Riina Daughter Probed for Extortion
Rome: The elder daughter of the late Cosa Nostra boss of bosses, Salvatore Tot² ‘The Beast’ Riina, has been placed under investigation in a probe concerning the extortion of two Florentine businessmen, judicial sources revealed Friday. Maria Concetta Riina, along with her husband Antonino Ciavarello, faces accusations of extorting money using mafia methods.
According to Ansa News Agency, Maria Concetta Riina allegedly told one of her victims, from whom she and her husband extorted a basket of groceries valued at 150 euros and 1,000 in cash, “We are still the same as we used to be, people don’t change.” In December 2017, Maria Concetta Riina’s daughter launched a webshop promoting items that celebrated the late Mafia boss, affectionately referring to him as ‘Uncle’ in the Sicilian dialect.
The website, zu-toto.scontrinoshop.com/about, states: “There are two of us, Maria Concetta Riina and her husband Antonino Ciavarello. We want to sell some ‘Zu Toto” brand products, we’re starting with coffee capsules, we’re doing this presale to get orders to get us going, seeing that they’ve seized everything from us without reason.” It further mentions, “Thanks in anticipation for your faith, we are expecting large orders from you and then, in the time it takes to set up a firm, we will send you what you ordered. For further info: [email protected].”
On her Facebook page, Maria Concetta Riina stated, “the lion is wounded but is not dead, it will soon rise up and keep fighting…as it has always done, always.” Her husband, Tony Ciavarello, was under house arrest in San Pancrazio in Puglia, serving a six-month sentence for fraud committed in 2009 at Termini Imerese near Palermo.
In parallel developments, a Padua detention review court revoked the parole of Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, one of Riina’s two sons, sentencing him to a year in a work ‘colony’ due to his contacts with drug pushers, which breached his parole terms. Prosecutors had initially sought a three-year term for Riina junior, one of the Mafia boss’s four children.
Tot² Riina, the notorious Corleone-born boss who waged a brutal war against the Italian State in the early 1990s, passed away on November 17, 2017, a day after his 87th birthday, in a section for inmates at Parma hospital. He was interred on November 22, 2017, in Corleone, his hometown near Palermo. The Italian church had barred a public funeral for Riina, referencing the excommunication of mafiosi by then Pope Benedict XVI. It was late Pope John Paul II who first issued the anathema against unrepentant mafiosi receiving the sacraments in 1993.
A private prayer session took place in the cemetery, where some of Riina’s Corleonesi allies, like Bernardo Provenzano, as well as several of his victims, are buried. Despite enduring 24 years under the 41 bis stringent jail regime, Riina was still regarded as the head of Cosa Nostra. He had been in a coma following two operations and had been seriously ill for a prolonged period.
Nicknamed The Beast for his brutality, Riina was serving a life sentence for numerous crimes, including the assassinations of anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. Other notorious assassinations linked to him include that of Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, appointed prefect of Palermo in 1982, and Sicilian Governor Piersanti Mattarella, brother of Italian President Sergio Mattarella, in 1980.