WHEN THE MAFIA TURNED ON ITSELF

The Second Mafia War was the bloodiest internal conflict ever fought within Cosa Nostra. Between 1978 and 1984, Sicily was engulfed by a campaign of violence that left an uncertain number of victims—probably between 400 and 1,000. Some were gunned down in the street, in ambushes planned with military precision. Others simply vanished, swallowed by the logic of lupara bianca: kidnapping, strangulation, acid, and disappearance. But this was not just a feud between rival clans. It was the moment when one faction decided to seize total control of the Sicilian Mafia by systematically destroying its enemies, their allies, their relatives, and, when necessary, judges, journalists, politicians, and police officers.

The roots of the conflict lay in the transformation of Sicily after the Second World War. The old Mafia, once tied mainly to land, livestock, and rural power, had expanded into construction, public contracts, transport, extortion, political mediation, and international crime. Above all, it had discovered the business that changed everything: heroin. During the 1960s and 1970s, Sicily became one of the major hubs for refining and distributing heroin on a global scale. Morphine base arrived from Asia, was processed in clandestine laboratories hidden in the countryside, and then shipped abroad, especially to the United States. The profits were enormous. Power inside Cosa Nostra was no longer measured only by territory or prestige, but by access to international trafficking routes and the fortune they produced.

At the top of the organization stood the Commission, or Cupola, the body meant to regulate the balance between families and prevent open war. But by the mid-1970s that balance had already begun to rot from within. After the arrest of Luciano Liggio, Totò Riina took over the Corleonesi faction and started building a patient, ruthless strategy for supremacy. The Corleonesi were initially less sophisticated than the old Palermo bosses and had fewer international connections, but they were more disciplined, more brutal, and far more ambitious. Riina worked methodically, placing allies in key positions, building loyalty across the provinces, and turning men like Michele Greco into useful instruments. Officially, the Mafia still looked like a federation of families. In reality, it was being hollowed out from the inside.

The breaking point came when the old order failed to understand how far Riina was willing to go. Men such as Gaetano Badalamenti, Stefano Bontate, Giuseppe Di Cristina, and Giuseppe Calderone still believed in a Mafia governed by hierarchy, mediation, and selective violence. Riina believed in conquest. One by one, the figures closest to the anti-Corleonesi bloc were isolated and eliminated. Giuseppe Di Cristina was killed in 1978. Giuseppe Calderonewas murdered the same year. Badalamenti was driven out. The warning signs were all there, but many either underestimated the danger or realized it too late. As one of the future collaborators would later suggest, the Corleonesi were no longer at the gates: they were already inside the system, ready to take it over.

The massacre truly began in 1981. The old Palermo bosses finally understood that Riina had to be stopped, and some among them began discussing plans to kill him. But Riina moved first. On 23 April 1981, Stefano Bontate was assassinated on the streets of Palermo, on the very night of his birthday. Less than three weeks later, Salvatore Inzerillo was murdered as well. Those two killings opened the floodgates. What followed was not an ordinary Mafia war but a purge on an industrial scale. The Corleonesi and their allies hunted down not only bosses and soldiers, but drivers, cousins, sons, brothers, intermediaries, old friends, and anyone who might one day seek revenge. Entire bloodlines were shattered. In Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento, Caltanissetta, and Catania, the map of power was rewritten in blood.

The methods used in the war revealed the nature of the new leadership. This was not violence aimed only at eliminating rivals; it was violence meant to terrify everyone who remained. Men were lured into fake meetings and strangled. Bodies were dissolved in acid. Some were left in trunks or abandoned cars as warnings. Others disappeared forever. The teenage son of Salvatore Inzerillo was murdered after vowing revenge. Relatives of Tommaso Buscetta were exterminated. Families tied to Badalamenti, Bontate, and Contorno were relentlessly targeted. Even exile did not guarantee safety: the war crossed the ocean, reaching the United States, where members of the Inzerillo family were tracked down and killed. The message was simple: there would be no survivors, only obedience or death.

At the same time, the violence spilled far beyond the internal boundaries of Cosa Nostra. Judges, policemen, journalists, and politicians became targets because the Corleonesi understood that domination required not only defeating rivals but bending the State itself through fear. In those years Sicily saw the murders of men such as Mario Francese, Boris Giuliano, Cesare Terranova, Piersanti Mattarella, Pio La Torre, Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, and later Rocco Chinnici. Some had investigated Mafia finances, some had challenged its political influence, some had simply understood too much. Their deaths showed that the Second Mafia War was not just an internal transition of power: it was the moment when Cosa Nostra, under Riina, openly turned itself into a machine of war against society.

One of the darkest symbols of that phase was the so-called Triangle of Death—the area between Bagheria, Casteldaccia, and Altavilla Milicia—where killings multiplied so rapidly that even the press struggled to keep count. In those months Palermo and its province looked like a battlefield. Bodies appeared in cars, in orchards, near roads, in city streets. Others never appeared at all. The killings were so frequent and so brazen that they created the sense of a territory no longer under the control of the State but under the rule of armed factions. By 1982, journalists were publishing daily body counts. The old Mafia equilibrium had collapsed completely.

And yet the triumph of the Corleonesi carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. Their victory was real, but it was too violent to remain hidden forever. Men like Tommaso Buscetta and later Salvatore Contorno began to talk. Their testimonies, combined with the work of judges such as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, would transform scattered bloodshed into judicial knowledge. What the Corleonesi had built through fear would eventually be reconstructed in court through words, documents, and names. The turning point came in 1984, when Buscetta began cooperating with the authorities, triggering a chain of investigations that led to the San Michele blitz and, ultimately, to the Maxi Trial.

The Second Mafia War therefore marks more than a chapter of Mafia violence. It marks the passage of Cosa Nostra from a criminal system based on negotiation and internal balance to one based on absolute domination, organized betrayal, and extermination. Riina won that war. But in winning it, he also exposed the true face of the organization more clearly than ever before—and made possible the response that would come next.