Gotcha, Godfather!

By JOHN MOODY PALERMO

SALVATORE ("TOTO") RIINA, WHO listed his occupation as shepherd, once said the surest cure for a sore finger is to cut off the arm to which it is attached. Last week Italy's organized-crime network was decapitated when the 62-year-old godfather of the Sicilian Mafia was arrested as his car sat stuck in Palermo's rush-hour traffic.

As the don quietly surrendered -- confirming his identity and complimenting his captors -- Italy's law enforcers smelled a larger victory in their struggle against the Mob. Riina's capture was the latest in a series of successes by the government since it began to get tough with entrenched crime following the 1992 murders of two of the country's top Mafia prosecutors. Last September, Giuseppe ("Piddu") Madonia, a member of the Mafia's 24-man decision-making body known as the Cupola, was caught after police tapped his portable phone. The same week Carmine Alfieri, the leader of the Camorra, the Naples crime syndicate that competes and cooperates with the Sicilian Mafia, was taken into custody. Even Riina's 84-year-old uncle was picked up in the search for the top don. Nonetheless, said Interior Minister Nicola Mancino, "the fight is a long way from being finished."

Toto Riina, whose underlings dubbed him "the Short One" and whose enemies called him "the Beast," had been on the run for 23 years. Suspected of ordering at least 150 killings, he was convicted in absentia in 1987 of murder and drug trafficking and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Some sources suggested he had undergone plastic surgery to change his appearance, but apart from grayer hair and a more pronounced paunch, the man captured last week bore an unmistakable likeness to an FBI computer-generated drawing based on the last known photograph of Riina, from 1973.

The don's blood-soaked leadership of the crime family based in the western town of Corleone -- and through it, of Sicily's criminal kingdom -- had finally repelled a country that romanticized and at times even sympathized with the so-called men of honor. Says Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist and author of two books on the Mafia: "Every time he had to make a choice between convincing and killing someone, he chose to kill."

A near illiterate with a brilliant criminal mind, Riina committed a series of blunders that led to his downfall. Among his mistakes, say authorities:

-- He ordered the assassinations last year of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two widely admired magistrates who had made Mafia busting their life's work. Public outrage over the murders, and the seeming untouchability of those who committed them, stiffened the Italian government's resolve to confront organized crime. The national assembly swiftly passed sweeping antiracketeering laws that permit wider use of phone taps, property searches, confiscation of the property of suspected Mafiosi and guarantees of protection for state's witnesses.

-- He surrounded himself with a group of thuggish henchmen who specialized in murder and mayhem rather than the silkier arts of persuasion and blackmail once favored by the Mafia. Unlike tradition-bound gangsters who obeyed the vow of silence when arrested, some of these lieutenants cut deals with the law. Over the past year, 270 so-called pentiti provided unprecedented details of the Mob's workings and helped investigators tighten the net around its chief. According to some sources, the tip that led to Riina's arrest came from at least one such stool pigeon who put more faith in the authorities' promises than in Riina's forgiveness.

-- He extended the Mob's traditional area of operations. Riina sent underbosses throughout the Continent to take advantage of Europe's open borders. He contracted with Colombia's cocaine cartels to distribute their wares, and was exploring ways to manipulate stock and currency markets. The threat of wider Mafia influence persuaded law-enforcement agencies across Europe and the U.S. to work together.

Riina's errors were all the more damaging because of a hardening public sentiment toward corruption. Unlike the U.S. Mafia, which makes most of its money through criminal activities like drug smuggling, loan-sharking, prostitution and gambling, the Italian Mob has gained most of its income by siphoning off public funds through rigged contracts, faked repairs and padded expenses for government projects.

Repeated bribery, corruption and kickback scandals have soured Italians on authority in general and politicians in particular. Suspected affiliation with the Mob, once dismissed as unprovable, has increasingly become a political kiss of death. Italian authorities believe that the Mob, with less of its money coming from state funds, will now be forced to turn to higher-risk crime.

As news of Riina's arrest spread through Palermo last week, some residents expressed jubilation, but most had nothing to say. "It's none of my business," grunted a young man on a motorcycle. "Knowing too much about that stuff is dangerous." It will remain so, even with Riina behind bars. At least five members of the Cupola are still at large. According to some sources, they long ago sketched out an agreement on how to divide the shepherd's fields and flock.