Benedetto Spera

Benedetto Spera (born July 1, 1934 in Belmonte Mezzagno , Sicily , Italy ) is a Sicilian mafioso.

Life

Benedetto Spera is a representative of the rural Cosa Nostra , which has exercised hegemony in the Cosa Nostra, as the Mafia calls itself, since the Second Mafia War . He is the boss of the Mafia family from Belmonte Mezzagno, a small town in the province of Palermo . Although located near the city of Palermo, this area is rural and agrarian. There are many strongholds of the Cosa Nostra and the notorious death triangle is also located in this area. This is where the Cosa Nostra was probably created. Corleone , notorious for its Mafia past, is also in this area. The Corleonesi , the Corleone Mafia family, have played an important role in the Cosa Nostra since the 1960s. Your bosses Luciano Liggio , Salvatore "Totò" Riina and Bernardo Provenzano began to forge a powerful alliance in the early 1970s that has endured to this day. It consisted mainly of small families in the provinces of Palermo and Trapani , including the Belmonte Mezzagno family. Other important allies came from San Giuseppe Jato , Monreale , Caccamo or Mazara del Vallo , for example .

In the bloody Second Mafia War from 1981 to 1983, this alliance wrested supremacy from the Palermo Mafia families. Benedetto Spera, a special confidante of Bernardo Provenzano, rose to be a member of the commission that constitutes a Senate of the Cosa Nostra. This earned him a life sentence even in absentia, because the decision to murder the two investigating judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino was made in the commission. Since almost all of its members were arrested, Provenzano convened a kind of directorate , which consisted of nine men - including Benedetto Spera - and only met when important strategic decisions had to be made that affected the entire organization. On September 30, 2001, Spera was arrested with his bodyguard in Mezzojuso, Palermo Province; Originally, based on their interrogation results, the officers assumed that the person under observation was Bernardo Provenzano.

Benedetto Spera is currently serving a sentence in a maximum security prison.

literature

• John Dickie : Cosa Nostra - The History of the Mafia . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-17106-4 .
• Alexander Stille : The Judges: Death, the Mafia and the Italian Republic . CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-42303-5 .
• Giovanni Falcone & Marcelle Padovani: Inside Mafia . Herbig Actuell, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-7766-1765-9 .
• Pino Arlacchi : Mafia from within - The life of Don Antonino Calderone . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-12477-8 .