Residents of the Sicilian town of Corleone have called for the "immediate removal" of a resident who has previously been convicted of mafia crimes and turns out to be the son of Italy's most feared mobster, Salvatore "Totò" Riina.
Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, 46, known as Salvuccio, who was convicted and jailed for almost nine years on charges of extortion, money laundering and participation in a mafia organization, returned to his hometown last April. He is the third son of Totò Riina, known as la belva (the beast) or il capo dei capi (the capo of the capos). He died in prison in 2017.
A few weeks after returning home, the local government in Corleone voted in favor of a resolution demanding that Giuseppe Riina leave the town as the community there seeks to escape its mafia past.
"Corleone wants to leave the mafia behind, even by removing unwanted fellow citizens, such as Salvuccio Riina, who has never distanced himself from the heinous crimes of his father, Totò," the resolution reads. "The reputational damage the Riina family has caused the city is serious and difficult to recover from."
The final decision to remove Salvuccio rests with the magistrates in Palermo.
Totò Riina rose to power in the mid-1970s, when he became the de facto leader of the Corleone crime family. At the time, Sicily had become a hub for the US heroin trade after the Vietnam War. He not only killed his rivals on an unprecedented scale in the 1980s and 90s, but also prosecutors, journalists and judges. The merciless killings culminated in the early 1990s with the murders of Antimafia Commission prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Totò Riina is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, including a 13-year-old boy who was kidnapped, drowned and dissolved in acid. He formally remained the boss of the Sicilian mafia until the day he died in prison, in November 2017, while in a coma as a result of cancer treatment.
