Nitto-ghost, from failed attacks to missed captures between the sea and Etna

A life as a ghost. He appeared and disappeared. For 11 years Nitto Santapaola lived his fugitive life at home (or almost). The boss of Cosa Nostra, who died last Monday, March 2, could count on a network of informants - perhaps even institutional ones - and spies in the criminal world that allowed him to escape assassination attempts and captures. A story that also triggers many mysteries surrounding the State-Mafia Negotiation that, however, has not found a “certified” truth from a ruling.

Let’s move to via delle Olimpiadi, the place where in 1981 a commando carried out an attack with machine guns and a bazooka at the hideout where Nitto Santapaola usually met with his loyalists. The boss miraculously survived, or perhaps he wasn’t there. Only his armored car was found on the scene. Natale Di Raimondo, now a collaborator, and Salvatore Pappalardo, who was killed years later by Alessandro Strano, were injured.

The death sentence for Nitto Santapaola was decreed by his historic rival Alfio Ferlito, a loyalist of Pippo Calderone, who fell in an ambush in 1978. He ordered his soldiers, among whom Turi Pillera stood out as his chosen heir.

Ferlito did not give up, however. He tried again with his gang a year later. On April 26, 1982, Nitto was to die. Guns, hand grenades, Kalashnikovs. A military attack planned in the smallest details: it was a massacre on via Dell’Iris, but Nitto was not among the victims. The boss apparently left half an hour earlier. We will never know if he had a “tip-off” or if it was a fatal coincidence. Ferlito’s commando stormed into an apartment and fired wildly. The toll was terrible: six dead. Carabinieri and police arrived in San Giorgio. Some say it felt like being in Beirut.

The armed war with Ferlito ended with another massacre, but on the other side of Sicily. In the massacre of the Circonvallazione, two months after the attack on via dell’Iris, boss Ferlito died under a rain of bullets. They were transferring him from one prison to another. That death cost Santapaola a life sentence. One of the eighteen he served under 41 bis.

With his opponent taken out, Santapaola felt more at ease during his fugitive life. Some swear they saw him during that time having coffee at the bar Amoroso in Vizzini. A period where legends spread. They called him the “hunter” for his passion for hunting (it was the alibi that perhaps saved him from the conviction for the murder of the mayor of Castelvetrano Vito Lipari). Then there are those who spread the rumor that he suffered from a lycanthropy syndrome.

A fake that inspired the name of the operation for his capture: Full Moon. The police arrested him in 1993. Even on that raid, conspiracies arose. There’s the version of Nitto’s personal surrender, and another that leads to the condition of “posato”. Which in Cosa Nostra language means “put on the bench”. But the power of Nitto - from what emerged in the interceptions of the maxi investigation Dionisio - lasted at least another 20 years after the historic capture.

What happened in the months leading up to the “Full Moon” operation still raises many questions today. And many secrets that Santapaola took to the grave.

In the first-degree ruling of the Negotiation trial of the Palermo Assize Court, there is a chapter dedicated to the failure to capture Nitto Santapaola in Terme Vigliatore, in the Messina area. There would have been interceptions that certified the fugitive's presence in the stronghold of the Barcellona clan. But nothing moved, and Nittò vanished into thin air.

The new hideout in Terme was found in a hurry after the arrest of Claudio Samperi in an illegal gambling den in Ognina. The captured man of honor became a collaborator and first indicated the place where he had met Santapaola: at the home of the gas man in Mascalucia. But even that time the boss had already vanished.