1960s Sicilian Mafia trials

The 1960s Sicilian Mafia trials took place at the end of that decade in response to a rise in organized crime violence around the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In the late 1950s, there was an increase in violence around the town of Corleone as rival factions in the local Mafia clan, the group around Michele Navarra and the Corleonesi, battled it out.

A crackdown – albeit not quite as disregarding of civil liberties as General Aldo De Marco initially requested – did indeed follow, and during the mid-1960s, 1,995 suspected Mafiosi were arrested and charged with hundreds of crimes.

Specifically, the defendants were all those who had been at a series of meetings in October 1957 between American and Sicilian Mafiosi at the Grand Hotel Des Palmes in Palermo.

All the Americans at the meeting, including Joseph Bonanno and Carmine Galante, were indicted, but none were extradited because the US had no such criminal charge of Organized Delinquency.

The prosecutors did not have a great deal of evidence at the trial, principally relying on information from Joseph Valachi, an American Mafiosi who began co-operating with the government in 1962.

As a low-level mobster, Valachi was not at the Grand Hotel Des Palmes meeting, but he was aware of the growing heroin trade and the Sicilian Mafia's involvement in it.

Anti-Mafia judge Cesare Terranova signed the order to send the men to trial in 1965, ruling that the crimes and those accused of carrying them out were all linked and should be tried as an organized body.

The defendants were accused of crimes relating to the First Mafia War, the charges including multiple murder, kidnapping, tobacco smuggling, theft, "public massacre" (the Ciaculli bombing) and Organized Delinquency.

It is not known for certain what role – if any – he played in the First Mafia War, although he spent a lot of time in Palermo in the early 1960s and was apparently friends with Salvatore Greco.

When Leggio took the stand he made the rather strange claim that he was being framed by a police officer who had "begged me repeatedly to pleasure his wife; and I, for moral reasons, refused...Please don't ask me for names, I am a gentleman."

We simply want to warn you that if a single gentleman from Corleone is convicted, you will be blown sky high, you will be wiped out, you will be butchered and so will every member of your family.

Cesare Terranova successfully appealed the acquittal of the "gentlemen from Corleone" so many, including Leggio and Riina, had to go into hiding almost as soon as they were released.

Leggio was retried in absentia for the Navarra murder in 1970, and this time found guilty, but it was four years before he could be captured and sent off to serve his life sentence.

On 10 December 1969, once all the trials were over, Michele Cavataio and three of his men were shot to death in a gun battle that left one of the attackers dead as well.

For example, Gaetano Badalamenti would end his days in a US prison after being convicted of doing in the 1970s and 1980s exactly what he had been accused of planning in the 1960s, namely trafficking heroin into America.