Nitto Santapaola died: he was 87 years old, he was detained in 41 bis in Milan

He died in Milan, at the San Paolo hospital, Benedetto Santapaolaknown as “Nitto”, one of the most powerful top exponents of Cosa Nostra. He was 87 years old. Born in Catania in 1938, he was detained in 41-bis regime in Opera prison where he served a life sentence. The hospitalization occurred on February 25th and the death was attributed to natural causes.

Nitto Santapaola, The agreement with the Corleonesi

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Nitto Santapaola’s rise within Cosa Nostra began in the second half of the Seventies. After the entry of Giuseppe Calderone in the Regional Commission in 1975, Santapaola took on an increasingly important role in the illicit affairs of the Catania family, where he built a dense network of faithful. The relationship with is crucial Totò Riina and with the group of Corleonesi. Riina supports his faction in the internal conflict within the Sicilian mafia. On 8 September 1978 Giuseppe Calderone was killed and Santapaola takes his place at the top of the Catania clan, shortly before the second mafia war, which exploded in the early 1980s.

The Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres

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The name of Santapaola figures among the instigators of the bloodiest mafia massacres of the early nineties. On May 23, 1992, the Capaci massacre caused the death of the judge Giovanni Falconehis wife Francesca Morvillo and the escort agents. For that attack, Santapaola was sentenced tolife sentence in 1997 at first instance, also based on the declarations of various justice collaborators and his role in the regional dome of Cosa Nostra.

A few months later, on 19 July 1992, theexplosion in via D’Amelio kills the judge Paolo Borsellino and five escort officers. Santapaola is among the defendants in the “Borsellino ter” trial as the instigator. In 2006 he was also sentenced to life imprisonment for this massacre definitive in 2008.

Capture and detention of Nitto Santapaola

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Santapaola is arrested atdawn of May 18, 1993after eleven years of hiding, in a farmhouse in the countryside of Mazzarrone. The operation involves hundreds of agents. At the time of arrest he offered no resistance. In the following months, new operations were launched against his clan, including “Ursa Major”, with dozens of arrest warrants. Finally, in 2020, the Supervisory Court of Milan rejected the request for house arrest during the Covid emergency.