Giuseppe Greco, one of the most feared killers in the Sicilian Mafia during the 1980s, was murdered in September 1985 by two men from his own hit squad. The killing marked the end of a blood-soaked rise through the ranks of Cosa Nostra, a career built on dozens of murders carried out with a Kalashnikov assault rifle that became his calling card. Born in 1952 in Sciaculi, an outlying town in the province of Palermo, Greco came from a mafia family. His father was a mafioso nicknamed Scarpa, Italian for shoe, which earned Giuseppe the moniker Scarpuzzedda, or little shoe.
Despite his brutal reputation, Greco was not a brainless brute. He passed his end-of-school examinations in Latin and Greek with marks among the highest of his year. He began killing at the age of 16, and just before each murder he would frequently sniff cocaine. The exact date of his entry into the mafia is unknown, but according to pentito Gaspare Mutolo, Greco first worked as a driver for Palermo boss Tommaso Spadaro, whose nephew was Giuseppe Lucchese.
Lucchese would later become Greco’s closest friend and a co-conspirator in numerous murders. After the expulsion of Gaetano Badalamenti in 1978, Michele Greco was appointed the new head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission, and Giuseppe Greco’s influence grew considerably. He sat alongside Michele on the commission, at the time controlling the entire Sciaculi, Licoja, Giordini, and Brancaccio region. The Corleonesi family, notably Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, who would eventually rule the Sicilian Mafia, had a close relationship with the Giordini clan.
Despite his surname, Giuseppe Greco was not related to Salvatore Greco nor to Michele Greco. During the Second Mafia War, from 1981 until 1983, orchestrated by the Corleonesi, Giuseppe Greco carried out dozens of murders and became Riina’s favorite killer. His Kalashnikov was notorious. Stefano Bontate, boss of the Santa Maria di Gesù family in Palermo, had emerged as one of the Sicilian Mafia’s acknowledged leaders.
The Sicilian Mafia Commission was revived in 1970 and consisted of ten members, initially headed by a triumvirate of Gaetano Badalamenti, Stefano Bontate, and Corleonesi boss Luciano Leggio, although Salvatore Riina would officially represent the Corleonesi. In 1974, the full commission was reconstituted under the leadership of Badalamenti. The commission was meant to settle disputes and keep the peace, but Salvatore Riina was plotting to decimate the Palermo clans. The same year, Leggio was captured and imprisoned for the 1958 murder of Michele Navarra.
Although Leggio retained some influence from prison, Salvatore Riina was now the effective head of the Corleonesi and resumed Leggio’s seat on the commission. However, Riina was planning to take full control. On the evening of August 20, 1977, against the wishes of the commission, the Corleonesi had Giuseppe Greco murder retired police Colonel Giuseppe Russo. Russo’s friend Filippo Costa was also killed during the hit.
In 1978, Gaetano Badalamenti was expelled from the commission and Michele Greco replaced him. Tommaso Buscetta would later explain that Michele Greco was a mere figurehead, given his bland and weak personality, and would not stand in Riina’s way. On March 9, 1979, Michele Arena, an Italian politician, was shot by two men in the neck, head, and chest and died. One of the hitmen was Giuseppe Greco.
On September 25, 1979, Cesare Terranova, an Italian judge and politician from Sicily notable for his anti-mafia stance, was shot to death in his car along with his driver, policeman Lenin Mancuso, who acted as his bodyguard. Giuseppe Greco was one of the men involved in these murders. Taking Terranova’s place was Rocco Chinnici. Salvatore Inzerillo, a powerful boss of Palermo’s Passo di Rigano family, was a close ally of Stefano Bontate and Gaetano Badalamenti and a relative of New York City mafia boss Carlo Gambino.
In the late 1970s, the Inzerillo family and Stefano Bontate made up a group of Sicilian Mafia heroin dealers, with John Gambino serving as the point of contact in the United States as well as the destination for their shipments of heroin, which were made in Sicilian laboratories using Turkish morphine base. By the early 1980s, the commission was directing the entire heroin consortium. Leggio’s men sat in board meetings with Bontate and Inzerillo, dividing up profits and discussing investments. However, both sides started scheming to grab all the money available.
Bontate and Inzerillo, who secretly consulted Badalamenti, were planning to kill Riina, take control of the commission, and take direct control of the heroin traffic. Leggio heard all about the plot in prison. Bontate and Inzerillo’s would-be successors both ratted on them. Stefano Bontate was murdered on the evening of his 42nd birthday, April 23, 1981, as he was returning home from a party in his honor.
When his bright red Alfa Romeo stopped for a red light, several killers opened fire, riddling him and his car with bullets. One of the weapons used was a state-of-the-art Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifle. On May 11, 1981, Salvatore Inzerillo was killed a few feet away from his brand new bulletproof car after enjoying a tryst with his mistress in an apartment complex built by the construction company he owned together with his cousin Rosario Spatola. The Kalashnikov assault rifle used to kill Inzerillo was the same one used to kill Bontate, by Giuseppe Greco.
Salvatore Inzerillo’s son, who swore to shoot Riina, was killed as well. Before he was shot and killed, Giuseppe Greco cut off his right arm, saying that now he would not be able to use it to kill Riina. In June 1981, Salvatore Contorno, the later turncoat, was targeted for assassination by Giuseppe Greco. While Contorno was driving in an old section of Palermo, Giuseppe Greco opened fire with his infamous Kalashnikov assault rifle from the back of a motorcycle.
Contorno ducked into the passenger seat to protect his son without losing control of the car as the windshield shattered on top of them. When the motorcycle turned around for another pass, Contorno managed to pull the boy from the car, get out his gun, and take cover in front of the vehicle. Although armed with only a . 38 caliber pistol, he managed to ward off the second attack, hitting Giuseppe Greco as he charged forward on the motorcycle firing his rifle.
However, wearing a bulletproof vest, Greco was not wounded. Greco’s accomplice was later identified by Contorno as Mario Prestifilippo. On April 30, 1982, Pio La Torre, a leader of the Italian Communist Party, and his driver Rosario Di Salvo were shot in a hail of bullets near the Communist Party’s headquarters in Palermo. Their car was trapped in a one-way street blocked by the killers.
Di Salvo returned fire with a . 38 caliber pistol before he was killed. The hit team included Giuseppe Greco and Giuseppe Lucchese. The Circonvallazione massacre, an attack which took place on June 16, 1982, on the Palermo Ring Road, was directed against Palermo boss Alfio Ferlito, who was being transferred from Enna to the Trapani jail.
He was killed alongside three carabinieri escorts, Salvatore Raiti, Silvano Franzolin, and Luigi Di Barca, as well as Giuseppe Di Lavore, the driver of a private company that handled transportation of prisoners. The assassins opened fire with a Kalashnikov and a shotgun, and years later it would be discovered that Giuseppe Greco played a principal role in these murders. Antonino Burrafato was an Italian policeman, a deputy sergeant serving at the Calacabrese prison in Termini Imerese. He was assassinated on June 29, 1982, under the order of Leoluca Bagarella, brother-in-law of Salvatore Riina.
The hit squad was made up of Giuseppe Greco, Giuseppe Lucchese, Antonio Marchese, and Salvatore Cucuzza. On September 3, 1982, on the orders of Salvatore Riina, Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa and his second wife Emanuela were in a car which she drove when a number of gunmen on motorbikes and in a car forced their car off the road, where it crashed into a stationary vehicle. The gunmen opened fire. Dalla Chiesa was killed along with his wife and their escorting agent Domenico Russo.
The lead killer was Giuseppe Greco, and this murderous event was named the Via Carini Massacre. Filippo Marchese, a leading figure in the Sicilian Mafia and a hitman suspected of dozens of homicides, was the boss of the Mafia family in the Corso dei Mille neighborhood in Palermo. He and Giuseppe Greco often joined forces in the same hit squads, including the ambush of Salvatore Contorno. They were believed to have played leading roles in the Christmas massacre in Bagheria on December 25, 1981.
Together with a squad of several men, they opened fire on a car in downtown Bagheria carrying three leading figures of the local Mafia. The wild hail of bullets killed an innocent bystander, and the hitmen ran out of ammunition before they had completed their mission. They were forced to drag the one surviving victim into their car and, after driving away, finished the survivor off with their bare hands. However, sometime in September 1982, Filippo Marchese was led to a warehouse by Salvatore Montalto.
There he met fellow killers Giuseppe Greco, Giuseppe Giacomo Gambino, and Salvatore Cucuzza, who quickly grabbed and strangled him. His body was subsequently dissolved in acid, like many of Marchese’s own victims. Calogero Zucchetto was an Italian policeman who dealt with the mafia and in particular collaborated in the search for fugitives, who were very numerous at the time. On the evening of Sunday, November 14, 1982, as he left the Calica bar in Via Notarbartolo, a street in the center of Palermo, he was killed with five gunshots to the head fired by two hitmen riding a motorcycle while Zucchetto was consuming a sandwich.
The perpetrators of the crime were identified as Mario Prestifilippo and Giuseppe Greco. On July 29, 1983, a car bomb explosion in Palermo killed Rocco Chinnici, two of his bodyguards, Mario Trapassi and Salvatore Bartolotta, and the concierge of his apartment block, Stefano Li Sacchi, as he left the house to go to work. The bomb was triggered by Giuseppe Greco. Antonino Nini Cassarà was an Italian policeman who became commissioner in Reggio Calabria and then in Trapani.
In 1982, he worked on the streets of Palermo together with agent Calogero Zucchetto in the context of Cosa Nostra inquiries. On one of these occasions, Cassarà and Zucchetto recognized two top killers, Giuseppe Greco and Mario Prestifilippo, but they fled before they could be arrested. Among the numerous operations he took part in was the famous Pizza Connection operation in collaboration with U. S.
police forces. On August 6, 1985, he was returning home while being escorted by two agents, Roberto Antiochia and Natali Mondo, and as they exited their vehicle they were ambushed by a hit squad. Cassarà died inside the entrance hall in the arms of his wife. Antiochia died in front of the entrance door.
Mondo survived by hiding underneath the vehicle. One of the hitmen involved was Giuseppe Greco. However, Mondo, the survivor, would suffer a similar fate on January 14, 1988, at the entrance to his wife’s shop. During the Second Mafia War, Giuseppe Greco, thought to be the underboss of the Sciaculi family, was not afraid to expose himself in the front line.
Police suspected him of carrying out dozens of murders, and it was he who handled the infamous Kalashnikov rifle that had opened fire on Contorno. He had been part of the audacious hit squad that gunned down General Dalla Chiesa, apparently jumping on the roof of the car in order to aim his Kalashnikov down on the general, his wife, and bodyguard. Francesco Marino Mannoia would later explain the shifting dynamic of power in Cosa Nostra. He described how Riina had gradually eliminated the killers who had distinguished themselves in the great Mafia War precisely because their increased prestige had begun to threaten Riina’s own power.
With consummate skill, Riina destroyed his rivals by playing on divisions within the families, personal enmities, and ambitions, so that he got others to do his dirty work. Riina had Marchese eliminated by his good friend and business partner, Giuseppe Greco, by appealing to his greed and aspiration. Greco wanted to take full control of the cement company he and Marchese owned jointly and wanted to prevent a possible challenge to his own leadership. Francesco Marino Mannoia said Giuseppe Greco became a kind of charismatic leader who inspired the admiration and absolute loyalty of many of the younger men of honor.
Giuseppe Greco treated Michele Greco like an irrelevant old man, making it clear that he held the real power. Giuseppe Greco had participated with Filippo Marchese in many murders, according to Vincenzo Sinagra, who later testified about this. For a while, Riina embraced Giuseppe Greco as a rising star and allowed him to overplay his hand, in the knowledge that his foolish conceit would create bad feelings among his fellow mafiosi which could later be used to Riina’s own advantage. Greco stopped bothering to attend commission meetings because of his growing disdain for the Cosa Nostra bosses.
Giuseppe Greco’s men began to worry about the growing rift between their own family and the commission and shared their concerns with Riina. In September 1985, Giuseppe Greco was shot and killed by two men of his own hit squad, Vincenzo Puccio and Giuseppe Lucchese. Agostino Marino Mannoia, the brother of Francesco Marino Mannoia, was on the scene, however not as a member of the hit squad but as an involuntary witness to the murder of his boss. He and another soldier, Filippo La Rosa, were waiting downstairs in Greco’s house while the heads of the family were upstairs talking when they heard shots.
Marino Mannoia and La Rosa ran upstairs to find Vincenzo Puccio and Giuseppe Lucchese standing over Giuseppe Greco’s body. Allegedly, Riina ordered that Giuseppe Greco’s body be dissolved in acid, while in the meantime he told other mafiosi that Greco was in hiding in the United States. Rumors of Greco’s death developed in 1988, but they were only confirmed to law enforcement the following year by Mafia turncoat Francesco Marino Mannoia. Later, Mario Prestifilippo, one of Giuseppe Greco’s accomplices, was shot to death as he sped through the streets of Bagheria on September 29, 1987, on a motorcycle.
Giuseppe Greco was given an in absentia life sentence as part of the Maxi Trial in 1987, after being found guilty of 58 counts of murder, even though he was dead by then. It is believed he committed at least 80 murders in total and possibly as many as 300. Agostino Marino Mannoia disappeared on April 21, 1989, and on May 11, 1989, Vincenzo Puccio himself was murdered in prison.