Nitto Santapaola

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Nitto Santapaola (actually: Benedetto Santapaola ; born June 4, 1938 in Catania , Sicily , Italy ) is a Sicilian mafioso.

Life

Benedetto Santapaola, whose first name has been called Nitto since his early youth, grew up with several brothers in very poor circumstances in the Catanesian district of San Cristoforo. Active as a petty criminal at an early age, he was accepted into the Mafia family of Catania in the early 1960s; he was soon followed by his brother Antonino "Nino" Santapaola. He was close friends with the boss of the family, Giuseppe Calderone , as well as his brother, Antonio Calderone . He came into conflict with the judiciary several times in the 1960s and, like many other mafiosi, was exiled in 1970; this is a special measure of Italian criminal law. Santapaola spent this time mainly in Naples .

In 1975, at the instigation of Giuseppe Calderone, the Regional Commission was founded, a government body of the Cosa Nostra . Giuseppe Calderone himself became its chairman and, due to the statutes of this body at the time, had to hand over the leadership of the Catania family to someone else. His friend Nitto Santapaola became the new boss, while Antonio Calderone remained vice-boss. Santapaola soon expanded the numerically weak family by accepting many new criminals, some of whom, like Alfio Ferlito, were petty criminals, some others were closely related to him personally. In this way Santapaola built a private army within the family that only obeyed him. Santapaola, who was also involved in the heroin trade , also rose socially in the 1970s. At the end of the decade he became Renault's general agent in Catania.

When the gap between the traditional bosses from Palermo and the up-and-coming Corleonesians opened in the mid-1970s, Santapaola allied itself with the Corleonesi around Salvatore Riina . The Calderones, on the other hand, traditionally had close relationships with the Palermo bosses such as Stefano Bontade and Salvatore Inzerillo . Tensions arose within the family and in September 1978 Giuseppe Calderone was murdered at the instigation of Riina and the Corleonesi. His brother Antonino, convinced that he would also be murdered, fled to Nice in 1982 ; there he was arrested by the French police in 1986 and soon decided to become a Pentito and testify as a key witness . Alfio Ferlito broke away from the family and started a bloody war against Santapaola and his supporters with some of his followers.

In 1981 the Second Mafia War broke out, which the Corleonesi won through a bloody massacre among their opponents. Ferlito, allied with her opponent Bontade, was murdered by them as well as countless others. Santapaola was now the undisputed boss in Catania. As a close ally of Riina, he also sat on the Interprovincial Commission from now on. Santapaola was also involved in the assassination of the Prefect of Palermo, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa , who provided some members of the killer squad from his family. Santapaola was arrested in 1994 in a converted farmhouse near Catania, where he was hiding from the judiciary. Convicted of multiple murders, Santapaola is serving a life sentence.

Antonio Calderone describes him in his statements as a brutal murderer who was not afraid to kill a group of 15-year-olds for stealing her mother's handbag. Nitto's brother Nino Santapaola describes Calderone as a psychopath who committed murder and often went out on Saturday evenings to murder people for mostly trivial reasons or simply because he did not like them:

“Nitto Santapaola is the cruellest person I have ever met. Adolf Hitler committed fewer murders than he did. Nitto needed the killing. "

In December 2007, Nitto Santapaola's son Vincenzo was arrested, allegedly through whom Santapaola continued to run the Catania family. Nitto Santapaola is said to have lycanthropy ; with this disease, those affected consider themselves werewolves.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Pino Arlacchi: Mafia from the inside - The life of Don Antonio Calderone , Frankfurt a. M. 1995, Fischer Verlag, ISBN 3-596-12477-8
  2. ^ [1] , The Guardian , December 5, 2007

literature

personal data
SURNAME Santapaola, Nitto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Santapaola, Benedetto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sicilian mafioso
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Catania