ROME, Nov 5: Sicilian police on Monday arrested Mafia supremo Salvatore Lo Piccolo just a year and a half after nabbing his predecessor as the “boss of bosses,” Bernardo Provenzano.

Sicilian regional president Salvatore Cuffaro called the arrests a “fatal blow” against the Cosa Nostra.

Around 40 officers stormed a house in Giardinello, outside Palermo, where Lo Piccolo was meeting with three other Mafia figures, including his 32-year-old son Sandro, in a garage, police said. The police had surrounded the house and fired warning shots before moving in.

Sandro Lo Piccolo, in tears, kept repeating “I love you, Daddy” during the arrests, ANSA said. Police seized money and weapons in the raid.

“It’s an extraordinary day for Italian democracy and the fight against the Mafia,” said Francesco Forgione, chairman of the Italian parliament’s anti-mafia committee, noting Lo Piccolo’s links with US crime syndicates.

“The Lo Piccolos were two bosses involved in restructuring the Mafia after the arrest of Provenzano, and are go-betweens with the American mafia.”

“We are extremely pleased,” said Palermo prosecutor Francesco Messineo. “Now we expect a series of positive consequences for breaking up the criminal machine,” he told ANSA.

The arrests coincided with Palermo’s annual “memory day” honouring victims of the Sicilian Mafia, the oldest and most famous of Italy’s criminal organisations. Nicknamed Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”), the Mafia controls Sicily’s economy as well as its political affairs.

Among hundreds of killings blamed on the Cosa Nostra were the assassinations of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.

Provenzano, 74, arrested in April 2006 after more than four decades on the run, is serving 10 life sentences.

His predecessor as Mafia supremo, Toto Riina, 76, presided over the Falcone and Borsellino murders. He has been in jail since 1993 serving some 15 life sentences, mostly for murder.

Organised crime — including the Sicilian Mafia, the Naples Camorra, the ‘Ndrangheta of southern Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita in the southeastern Apulia region — has a turnover of some 90bn euros ($128 billion), some seven per cent of Italy’s GDP, according to a report last month.

Businesses pay some 30bn euros in extortion money — known here as “pizzo” — to crime syndicates each year, the report said, adding that some 160,000 businesses, especially in the south, regularly pay pizzo.—AFP