Ciaculli massacre

During the 1950s, the Mafia had developed interests in urban property, land speculation, public sector construction, commercial transportation, and the wholesale fruit, vegetable, meat and fish markets that served the burgeoning city of Palermo, whose population rose by 100,000 between 1951 and 1961.

[4] A relationship developed between mafiosi and a new generation of politicians of the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana) such as Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino.

The Sicilian Mafia Commission was dissolved, and of those mafiosi who had escaped arrest—among them Tommaso Buscetta—many went to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.

According to Tommaso Buscetta, who became a cooperating witness in 1984, Michele Cavataio, the boss of the Acquasanta quarter of Palermo, was responsible for the Ciaculli bomb.

Cavataio was killed on 10 December 1969 in the Viale Lazio in Palermo as retaliation for the events in 1963; the assassination was carried out 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.

[3] In the same day of the massacre of Ciaculli, in Villabate there was another car-bomb attack in which two civilians, Giuseppe Tesauro and Pietro Cannizzaro, died.