June 28, 1944 - Benedetto Capizzi
His significance lies less in personal notoriety than in what his nomination represented: a coordinated effort by Cosa Nostra's surviving leadership to reconstitute a centralized power structure in the wake of successive high-profile arrests. Capizzi was positioned to head a revived Mafia Commission that would have reunified the organization under a single paramount boss, reversing years of fragmentation. Operation Perseus in 2008 — which swept up 94 individuals, many of them elderly bosses who had returned to activity after release on health grounds — dismantled the attempt before it could take hold.
From Wikipedia
Benedetto Capizzi (28 June 1944 – 12 September 2023) was an Italian mobster and a boss of the Sicilian Mafia, from the Villagrazia area of Palermo. He was nominated to be the head of the new Sicilian Mafia Commission.
On 16 December 2008, Capizzi was among 94 Mafiosi arrested in "Operation Perseus" (Perseo in Italian; after the Greek mythological hero Perseus who beheaded Medusa). The operation foiled an attempt to reconstitute a new Mafia Commission after the arrests of Mafia bosses Bernardo Provenzano, Antonio Rotolo, and Salvatore Lo Piccolo in 2006 and 2007. The object, as one tapped Mafioso put it, was to "re-establish Cosa Nostra" in the old style, with a single all-powerful boss, a "capo di capi".
Capizzi had been nominated as the possible head of the Commission. Among the other members were other historical Cosa Nostra bosses, such as Gerlando Alberti, Gregorio Agrigento from San Giuseppe Jato, Giovanni Lipari, Gaetano Fidanzati, Giuseppe Scaduto from Bagheria, and Salvatore Lombardo, the 87-year-old boss from Montelepre. Many of those arrested had recently been released from prison on health grounds, and were serving out their sentences under house arrest.
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