Ciaculli Massacre - Perpetrators

Perpetrators

According to Tommaso Buscetta – after he became a cooperating witness in 1984 – it was Michele Cavataio, the boss of the Acquasanta quarter of Palermo, who was responsible for the Ciaculli bomb. Cavataio had lost out to the Greco Mafia clan in a war of the wholesale market in the mid 1950s. Cavataio killed Di Pisa in the knowledge that the La Barbera’s would be blamed by the Greco’s and a war would be the result. He kept fuelling the war through other bomb attacks and killings.

Cavataio was backed by other Mafia families who resented the growing power of the Sicilian Mafia Commission to the detriment of individual Mafia families. Cavataio was killed on December 10, 1969, in the Viale Lazio in Palermo as retaliation for the events in 1963 by a Mafia hit squad including Bernardo Provenzano, Calogero Bagarella (an elder brother of Leoluca Bagarella the brother-in-law of Totò Riina), Emanuele D’Agostino of Stefano Bontade’s Santa Maria di Gesù Family, Gaetano Grado and Damiano Caruso a soldier of Giuseppe Di Cristina, the Mafia boss of Riesi. The attack is known as the Viale Lazio massacre (Lazio Street Massacre).

Several top Mafia bosses had decided to eliminate Cavataio on the instigation of Salvatore "Ciaschiteddu" Greco. Greco had come to subscribe to Buscetta’s theory about how the First Mafia War began. The composition of the hit squad, according to Buscetta, was a clear indication that the killing had been sanctioned collectively by all the major Sicilian Mafia families: not only did it include Calogero Bagarella from Corleone, and a member of Stefano Bontate’s family in Palermo, but also a soldier of Giuseppe Di Cristina’s family on the other end of Sicily in Riesi. The Viale Lazio bloodbath marked the end of a ‘pax mafiosa’ that had reigned since the Ciaculli massacre.