Salvatore Achille Ettore Lima (; 23 January 1928 – 12 March 1992), often referred to as Salvo Lima, was an Italian politician from Sicily who was associated with, and murdered by, the Sicilian Mafia. According to the pentito (Mafia defector) Tommaso Buscetta, Lima's father, Vincenzo Lima, was a member of the Mafia but it is not known whether Lima himself was a made member of Cosa Nostra. In the final report of the first Antimafia Commission (1963–1976), Lima was described as one of the pillars of Mafia power in Palermo.
During his long career with Christian Democracy (DC) that began in the 1950s, Lima was first allied with the faction of Amintore Fanfani and after 1964 with the one of Giulio Andreotti, seven times prime minister and a member of almost every post-war Italian government. That shift earned him a seat in the national parliament in 1968. Lima was often referred to as Andreotti's proconsul on Sicily. Under Andreotti, Lima once held a cabinet post. At the time of his death, he was a member of the European Parliament. Lima rarely spoke in public or campaigned during elections but usually managed to gain large support from seemingly nowhere when it came to voting day. He was assassinated in 1992 by the Sicilian Mafia.
Early life and mayor of Palermo
Lima was born in Palermo on 23 January 1928, the son of Vincenzo Lima, an archivist from the municipality of Palermo. In the early 1950s, after obtaining a degree in Law from the University of Palermo, he found a job at the Banco di Sicilia. Following the 1956 Italian local election, Lima was elected municipal councilor of the municipality of Palermo and became a supporter of the Christian Democracy deputy and minister Giovanni Gioia several times, adhering to Amintore Fanfani's party current and becoming councilor with delegation to public works within the municipal council led by the new Palermo mayor Luciano Maugeri. From 1958 to 1963, Lima was mayor of Palermo, his birthplace, while his fellow Christian Democrat Vito Ciancimino was assessor for public works.
Between 1951 and 1961, the population of Palermo had risen by 100,000. Under Lima and Ciancimino an unprecedented construction boom hit the city. They supported Mafia-allied building contractors such as Palermo’s leading construction entrepreneur Francesco Vassallo – a former cart driver hauling sand and stone in a poor district of Palermo. Vassallo was connected to mafiosi like Angelo La Barbera and Tommaso Buscetta. In five years, over 4,000 building licences were signed, more than half of them in the names of three pensioners who had no connection with construction at all. This period was later referred to as the "Sack of Palermo" because the construction boom led to the destruction of the city's green belt, and villas that gave it architectural grace, to make way for characterless and shoddily constructed apartment blocks. In the meantime, Palermo's historical centre was allowed to crumble. During an investigation in 1964, Lima had to admit that he knew La Barbera, one of Palermo's most powerful mobsters. From 1965 to 1968, Lima was again mayor of Palermo.
At the time, the public and authorities did not know these connections. Buscetta only revealed facts about the relations between mafiosi and politicians after judge Giovanni Falcone was killed in 1992. Already in 1964, one of Falcone's predecessors, judge Cesare Terranova, unequivocally demonstrated Lima's connections with the La Barberas. In an indictment in 1964, Terranova wrote that "it is clear that Angelo and Salvatore La Barbera (well-known bosses in the Palermo area) ... knew former mayor Salvatore Lima and maintained relations in such a way as to ask for favours ... The undeniable contacts of the La Barbera mafiosi with the one who was the first citizen of Palermo ... constitute a confirmation of ... the infiltration of the Mafia in several sectors of public life." Nevertheless, Lima was allowed to continue in politics as if nothing had happened. particularly top men in the moderate wing of Cosa Nostra, such as Stefano Bontade and Gaetano Badalamenti, and that this was favoured by the connection between them and Lima. After his car screeched to a halt, Lima scrambled out and attempted to flee but the hitman got off the motorbike, shot Lima in the back, and then ran over and finished him off with a bullet to the neck. The hitman then sped away. The killing took place three weeks before Italy's national election, billed as a watershed in Italian politics.
The Mafia had counted on Lima and Andreotti to appoint Corrado Carnevale to review the sentence. Carnevale, known as "the sentence killer", had overturned many Mafia convictions on the slenderest of technicalities previously. Carnevale had to withdraw due to pressure from the public and from Giovanni Falcone, who at the time had moved to the ministry of Justice. Despite the fact that he served under an Andreotti-led government, Falcone was backed by the minister of Justice Claudio Martelli. In 1998, several Mafia bosses were sentenced to life in prison for Lima's murder, including Salvatore Riina. Tommaso Buscetta, moved by the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, decided to break his long silence on ties between politics and Cosa Nostra. He acknowledged that he had known Lima since the late 1950s. On 16 November 1992, Buscetta testified before the Antimafia Commission presided by Luciano Violante about the links between Cosa Nostra and Lima and Andreotti. He indicated Lima as the contact of the Mafia in Italian politics. Buscetta testified: "Salvo Lima was, in fact, the politician to whom Cosa Nostra turned most often to resolve problems for the organisation whose solution lay in Rome."
Other collaborating witnesses confirmed that Lima had been specifically ordered to fix the appeal of the Maxi Trial with the Supreme Court of Cassation and had been murdered because he failed to do so. Gaspare Mutolo stated: "I knew that for any problems requiring a solution in Rome, Lima was the man we turned to. Lima was killed because he did not uphold, or couldn’t uphold, the commitments he had made in Palermo ... The verdict of the Supreme Court was a disaster. After the Supreme Court verdict, we felt we were lost. That verdict was like a dose of poison for the mafiosi, who felt like wounded animals. That's why they carried out the massacres. Something had to happen. I was surprised when people who had eight years of a prison sentence still to serve started giving themselves up. Then they killed Lima and I understood." According to Mutolo, "Lima was killed because he was the greatest symbol of that part of the political world which, after doing favours for Cosa Nostra in exchange for its votes, was no longer able to protect the interests of the organisation at the time of its most important trial." The suspicion that he had relations with Cosa Nostra appeared several times in various reports of the Antimafia Commission, and the Chamber of Deputies rejected requests for authorization to proceed against him four times. With the rise of power of the Corleonesi, this changed profoundly. Messina said: "Now, it has become an imposition: do this or else." In 2003, the Supreme Court of Cassation annulled the sentence to life imprisonment for Pietro Aglieri, Giuseppe Farinella, Giuseppe Graviano, and Benedetto Spera.
Electoral history
{|class=wikitable style="width:70%; border:1px #AAAAFF solid"
|-
! width=12%|Election
! width=25%|House
! width=34%|Constituency
! width=5% colspan="2"|Party
! width=12%|Votes
! width=12%|Result
|-
! 1968
|
|
| bgcolor="" |
| DC
| 80,387
| Elected
|-
! 1972
|
|
| bgcolor="" |
| DC
| 84,755
| Elected
|-
! 1976
|
|
| bgcolor="" |
| DC
| 100,792
| Elected
|-
! 1979
| European Parliament
| Italian Islands
| bgcolor="" |
| DC
| 305,308
| Elected
|-
! 1984
| European Parliament
| Italian Islands
| bgcolor="" |
| DC
| 256,633
| Elected
|-
! 1989
| European Parliament
| Italian Islands
| bgcolor="" |
| DC
| 246,912
| Elected
|}
Notes
References
Bibliography
- Dickie, John (2004). Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia. London: Coronet. .
- Jamieson, Alison (2000). The Antimafia: Italy's Fight Against Organized Crime. London: MacMillan Press. .
- Schneider, Jane T.; Schneider, Peter T. (2003). Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo. Berkeley: University of California Press. .
- Servadio, Gaia (1976). Mafioso: A History of the Mafia from Its Origins to the Present Day. London: Secker & Warburg. .
- Stille, Alexander (1995). Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic. New York: Vintage. .
External links
- Salvatore Lima's European Parliament page
- 2001 sentence of the Supreme Court of Cassation about Lima's murder
- At CSM
- 2004 sentence of the Supreme Court of Cassation about Andreotti and his relations with the Mafia, which were favoured by their links with Lima
- At ArchivioAntimafia
- At LeggiOggi