Mafia’s Boss of Bosses Gives Up Without Fight in Sicily : Crime: Salvatore Riina had been sought since 1969. Called ‘The Beast,’ he reportedly ordered over 50 slain.

Salvatore Riina, the merciless and elusive Mafia leader who tyrannized the underworld of organized crime in Italy, surrendered meekly to police in Sicily on Friday after more than two decades as one of the world’s most wanted fugitives.

“You got the wrong guy,” Riina blustered to the young carabiniere who ambushed his car in the morning rush hour on Via Leonardo da Vinci, a busy street in the Sicilian capital of Palermo.

Riina carried false documents and an aged, jowly face that nobody on the right side of the law had seen since 1969. But the 35-member special operations team from Italy’s national paramilitary police had the right guy: the capo di tutti i capi, the boss of bosses of the Cosa Nostra.

It was the most important arrest in Italy’s fight against the Mafia, and it took a nation’s breath away.

“Those who were afraid now know that the monster is not invincible,” said national police chief Vincenzo Parisi.

Riina, 62, was the most wanted man in Italy, and near the top of Interpol’s list of the world’s 10 most dangerous criminals, Italian officials said.

“This is a turning point, the momentum has moved to the side of the state and the people,” said Luciano Violanti, president of the anti-Mafia commission in the Italian Parliament. Anti-Mafia judge Loris D’Ambrosio said in an interview Friday, “It is a great day for all of us and a stunning blow for the Mafia.”

Riina started his long Mafia career by earning the nickname “The Accountant,” for his meticulousness; he matured into “The Beast” because of his savagery. He is said to be responsible for more than 50 slayings, including the assassinations in the past year of the country’s two leading anti-Mafia judges.

A native of the Sicilian town of Corleone, familiar to moviegoers as The Godfather’s hometown, Riina fled custody in 1969 and since then had become almost legendary in his ability to evade capture. Italian television reporters in Corleone on Friday night could find almost no one who would talk about the arrest.

While on the run, Riina managed to get married and raise a family, apparently living all the while in Sicily, protected by a conspiracy of silence. It is unclear whether he has two or four children; police say there are no official records of either the marriage or the births.

From hiding, Riina waged a ruthless crusade against enemies and ambitious allies alike in a bloody passage known to police as the “Third War of the Mafia.” Victory took Toto Riina, as he is universally known in Italy, to power around 1981 as overall boss of the Cosa Nostra.

In 1987, he was convicted in absentia of a series of Mafia murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. By then, he had consolidated control of the Sicilian Mafia’s flourishing trade in drugs and arms, routinely eliminating competitors with bullets fired by killers such as Pino Marchese.

“If you see him, if you speak to him, Riina seems a good man,” said Marchese, who was once Riina’s driver and later an up-and-coming young Mafia killer. “He’s kind and caring; but he’s like an apple . . . red and beautiful but inside is rotten and has worms.”

Marchese, who went to jail for murder he committed at Riina’s behest, later killed a cellmate on Riina’s orders. He is now among 300 or so Mafia defectors who are collaborating with Italian police.

“Riina always said to me ‘You are in my heart . . . ‘--but in his heart Toto has nothing,” Marchese told investigators. Riina “doesn’t hesitate to kill children and innocent people.”

Friday’s stunning arrest came after what carabinieri commanders said was months of patient investigation and painstaking footwork. “We watched places more than people,” said a carabinieri colonel basking in “thanks from the entire nation” delivered within minutes of the arrest by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro.

Police said they constructed three rings of surveillance around the area where Riina was spotted Friday in a small white Citroen sedan, driven by a young henchman. Although the latest picture of Riina was a generation old, searchers were aided by an FBI computer portrait. It took the last picture of Riina and aged him 23 years.

Riina was at pains to lose himself in the big-city anonymity of Palermo. The car he was in was legally registered, without armor or even a mobile telephone--an au courant status symbol in Italy. The driver--still not identified--had no record. It might have been a Sicilian and his grandfather out for a ride.

Armed to the teeth, police were prepared for a backup car and a shootout. But Riina had no security. Not a shot was fired.

As ruler of the Mafia, Riina systematically destroyed the organization’s feudal system of territorial rule by clans disciplined within a hierarchical structure. Riina killed his way to the top, and from there, he ruled as a dictator, said Col. Domenico Di Petrillo, who heads the Rome office of the newly created anti-Mafia police.

Where the Mafia long operated as a parallel force within Italian society, Riina put it on a collision course, attacking all who challenged it. Among his many outstanding murder warrants, Riina is accused of the assassination of anti-Mafia hunter Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and his wife in 1982 in Palermo. He is also accused of ordering the murders of rival gang leaders, senior police and politicians, and, last year, the brutal bomb slayings of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone, his wife and bodyguards, and Paolo Borsellino, with his five bodyguards.