Two extra rooms will be added, with the work expected to take 12 months.
Riina, who was also nicknamed in Sicilian dialect U Curtu or Shortie, is
believed to have personally killed around 40 people and to have ordered the
assassination of many more.
He was born and raised in Corleone, the hilltop Sicilian town which was
immortalised in The Godfather books by Mario Puzo and the subsequent films
starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino.
Riina’s capture was considered a major victory in the struggle against the
Mafia.
He is currently held in a maximum security prison, where he is allowed minimal
contact with the outside world in order to prevent him from trying to run
mob activities from behind bars, as other Mafia dons have done in the past.
The conversion of the house is the latest example of former Mafia assets being
confiscated by the State and adapted for legitimate purposes.
A hideout used by Riina in the hills near Corleone was given a new lease of
life when it was converted into a rustic bed-and-breakfast called ‘Lands of
Corleone’ in 2010.
The property has a particularly gruesome past – not far away one of Riina’s
right-hand men strangled a teenager and dissolved his body in acid to punish
the boy’s father for becoming a “pentito” or informer.
A house owned by Riina and his family in Corleone was confiscated in 2001 and
turned into a station for the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s fraud police.
Mafia-owned tracts of land seized by the authorities have been turned into
vineyards and olive groves, with their produce marketed as being free from
the taint of organised crime.
Many of them are owned and managed by Libera, an anti-Mafia organisation
founded by a Catholic priest.
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