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ROME - The crime stories of the most notorious Sicilian mafiosi of recent years are being rewritten in Milan as the result of the testimony of a new supergrass.
The former gangster, from the southern Sicilian city of Gela, is explaining to Milanese prosecutors exactly how, when and why the Sicilians extended their reach to Milan, at the opposite end of the Italian peninsula.
Prosecutors believe the turncoat, who extorted and killed alongside the top mafiosi of the day, may help them to solve 10 or more murders committed in Italy's biggest city in the 1980s and early 90s. And the chief prosecutor involved in the case, Marcello Musso, said the evidence his team was obtaining could also shed light on the hidden activities of Gela-based mobsters currently in the city, some of whom, he said, are still "militarily active and dangerous".
Milan, Italy's commercial capital, clung on to its reputation as an island of capitalistic probity and rectitude until the explosion of the so-called "Tangentopoli" (Bribesville) corruption case in the early 1990s which exposed the symbiotic relationships between the city's politicians and businessmen. But if the latest informer is to be believed, Sicilian gangsters were involved in the city many years before.
The most notorious whose name came up is Toto Riina, the 1.57m former capo di capi known as "Toto u curtu" (Shorty) or "la Belva" (the Monster).
Riina, 76, the boss said to have killed 40 people and to be responsible for the deaths of 1000 more, including investigators Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, was by coincidence rushed from prison to hospital in Milan last week, suffering from heart problems.
Though based throughout his career - much of it on the run - in Sicily, Riina is quoted by the new supergrass as having boasted, "Milan is in our hands." The investigators believe that many of the unsolved killings followed a fixed pattern, reflecting the tight command structure of the Mafia.
- INDEPENDENT
