Sicilian Mafia Sends Bullet to 5-Year-Old in Bid to Silence Witness Father

The Sicilian Mafia sent a threatening letter with a bullet to the five-year-old son of a witness to alleged state complicity with organized crime in the early 1990s, according to the boy’s father.

“The sons of shameful traitors must pay for their father’s guilt,” the letter read, according to Massimo Ciancimino, who spoke in an interview on Sky TG24 television. “Why take things out on a young boy who is just five years old,” he said, adding that the letter was delivered to his Palermo home today.

Ciancimino is a witness in probes and trials relating to years he spent as assistant to his late father Vito, a former Corleone crime-family “consigliere” and mayor of the Sicilian capital, Palermo. He also published a book last year revealing his father’s ties to the mafia and the Italian secret services.

Ciancimino has received several threats over the last year, including bullets by mail, although this was the first time his son was threatened directly, he told Sky TG24. While he still owns a home in Palermo, Ciancimino now lives with his family in Bologna, in northern Italy.

In a much-publicized case in 1993, the Sicilian Mafia kidnapped 13-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo in a bid to silence his mobster father, Santino, who had turned state’s evidence. After almost 779 days in captivity, the boy, then 15, was strangled and dissolved in acid.

Palermo prosecutors last year reopened probes into links between Cosa Nostra and high-ranking state representatives after Ciancimino and turncoat Gaspare Spatuzza presented new evidence. Investigators are seeking to establish whether members of the government or secret services had a role in the assassinations of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, or bombings in Florence, Milan and Rome in 1993.

To contact the reporters on this story: Steve Scherer in Rome at scherer@bloomberg.net

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