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:
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The decline of a culture
Mourned by scholars who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys.”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)