Salvatore Lima - Killed By The Mafia

Killed By The Mafia

On March 12, 1992, 64-year-old Salvo Lima was on his way to Palermo in his chauffeur driven car when his tires were shot out by a gunman on a motorcycle. After his car screeched to a halt, Lima scrambled out and attempted to flee, but the assassin got off the motorbike, shot Lima in the back and then ran over and finished him off with a bullet to the neck. The killer then sped away.

The killing took place three weeks before Italy's national election, billed as a watershed in Italian politics. The murder of Lima meant a turning point in the relations between the Mafia and its reference points in politics. The Mafia felt betrayed by Lima and Andreotti. In their opinion they had failed to block the confirmation of the sentence of the Maxi Trial by the Court of Cassation (court of final appeal) in January 1992, which upheld the Buscetta theorem that Cosa Nostra was a single hierarchical organisation ruled by a Commission and that its leaders could be held responsible for criminal acts that were committed to benefit the organisation.

The Mafia had counted on Lima and Andreotti to appoint Corrado Carnevale to review the sentence. Carnevale, known as "the sentence killer", had overturned many Mafia convictions on the slenderest of technicalities previously. Carnevale, however, had to withdraw due to pressure from the public and from Giovanni Falcone – who at the time had moved to the ministry of Justice. Falcone was backed by the minister of Justice Claudio Martelli despite the fact that he served under Prime Minister Andreotti.

Many Mafia bosses were condemned to life in prison and Cosa Nostra reacted furiously. Apart from killing Lima in March 1992, Mafia killers blew up Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three bodyguards in May. In July, a second car bomb killed Falcone's colleague and close friend Paolo Borsellino, along with five bodyguards. In September the Mafia murdered Ignazio Salvo, the prominent Mafia businessman who had been close to Lima.

Tommaso Buscetta, moved by the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, decided to break his long silence on ties between politics and Cosa Nostra. He acknowledged that he had known Lima since the late 1950s. On November 16, 1992, Buscetta testified before the Antimafia Commission presided by Luciano Violante about the links between Cosa Nostra and Salvo Lima and Giulio Andreotti. He indicated Salvo Lima as the contact of the Mafia in Italian politics. "Salvo Lima was, in fact, the politician to whom Cosa Nostra turned most often to resolve problems for the organisation whose solution lay in Rome," Buscetta testified. Other collaborating witnesses confirmed that Lima had been specifically ordered to "fix" the appeal of the Maxi Trial with Italy's Court of Cassation and had been murdered because he failed to do so.

"I knew that for any problems requiring a solution in Rome, Lima was the man we turned to," according to another pentito Gaspare Mutolo. "Lima was killed because he did not uphold or couldn’t uphold, the commitments he had made in Palermo (…) The verdict of the Supreme Court was disaster. After the Supreme Court verdict we felt we were lost. That verdict was like a dose of poison for the mafiosi, who felt like wounded animals. That’s why they carried out the massacres. Something had to happen. I was surprised when people who had eight years of a prison sentence still to serve started giving themselves up. Then they killed Lima and I understood." According to Mutolo, "Lima was killed because he was the greatest symbol of that part of the political world which, after doing favours for Cosa Nostra in exchange for its votes, was no longer able to protect the interests of the organisation at the time of its most important trial."