Cosa Nostra News

UPDATED:  "Everything is a message, everything is full of meaning in the world of Cosa Nostra, no detail is too small to be overlooked.” --Giovanni Falcone Luciano Leggio, Corleonesi leader who took control of the Commission. One of the Sicilian Mafia’s most prolific killers was Giuseppe "Pino" Greco (January 4, 1952 – September 1985), aka The Shoe. Born in Ciaculli, an outlying town in Palermo province, he joined the Sicilian Mafia and by the 1980s, sat on the Commission when it was ruled by his uncle, Michele Greco, the Ciaculli boss. Greco’s Ciaculli family, to use the common American term, was closely allied with Salvatore (Shorty) Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, leaders of the Corleonesi, first as Luciano Leggio's direct underlings, then on their own following Leggio's 1974 arrest. Pino was Riina’s favorite hit man. In fact, Riina manipulated Greco and some of his blood relations in the Mafia to knock out Palermo rivals of the Corleones...

Sicilian Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro (born 26 April 1962) is probably one of the only mobsters whose nickname was derived from an Italian comic book series, called Diabolik. In news touted around the world recently, Italian police said they have received new information from a reliable informant, which apparently marks the first time in nearly four years that investigators were able to update the mobster's computer simulated portrait (known as an "identikit"). Add caption He is considered to be one of the new leaders of Cosa Nostra since the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano in April 2006. He didn't rise to prominence until April 2001, when the magazine L'Espresso put him on the cover with the headline: Ecco il nuovo capo della mafia (" Here is the new boss of the Mafia "). He has been a fugitive since 1993. According to Forbes magazine he is among the 10 most wanted criminals in the world The 52-year-old is said to have a recedi...

Riina, the jailed head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra of Corleone. From ABC News : "An Italian newspaper report says the remote control to detonate the bomb that killed anti-Mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino in 1992 was hidden inside the intercom at his mother's Palermo residence. La Repubblica said on its website Wednesday that jailed Mafia boss Salvatore "Toto" Riina revealed the whereabouts of the remote control, long a mystery, to another inmate in a monitored jail yard chat. "The newspaper says it isn't clear whether Borsellino activated the bomb himself by buzzing his mother's home, or if someone else did. Borsellino and his bodyguards were killed in the blast from a car packed with more than 160 pounds (70 kilograms) of plastic explosives outside his mother's house. It came just two months after another anti-Mafia prosecutor was killed. Riina ordered the back-to-back slayings."

The Sicilian mafia ordered the assassination of former mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani , a court in Palermo has heard, according to the UK's  Mail Online . (Another surprising revelation from a separate trial in January unearthed a plot to blow up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.) So know we actually have, in the form of Italian court records,  corroboration for a claim Giuliani has been making for years . (More recently, we learned the Sicilian Cosa Nostra also had plans to whack former New York Governor Mario Cuomo , until they learned the extent of his security detail.) Giovanni Falcone fearlessly hunted the Sicilian Mafia. As we reported, Giuliani claimed that the Mafia in Sicily put an $800,000 contract on his head; He said this repeatedly as we note in the above linked story. He also repeated this as a guest on Oprah Winfrey's OWN cable-channel show, "Oprah: Where Are They Now." A the Mail reported, which jibes with our take: "the oneti...