Sicilian town angered after ‘vile’ social media post by son of mafia boss

A son of a notorious Cosa Nostra mafia boss has sparked fury in the Sicilian town of Corleone after writing a message on social media that was condemned as a “vile attack” against the Italian state.

Related: Corleone: the Sicilian town trying to break free of its mobster past

On Ferragosto, a beloved national holiday in Italy marked on 15 August, “Salvuccio” Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, one of the sons of Salvatore “Totò” Riina, wished his social media followers a “happy holiday” from “via Scorsone 24, Corleone, Italy”.

The address was home to the Riina family for years but in 2018 the street’s name was changed to Via Terranova in tribute to the anti-mafia judge Cesare Terranova, who was shot dead in 1979 in an ambush orchestrated by the Corleone mafia boss Luciano Liggio.

The name change was ordered by the interior ministry commissioners who at the time were administering Corleone – as featured in The Godfather book and film trilogy – after its town hall was dissolved due to mafia infiltration.

Walter Rà, elected as the mayor of Corleone in June, described the incident as “cowardly” while reaffirming that the town had left its dark history behind and would not bow down to intimidation. “We won’t allow it,” he told Italian media. “We have turned the page here, nobody will make us go backwards.”

Salvuccio Riina later trimmed the post to take out the reference to “via Scorsone”.

Totò Riina died in prison in 2017 . Nicknamed “the Beast”, he is believed to have ordered more than 150 murders, including the killing of a 13-year-old boy who was dissolved in acid. He also ordered the murders of the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.

His third son, Salvuccio, returned to live in Corleone in 2023 after serving almost nine years in prison for mafia association, money laundering and extortion and subsequently spending a period between Veneto and Abruzzo where he had been entrusted to a social services scheme. Corleone’s former administration had attempted to expel him in a move to protect the town from “reputational damage”.

The town’s current leaders said in a statement on Salvuccio Riina’s social media post: “Although we do not want to give further visibility to those who periodically look for it, we firmly distance ourselves from such declarations and firmly condemn such bravado, which sounds like a vile attack against the state and institutions.

“The utterances of Riina jr … do nothing but accentuate a negative and distorted vision of Corleone, tarnishing the efforts that are made every day by the community to free itself from a reputation linked to mafia and crime. Corleone is not mafia. Corleone is history, culture, freedom, but above all Corleone is legality, all characteristics that highly questionable characters will never be able to undermine.”

Salvuccio Riina is reported to have married his Spanish partner in Spain in June and to have hosted a post-wedding party at a restaurant in Corleone with 200 guests. In 2016 he wrote the controversial book Riina Family Life, which many bookshops refused to sell.

Totò Riina had three other children: Maria Concetta , Giovanni Francesco, and his youngest, Lucia. Giovanni Riina, also a Cosa Nostra mafioso, was given a life sentence in 1996. In 2019, Lucia Riina opened a restaurant called Corleone near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but she shut it down a year later.