Top Fugitive’s Arrest Deals a Blow to Mafia

A police anti-Mafia assault team raided a white stucco farmhouse in the Sicilian countryside at dawn Tuesday and dealt a stunning new blow against organized crime in Italy.

Asleep with his wife when the door burst in, fugitive Mafia boss Benedetto Santapaola, Italy’s most-wanted man, didn’t even have a chance to reach for his pistol on the night table. He went quietly; exuberant raiders allowed him a milk-and-crackers breakfast in the farmhouse kitchen before he left for jail.

“All things have to end,” Santapaola was quoted as telling the arresting officers.

“Today a legend has fallen,” jubilant Interior Minister Nicola Mancino told Parliament.

State television showed Santapaola being hustled into a police car. He faces a hearing Friday in Palermo.

The arrest is a major step forward in Italy’s widespread crackdown against deeply rooted organized crime. Aided by nearly 400 talkative gang defectors, police are making almost daily arrests against the Mafia in Sicily, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Campania around Naples.

“The turncoats are a symptom of the crumbling of organized crime,” said national police chief Vincenzo Parisi on Tuesday. He put the number of informers nationwide at 388--an increase of 100 so far this year alone. Until a decade ago, no one had ever been known to violate the Mafia’s code of silence.

On Tuesday, a senior judge in Naples, Alfonso Lamberti, was arrested for alleged links with the Camorra on the basis of evidence provided by an informer. And in Calabria, the sister of a jailed ‘Ndrangheta boss, Maria Rosa Mammoliti, was jailed for taking over the family crime business.

In Sicily, Santapaola, a fugitive for nearly 12 years, was chief lieutenant of Mafia “boss of bosses” Salvatore (Toto) Riina, who was arrested in January.

A 52-year-old former traveling salesman, Santapaola, called “Nitto” and also nicknamed “Il Cacciatore” (The Hunter) for his love of the sport, headed the Mafia’s ruling Corleone clan. Mafia experts considered him the leading candidate to replace Riina as the boss of the Sicilian underworld.

The farmhouse where Santapaola was captured, in the village of Mazzarrone in Sicily, is in the home territory of a clan notorious for its ferocity.

“Mafiosi can no longer sleep peacefully, not in their homes, not in their own turf,” police Mafia specialist Gianni de Gennaro told Italian reporters.

In 1987, Santapaola was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the 1982 murder of anti-Mafia general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa in Palermo. The conviction was reversed on appeal.

That trial may be reopened against Santapaola, who has also been convicted of drug trafficking and Mafia participation and is accused of blowing up a rival and four policemen escorting him during a jail transfer.

With Santapaola’s arrest, there remain about 25 “super fugitives” in Sicily, police say. About half a dozen of them are potential successors to Riina now, but none is of Santapaola’s rank.

In the wake of the arrest, investigators now talk of “a new map of the Mafia”--younger, lesser-known bosses pushed toward prominence to fill the gaps left by the unprecedented police assault.

Striking back, Mafia bombers a year ago this month killed Giovanni Falcone, Italy’s senior anti-Mafia judge, together with his wife and bodyguards on a highway outside Palermo. In July, Falcone’s successor, Judge Paolo Borsellino, was also killed by a bomb in Palermo.

(Southland Edition) Mafia Rap Sheet

Some key figures arrested in Italy’s crackdown on organized crime:

* May 18, 1993: Benedetto (Nitto) Santapaola, the reputed No. 2 Mafia boss, arrested in a farmhouse in Sicily.

* May 13, 1993: Michele (the Madman) Zaza, a top boss of the Camorra, the Naples crime gang, arrested on the French Riviera.

* Feb. 8, 1993: Rosetta Cutolo, sister of imprisoned Camorra boss Raffaele Cutolo who reportedly ran the crime syndicate in his absence, arrested in Naples.

* Jan. 15, 1993: Salvatore (Toto) Riina, the “boss of bosses” of the Sicilian Mafia, arrested in Palermo after 23 years on the run.

* Sept. 12, 1992: The Cuntrera brothers, including Pasquale Cuntrera, allegedly a member of Mafia’s ruling body, arrested in Venezuela.

* Sept. 11, 1992: Carmine Alfieri, Camorra’s No. 1 boss, arrested in Naples after 11 years on the run.

* Sept. 6, 1992: Giuseppe Madonia, a fugitive since 1984 and a member of Mafia’s ruling body, arrested.

Source: Associated Press