Rome/Palermo - The death of Sicilian Mafia
boss Salvatore "Toto'" Riina on Friday does not mark the end of
Cosa Nostra, but the crime group is unlikely to allow one man
such power ever again, a top magistrate and former mobster said.
The 87-year-old Riina died in a hospital in Parma, the
northern Italian city where he had been serving 26 life
sentences for murders committed between 1969 and
1992.
"The end of Riina isn't the end of Cosa Nostra," the chief
magistrate in Sicily's capital of Palermo, Francesco Lo Voi,
told Reuters.
"What remains to be understood is whether the men of Cosa
Nostra will seek a direct successor or a new organisational
structure," Lo Voi said.
Gaspare Mutolo, who admits to having strangled some 20
people, agrees. Mutolo, now 77, turned state's witness in the
early 1990s at the age of 51, and became a key witness in dozens
of mafia cases.
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He shared a jail cell with Riina in the 1960s, and became
his trusted bodyguard and driver afterward. Mutolo, who still
wears a balaclava to hide his identity from cameras, felt "pity"
when he heard his former friend and cell mate had died, he said.
"He was a friend. He helped me. He even saved my life. I saw
him a little bit as a father figure," Mutolo told foreign
reporters in Rome.
Riina's death changes little in Sicily, he said: "Palermo
still has the mafia."
BACK-ROOM DEALS
As several recent cases show, the mob still extorts business
owners on the island, and it still seeks to win lucrative public
contracts through back-room deals with corrupt politicians and
bureaucrats.
"I can't imagine politics without the mafia," Mutolo said.
But the future of Cosa Nostra without Riina, whose brutality
undermined the trustworthiness of the organisation by driving
mafiosi like Mutolo into the hands of the state, is uncertain.
The Calabrian mob, known as the 'Ndrangheta, has had few
turncoats and has taken over drug routes once dominated by Cosa
Nostra.
The Calabrians now are major importers of cocaine from South
America to Europe and to North America. Even politicians are
wary of doing deals with the Sicilian mob now, Mutolo said.
"Cosa Nostra is not the same as it was in the 1980s mainly
because of the turncoats," Mutolo said. "The Calabresi have
taken over because they are more trusted."
Cosa Nostra has always had a military-like structure, but
before Riina there was no single "boss of bosses". Power was
divvied up by territory, and the local bosses met together in a
so-called "Commission" to discuss strategy and settle disputes.
But Riina made himself the dictator of Cosa Nostra.
"It's not a given that Cosa Nostra will see a charismatic
leader as a necessity" in the future, Lo Voi said, returning to
"a decentralisation of operations and decision making" as there
was before Riina took over.