was the nature of Greco’s work, however, that within days of organising with Marchese a massacre of nine gangsters invited to a barbecue at his uncle’s estate, Greco was ordered by Riina to kill Marchese, who was perceived as becoming too powerful.

Unfortunately for Greco, that fate would soon enough be his own, Riina’s craving for ultimate power brooking no sentiment. Greco's ‘mistake’ was to assume control of the Ciaculli mob on behalf of his uncle, who was in hiding.

Riina decided he had to reduce the strength of the Ciaculli, who lost eight members in a massacre in the Piazza Scaffa in central Palermo, and had decided that Greco had to go even as his erstwhile chief henchman was arranging the killing of another identified ‘enemy’ in police investigator Antonino Cassarà.

In September 1985, Greco invited two supposed friends, Vincenzo Puccio and Giuseppe Lucchese, into his villa outside Bagheria, about 20km (12 miles) east of Palermo, only for the pair to draw their weapons and shoot him dead. His body was never found and his death not confirmed until 1989 by an informant, Francesco Marino Mannoia, whose brother had also been in Greco’s house at the time of the killing.

By that time, the Maxi Trial, the extraordinary event spanning six years that saw the conviction of 360 defendants following the investigations led by Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, had handed Greco a life sentence in absentia, along with Marchese, Riina and Provenzano among others.

The sandy beach at Mondello, the pretty resort just
along the coast from Palermo

Travel tip:

Palermo has plenty of attractions in the heart of the city, but there are also some good beaches nearby, the closest of which is at Mondello, about 10km (6 miles) out of town to the north. The former fishing village has a nice sweeping bay enclosing turquoise water and a beach of fine sand and a promenade lined with beautiful villas, many built in Liberty style at the start of the 20th century as summer retreats for the wealthier residents of the city.  The nature reserve of Capo Gallo, with its white rocks and clear water, is within walking distance of Mondello.

The Villa Palagonia in Bagheria reflected the town's
wealth in the early 18th century

Travel tip:

Bagheria, a town of around 55,000 inhabitants, became prosperous under Savoyard and Habsburg rule in the early 18th century, when the first of many grand villas were built in the town.  The two most striking baroque residences, Villa Valguarnera and Villa Palagonia, were designed by the architect Tommaso Maria Napoli and have echoes of architecture in Rome and Vienna, where he had worked previously.  Villa Palagonia is renowned for its complex external staircase, curved façades, and marble.  The town is the home of the film director Giuseppe Tornatore, most famous for Cinema Paradiso, and some of the location shooting took place there.


More reading:

How Bernardo Provenzano evaded the police for 43 years

Giovanni Falcone's lifelong crusade against the Mafia

Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia 'pentito' who put hundreds behind bars

Also on this day:

1710: The birth of 'opera buffa' composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

1881: The birth of Gaetano Merola, founder of the San Francisco Opera

1975: The death of Carlo Levi, author of Christ Stopped at Eboli


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Dr Michele Navarra – physician and Mafia boss

Hospital doctor who headed Corleone clan

Michele Navarra was an eminent
physician in Corleone

Michele Navarra, an extraordinary figure who became the leading physician in his home town of Corleone while simultaneously heading up one of the most notorious clans in the history of the Sicilian Mafia, was born on this day in 1905.

Dr Navarra was a graduate of the University of Palermo, where he studied engineering before turning to medicine, and became a captain in the Royal Italian Army. He could have had a comfortable and worthy career as a doctor.

Yet he developed a fascination with stories about his uncle, Angelo Gagliano, who had until he was murdered when Navarra was a boy of about 10 years old been a member of the Fratuzzi – the Brothers – a criminal organisation who leased agricultural land from absentee landlords and then sublet it to peasant farmers at exorbitant rates, enforcing their authority by extorting protection money, as well as by controlling the hiring of workers.

As the son of a land surveyor, Navarra already enjoyed privileges inaccessible to most of the population and his medical qualifications only further lifted his standing in the community. Somehow, though, it was not enough.

After the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, having co-operated with the Anglo-American forces, Navarra took advantage of his relationship with Angelo di Carlo, a Sicilian cousin in the American marines who had used his Mafia connections to become a vital go-between for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) in obtaining intelligence ahead of the invasion.

Navarra, along with a fellow doctor, was killed in his
 car in an ambush on a country road

The occupying army were determined to remove Fascist party members from power on the island, so Navarra presented himself as an anti-Fascist and, with Di Carlo’s help, secured the right to round up and take possession of all military vehicles abandoned by the Italian army.

He used some of these to set up a regional bus service but others became vital to his cattle rustling operations, which enabled him to establish himself as an important figure in the criminal underworld, to the extent that, when Corleonese clan boss Cologero Lo Bue died in 1944 – from natural causes – Navarra was able to fight off a challenge from Vincenzo Collura, a Sicilian-born American gangster, to take over as Lo Bue’s succssor.

At the same time, remarkably, Dr Navarra was advancing his medical career.  In 1946, he was appointed the lead physician at Corleone’s local hospital (after his predecessor was mysteriously murdered) and enjoyed enormous respect in the community for his skill and diligence, and his generosity in waiving fees for those in financial hardship. Often, he would be invited to be godfather to the children of grateful patients.

When Corleone people spoke of him, they called him 'u patri nostru - Sicilian dialect for 'our father'.

Luciano Leggio, Navarra's former lieutenant,
ultimately betrayed his boss

Yet it was his criminal activity that was the real source of his wealth and power. The Corleonese clan controlled not only cattle rustling but all manner of other activities, legitimate or otherwise, thanks to Dr Navarra’s influence in the award of local government contracts.

As a member of the Christian Democrat party, he did what he could to keep the party in power locally and was duly rewarded, even if his methods were somewhat unusual.  Voters were often escorted into the polling booths by gang members to ensure they voted the right way, Dr Navarra having issued certificates to say they were blind had to be assisted at the ballot box.

More sinisterly, he despatched his young lieutenant, Luciano Leggio, to murder Placido Rizzotto, a trade union leader who was gaining popularity for the Socialist party.

Navarra exploited his standing to develop powerful political allies, who in turn handed him prestigious positions.  For a while, for example, he was the official medical adviser to Ferrovie dello Stato, the state rail network.

He was always well dressed, genteel even, yet almost every week he would issue the order for someone to be killed, either an opponent or an individual who in some way was an impediment to his progress.

Navarra was careful to keep his own hands clean, always commissioning murders through a third party. Seldom could a killing be traced back to him, although he was sent into exile in Reggio Calabria after being accused of personally silencing, though a lethal injection, the only witness to the Rizzotto murder.

It was during his exile that his former underling, Leggio, developed his own rackets and tried to seize power. Navarra tried to have him killed in the summer of 1958 but the plot failed and it was only a few months later that Navarra's car was ambushed on an isolated country road and he died, along with an innocent colleague from the hospital, in a hail of machine gun fire.

Among the suspected killers were two notorious future bosses of the Corleonese clan, Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina and Bernardo Provenzano.

The Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri

Travel tip:

The University of Palermo, founded in 1806 but with roots in learning traceable to the 15^th century, when medicine and law were first taught on the site, is home to about 50,000 students.  It is notable among other things for the Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, the 14^th century palace that was once the home of the powerful Sicilian ruler Manfredi III Chiaramonte, which now houses the rector’s office and a museum, and the 30-acre Orto Botanico (Botanical Gardens).

The Palazzo Comunale overlooks the Piazza Garibaldi
at the heart of Corleone

Travel tip:

Although the town of Corleone was immortalised in fiction by Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and the film of the same name, its Mafia past is only too real and citizens lived an oppressed life for many years, fearful of even admitting that the secret society existed.  Nowadays, there are organisations that are proudly anti-Mafia and the confiscated home of one-time leader Bernardo Provenzano has been turned into an anti-Mafia museum and art gallery in memory of Paolo Borsellino, the anti-Mafia magistrate who was murdered in 1992.

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Bernardo Provenzano - Mafia boss

Head of Corleonesi clan dodged police for 43 years

Bernardo Provenzano after he was arrested in 2006
following 43 years on the run from police

Bernardo Provenzano, a Mafia boss who managed to evade the Sicilian police for 43 years after a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1963, was born on this day in 1933 in Corleone, the fabled town in the rugged countryside above Palermo that became famous for its association with Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather.

The former farm labourer, who rose through the ranks to become the overall head - il capo di tutti i capi - of the so-called Cosa Nostra, lived for years under the eyes of the authorities in an opulent 18th century villa in a prestigious Palermo suburb, although ultimately he took refuge in the hills, alternating between two remote peasant farmhouses.

He was finally captured and imprisoned in 2006 and died in the prisoners' ward of a Milan hospital 10 years later, aged 83.

Although Provenzano assumed power during one of the bloodiest periods in Mafia history, he was eventually credited with rescuing the organisation from the brink of collapse by turning away from the violent path followed by his predecessor as capo di tutti i capi, Salvatore 'Toto' Riina, and restoring traditional Mafia values.

Corleone - the small agricultural town in the hills above
Palermo that became a Mafia power hub

Provenzano was born and raised in Corleone, the small agricultural town that acquired mythical status after Puzo chose Vito Corleone as the name for his fictional mafia boss in The Godfather.

He left school at the age of 10 to work in the fields at the time of the Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943.  He and Riina knew each other as boys and they joined the Mafia as teenagers. Provenzano was an excellent shot and he and Riina were hired by the ambitious mobster Luciano Liggio as armed escorts in his cattle-rustling operation.

Provenzano and Riina were subsequently among the 14 gunmen who in 1958 helped Liggio seize control of the Corleonese clan by murdering its leader, Michele Navarra.  Provenzano was identified as one of the killers and implicated in several other murders during a power struggle that ensued within the Corleone clan following the Navarra slaying. A warrant for his arrest was issued in 1963 and he went into hiding.

He was seldom seen in public, refused to have his picture taken and never answered the telephone in person, so fearful was he that he would be found. Yet over the next four decades he would become one of the most powerful figures in organised crime in Italy.

For more than 40 years, these police mug shots were the
only pictures by which the fugitive boss could be identified

When Leggio was arrested and jailed in 1974, Riina became the boss of the Corleonese clan and chose Provenzano as his right-hand man.

Riina set his sights on taking over the Mafia throughout Sicily and on switching from traditional Mafia activities such as extortion and protection rackets to the heroin trade, which was far more lucrative. However, his ambitions met with fierce opposition from the Palermo families and sparked a civil war within the Cosa Nostra that claimed more than 1,000 lives.

Ultimately, Riina prevailed. But the bloodshed outraged public opinion, prompting a concerted crackdown on Mafia activities culminating in the “Maxi Trial” of 1986-87 that saw nearly 360 mobsters convicted.  Many were found guilty in absentia, including Riina and Provenzano.

Extraordinarily, Provenzano was all this time living in the spectacular 18th century Villa Valguarnara in Bagheria, which was his home for much of the 1980s and 1990s. He went to considerable lengths to keep himself invisible, never having a bank account or a telephone, communicating with associates by way of pizzini - typewritten coded notes folded into tiny squares - and travelling to meetings in an ambulance.

Riina's response to the "Maxi Trial" was to wage a new war on the State itself, in which high profile victims included the Euro MP and former Mayor of Palermo, Salvatore Lima, and Italy’s most prominent anti-Mafia judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who were murdered in Sicily within the space of five months in 1992.

These deaths caused still more public outrage and in January 1993 Riina was finally tracked down and arrested.

The anti-State campaign continued after Riina's arrest with a series of bomb attacks in public places in mainland Italy.  Five people, including a baby girl, were killed in 1993 when a car bomb exploded outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The Torre dei Pulci, close to the Uffizi Gallery,
which took the brunt of the 1993 bomb attack

In the meantime, Provenzano had taken Riina's place as capo di tutti i capi. The bombings stopped, it is thought, because he saw the high levels of violence that characterised Riina's reign as being an impediment to Mafia operations, attracting unwanted attention from the authorities.

It is even suspected that it was Provenzano who tipped off the police, through intermediaries, about Riina's address, so that he could seize power and oversee a return to more traditional Mafia practices.

Despite Riina's arrest, Provenzano kept out of sight and for many years it was assumed he was dead. In fact, he was quietly rebuilding the organisation and restoring its financial power.

That he was alive came to light in January 2005 during the arrest of other suspected Mafiosi, when police discovered some of his type-written coded notes and, working on a tip-off from a supergrass, found him living in a shepherd’s refuge in the countryside outside Corleone.

He was arrested on April 11, 2006. Having been already convicted in absentia of several murders, including those of the judges Falcone and Borsellino, he was imprisoned with no requirement for a trial.

Paradoxically, for one who made his money from crimes supported by threats and violence, Provenzano was deeply religious. Associates described how his notes often included blessings or quotations from the bible, while he appeared at one meeting of Cosa Nostra bosses in 1992 dressed as a cardinal. When arrested, all that he took with him from the shepherd’s refuge were his medicine and his rosary.

Travel tip:

Corleone, a town of around 12,000 inhabitants in the province of Palermo, was once dominated by Arabs before falling into the hands of the Normans.  Its strategic position overlooking the main routes between Palermo and Agrigento meant it was on the frontline in many wars.  At one time the town had two castles and was encircled by a defensive wall.  Its association with the Mafia began in the 1960s following the outbreak of violence that followed the killing of Michele Navarra. The link was solidified when Mario Puzo decided his main character in The Godfather would be known as Vito Corleone after a United States immigration official processing the arrival of Vito Andolini mistook his place of origin for his surname.

Inside the cathedral at Monreale, just outside Palermo, with
its fabulous Byzantine mosaics

Travel tip:

Some of the most impressive buildings in Palermo were left behind following the period in which the Normans ruled after conquering Sicily in 1072. The Norman legacy was a blend of Romanesque architecture, Byzantine mosaics and Arabic domes.  Notable examples are the Palazzo dei Normanni on Piazza Indipendenza, where the Palatine Chapel features golden mosaics of scenes from the Bible, the Church of La Martorana in Piazza Bellini and, a little out of town, cathedral at Monreale, with ceilings and walls decorated by master mosaicists from Byzantium.


More reading:

How Giovane Falcone made taking on the Cosa Nostra his life's work

Paolo Borsellino - the other half of Sicily's dynamic duo of Mafia-busters

Lucky Luciano - mobster from Palermo who organised the gangs of New York

Also on this day:

1788: The death in Rome of Bonnie Prince Charlie, pretender to the English throne

1888: The death of the Saint, Don Bosco


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