‘The best forgiveness is revenge.’

This book about the Sicilian Mafia boss, Salvatore Riina (nicknamed Toto Riiia or U Curtu) was published 15 years after his arrest and imprisonment in 1993. He is now 86 years old, ill with terminal cancer and about to be released from prison on compassionate grounds. His son Guiseppe Salvatore recently came out of prison and published his autobiography.

I picked up The Boss of Bosses at the Muscat airport while waiting for a flight to Milan. The book was meant to relieve boredom in transit but it actually made me lose my sleep, literally and figuratively. After having read The Godfather by Mario Puzo in my schooldays, this was the first time in decades that I was reading about the Mafia. (I must confess at this juncture that I really enjoy the party game ‘Mafia’ which can be adapted to management training in skilful ways.)

“Cosa Nostra was ruled by terror. You could die over nothing. Over a word, a look. All you needed to do was dither over an order to kill a crony, give one question too many or one answer too few to be squashed like a fly on a window pane.” The authors give a brilliant portrayal of the life and times of the man who rises from a humble peasant background to become the supreme head of the Sicilian mafia in the early eighties.

“One day the Corleonese confided in a cellmate: ‘When I get out of here I want to walk on a carpet of 100,000 lira notes.’ This was a simple peasant from Corleone speaking in 1963. His father and brother had died in a blast when he was thirteen. Toto Riina knew only one kind of life – he had only one option, only one goal, the Cosa Nostra.”
Prison life is described thus: “It was commonly said that ‘you were almost better off inside than out’, and the Ucciardone (prison) was compared to the Grand Hotel. Lobster and champagne came in everyday via the register office, and ended up in the cells of the big guns.”

Riina’s constant companions in the early days were Calogero Bagarella and Bernardo Provenzano. In 1969 he went underground after being arrested and later acquitted in a case of triple homicide. Toto married Antonina Bagarella, the sister of Calo, on 16th April 1974 after a 19 year engagement. They were blessed by a team of three priests at a secret hideout. Their four children were delivered in secret. They lived incognito and were constantly on the move. Toto Riina drove a white Mercedes with his wife seated in front and children at the back all the time remaining undetected. His unexpected arrest in 1993 stunned the nation and the world.

When Toto Riina wrested control of the mafia after a bitterly fought ‘mafia war’ the changes were dramatic. “Cosa Nostra, which was, in its own way of course, a democratic state, became a dictatorship in only two years. The Corleonesi weren’t just a family, they had become a current, an alignment, a party. The affairs of Cosa Nostra effectively changed from one day to the next. The Sicilian mafia had altered its structure, its DNA.”

The book tell us a lot about the mafia – how they lived, what they did, their bizarre norms and values, their code of silence, the businesses they ran, and the bloodshed, vendetta and violence that marked their lives. Here are some interesting descriptions:

• You earned more and risked less with cigarettes. Chesterfield, Camel, Pall Mall. In 1959 a case cost 28,000 lire in Tangier and was sold in Rome for 210,000. Cigarettes were a goldmine. Cigarettes had kept Cosa Nostra alive for a quarter of a century.

• During the early 1980s Palermo was a refinery operating at full steam. DEA experts maintained that the Sicilians covered a third of the North Atlantic market, something like four tons of heroin a year. According to FBI figures it was more than that: six tons a year.

• Piccioli, piccioli, piccioli -money, money, money…No one in Palermo was talking about anything else. Some had mother-of-pearl floors, some had gold taps. They would buy a Jaguar one day and a Ferrari the day after, or build villas with silver swimming pools.

• Giovanni (son of Toto Riina) supplies the proof that his uncle was looking for. At his first murder he doesn’t look away when his victim is dying. He shows character and determination. He doesn’t give in. He doesn’t feel pity. A ‘brave’ son, a man of honour, worthy of his father, his uncle, the whole Corleone ‘family’.

Tommaso Buscetta became the first Mafia boss to spill the beans and his testimony sealed the fate of Toto Riina and several others. In 1987, Riina and several other received life sentences from the court. But he was nabbed only after six years.

In May 1992 anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone was killed in a bomb blast. Soon thereafter another judge Paolo Borsellino was killed. No one had any doubts about who was behind the killings. Buscetta had given valuable information to these judges to enable the conviction of the mafia bosses. After their assassination Buscetta came out with the names of the politicians who were aiding the mafia.

Overall assessment: Brilliant book.

The Boss of Bosses: The Life of the Infamous Toto Riina, Dreaded Head of the Sicilian Mafia
AUTHORS: Attilio Bolzoni and GuiseppeD’Avanzano
TRANSLATOR: Shaun Whiteside
PUBLISHER: Orion Books Ltd.
Year of Publication: 2015

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.