SALVATORE ("TOTO") RIINA, WHO listed his occupation as shepherd, once said the surest cure for a sore finger is to cut off the arm to which it is attached. Last week Italy's organized-crime network was decapitated when the 62-year-old godfather of the Sicilian Mafia was arrested as his car sat stuck in Palermo's rush-hour traffic.
As the don quietly surrendered -- confirming his identity and complimenting his captors -- Italy's law enforcers smelled a larger victory in their struggle against the Mob. Riina's capture was the latest in a series of successes by the government since it began to get tough with entrenched crime following the 1992 murders of two of the country's top Mafia prosecutors. Last September, Giuseppe ("Piddu") Madonia, a member of the Mafia's 24-man decision-making body known as the Cupola, was caught after police tapped his portable phone. The same week Carmine Alfieri, the leader of the Camorra, the Naples crime syndicate that competes and cooperates with the Sicilian Mafia, was taken into custody. Even Riina's 84-year-old uncle was picked up in the search for the top don. Nonetheless, said Interior Minister Nicola Mancino, "the fight is a long way from being finished."
Toto Riina, whose underlings dubbed him "the Short One" and whose enemies called him "the Beast," had been on the run for 23 years. Suspected of ordering at least 150 killings, he was convicted in absentia in 1987 of murder and drug trafficking and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Some sources suggested he had undergone plastic surgery to change his appearance, but apart from grayer hair and a more pronounced paunch, the man captured last week bore an unmistakable likeness to an FBI computer-generated drawing based on the last known photograph of Riina, from 1973.
The don's blood-soaked leadership of the crime family based in the western town of Corleone -- and through it, of Sicily's criminal kingdom -- had finally repelled a country that romanticized and at times even sympathized with the so-called men of honor. Says Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist and author of two books on the Mafia: "Every time he had to make a choice between convincing and killing someone, he chose to kill."
A near illiterate with a brilliant criminal mind, Riina committed a series of blunders that led to his downfall. Among his mistakes, say authorities:
-- He ordered the assassinations last year of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two widely admired magistrates who had made Mafia busting their life's work. Public outrage over the murders, and the seeming untouchability of those who committed them, stiffened the Italian government's resolve to confront organized crime. The national assembly swiftly passed sweeping antiracketeering laws that permit wider use of phone taps, property searches, confiscation of the property of suspected Mafiosi and guarantees of protection for state's witnesses.