Decline
Towards the end of 1985, Giuseppe Greco vanished. He was murdered on the orders of Riina, who thought Greco was getting a bit too ambitious. Riina was apparently threatened by the way a significant following of younger mobsters looked up to Greco and saw him as a potential future boss. Michele Greco was arrested on February 20, 1986, and joined the hundreds of defendants at the Maxi Trial. Greco gave testimony at the trial and to illustrate his standing as a supposedly honest citizen, he boasted of all the illustrious people he had entertained at his large estate, including a former chief prosecutor and police chiefs.
The Greco clan lost its grip on the mandamento of Ciaculli, which was merged with Brancaccio and the leadership eventually was taken over by Giuseppe Graviano and his brother Filippo from the Brancaccio Mafia family. Salvatore Greco surrendered on January 25, 1991, while in the hospital for a heart attack. By then he was considered not more than a museum piece – the Greco’s were no longer part of the power structures of Cosa Nostra.
Read more about this topic: Greco Mafia Clan
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)