| Michele Greco |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT MICHELE GRECO | |
| 1924 births | |
| greco, michele | |
| living people | |
| people from palermo city | |
| drug traffickers | |
| sicilian mafiosi | |
| sicilian mafiosi serving life sentences | |
| mob bosses | |
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RISE TO POWER He was born and raised in Palermo and joined the Mafia as a young man, eventually running a large estate near Palermo and involving himself in Racketeering , Extortion and, beginning in the 1970s , Heroin trafficking. In 1978 , Greco, who had the nickname "The Pope", was powerful enough to become a member of The Commission along with Gaetano Badalamenti , Stefano Bontade and Salvatore Inzerillo . The Commission was like a Board Of Directors for the Mafia. PUPPET BOSS In 1981 , Mafia bosses Stefano Bontade and Salvatore Inzerillo were murdered within a few weeks of each other. Michele Greco took over Stefano Bontade's family and, not long after taking up his position, he invited a number of Bontade's allies for a meeting on his estate. A couple of Mafiosi were suspicious and did not go, but at least eleven Mafiosi went along and were wiped out, never to be seen again. As it turned out, Michele Greco had been allied with Salvatore Riina and the Corleonisi all along; Riina had used Greco's position on The Commission to help banish Gaetano Badalamenti from the Mafia and then, after Riina ordered Bontade's murder, he had Greco take over Bontade's Mafia Clan to do the Corleonisi's bidding during the subsequent Mafia War. Greco was later described as little more than puppet of Riina's, doing whatever he was told. One of the men who did not turn up to the fateful meeting at Greco's estate was Salvatore Contorno. He sensed trouble and soon went into hiding when the Mafia War broke out, during which time he narrowly escaped death during an ambush by a Corleonesi hitman, Michele's nephew Pino Greco . Whilst in hiding from both the authorities and the Corleonesi Mafia Clan, Contorno sent anonymous letters to the police, revealing to the authorities information on the Mafia, its members, the various factions and the violent turmoil it was undergoing. Contorno was eventually arrested in 1983 and became a fully fledged informant the following year, taking Tommaso Buscetta 's lead. Contorno's revelations in his letters to the police were the first time the authorities had really learned of Michele Greco's high-ranking membership of the Mafia. Previously he had just been regarded as a rather secretive landowner with a suspiciously high-income, although he did come from a long line of Mafiosi. He was also alleged to have powerful ties with authority figures, including politicians. MANHUNT AND CAPTURE Based on Salvatore Contorno's anonymous revelations, police chief Antonino 'Ninni' Cassarà drew up a report in July 1982 listing 162 Mafiosi who warranted arrest, and the report was unofficially known as the 'Michele Greco + 161' report, signalling Greco's importance over the other suspects. On August 6 , 1985 , Ninni Cassarà and one of his bodyguards, Giovanni Lercara, were massacred by a team of up to fifteen gunmen outside Cassarà's home in front of his horrified wife. The 'Michele Greco + 161' report was just the start of an investigation that was to become the Maxi Trial , where most of the leadership of the Mafia were tried for numberless crimes. After four-years on the run, Michele Greco was arrested on February 20 , 1986 and he joined the hundreds of defendants at the Maxi Trial, which had started just ten-days previously. Greco was specifically charged with the murder of the anti-Mafia Magistrate Rocco Chinnici , Chinnnici's two bodyguards and an innocent bystander, the four of whom had been killed by a Car Bomb in 1983 . Greco gave testimony at the trial which mostly consisted of him boasting of all the illustrious people he had entertained at his large estate, including a former chief prosecutor and police chiefs. He also admitted that Stefano Bontade had often hunted on his estate, and in something of an alarmingly off-hand statement, Greco said that he and Stefano "were together on the Holy Friday, just days before his misfortune." The "misfortune" he referred to was Stefano being machine-gunned in the face. At the end of the trial, on December 16 , 1987 , Michele Greco, then aged 63, was found guilty of the four murders and imprisoned for life. The Maxi Trials were largely undone by notoriously generous appeals, mostly thanks to Corrado Carnevale , who would release Mafiosi on the slightest of pretexts, much to the frustration of the Maxi Trial's architects, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino . Greco was released on appeal in March 1991 , but nine-months later Falcone and Borsellino took charge of the appeals process and overturned dozens of appeals. In the light of this, Michele Greco was quickly rearrested in February 1992 and put back behind bars to serve his freshly reinstated life-sentence. He remains in Prison to this day. REFERENCES
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