Giuseppe Greco

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Giuseppe "Pino" Greco

Giuseppe "Pino" Greco (1950 - 1985) was a hitman and member of the Sicilian Mafia.

He was nicknamed Scarpuzzedda (Sicilian for "Little Old Shoe") and came from a long line of mafiosi. A number of sources refer to him exclusively as Pino Greco although Giuseppe was his Christian name; "Pino" is a frequent abbreviation of the name Giuseppe.

[edit] Criminal Career

He was a member of the Ciaculli Mafia family based in Palermo in the neighbourhood of the same name. The boss of the entire family was his uncle, Michele Greco. Giuseppe Greco and the Ciaculli Family were closely allied with the Corleonesi, and specifically with their boss, Salvatore Riina. The pentito Tommaso Buscetta later explained that during meetings between the heads of various Mafia families, Michele Greco would just nod his head and agree with virtually everything Riina said.

During the Second Mafia War from 1981 until 1983, orchestrated by the Corleonesi, Giuseppe Greco carried out dozens of murders, often with his favorite weapon, an AK-47. He was eventually convicted in absentia of fifty-eight murders but it is believed he committed at least eighty murders in total and possibly as many as three-hundred. Amongst those he gunned down are Stefano Bontade, Salvatore Inzerillo and General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. He even murdered Inzerillo's fifteen-year-old son after the youth vowed to avenge his dead father. Greco is rumoured to have chopped the boy's arm off before killing him. In order to kill magistrate Rocco Chinnici he employed a car bomb.

He was part of a "death squad" including Mario Prestifilippo, Filippo Marchese, Gianbattista Pullarà, Giuseppe Lucchese, Giacomo Gambino and Nino Madonia.

He was close friends with Filippo Marchese, the boss of the Corso de Mille neighbourhood in Palermo and another close ally of the Corleonesi. Marchese ran the so-called "Room of Death", a squalid Palermo apartment, where victims were tortured and murdered before being dismembered and either dumped out at sea or thrown into barrel of acid. Greco is suspected of helping Marchese carry out many killings there.

A number of informants have said that he personally garrotted Rosario Riccobono, a Palermo boss.

In late 1982, Greco murdered Marchese on the orders of Riina. The Mafia War was dying down and Riina had decided Marchese was no longer of any use. By then, Greco was believed to be the underboss of the Ciaculli family.

[edit] Death

Towards the end of 1985, Giuseppe Greco vanished. For a while it was suspected he had gone to the United States but this was just a rumour started by Riina. Scarpuzzedda was, in fact, murdered on the orders of Riina, who thought Greco was getting a bit too ambitious for his own good. Greco was murdered in his home, shot to death by his two fellow Mafiosi and supposed friends, Vincenzo Puccio and Giuseppe Lucchese.

He picked up an in absentia life sentence at the Maxi Trial of 1986/87 after being found guilty of fifty-eight counts of murder [1], even though he was dead by then. His body was never found and rumours of his death only surfaced in 1988 and were only confirmed by an informant, Francesco Marino Mannoia, two-years later.