The daughter of a notorious Sicilian mafia boss has opened a restaurant near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris called Corleone.
Lucia Riina, a painter and the youngest child of the late “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Totò” Riina, named the establishment after her father’s home town and the crime family in Francis Ford Coppola’s award-winning Godfather trilogy of films.
”Discover real Italian-Sicilian cuisine in a cosy and elegant place,” says the ad on a Facebook page.
Nicknamed the Beast because of his cruelty, Salvatore Riina was an unrepentant criminal who not only assassinated his criminal rivals on an unprecedented scale in the 1980s and 90s, but also targeted the prosecutors, journalists, and judges who sought to stand in his way. He is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, including a 13-year-old boy who was kidnapped, strangled and dissolved in acid. Riina was serving 26 life sentences when he died of cancer in November 2017.
The news of the restaurant opening drew criticism in Italy. Riina’s family was believed to be in financial difficulty after having much of their property confiscated, with his son-in-law pleading poverty and begging for money online.
Yesterday, the Sicilian tax agency asked Riina’s family to pay the €2m (£1.8m) it cost to keep him in prison for 24 years until he died.
'‘The law expressly excludes that the expenses for costs in prison extends to the family members of the detained. There must have been a mistake,” Riina’s family lawyer, Luca Cianferoni, told the press.
It is not the first time that Riina’s family members have capitalised on Sicily’s old image as a mobster haven or their father’s name for their marketing strategy.
Less than a month after Totò’s death, another of his daughters, Concetta Riina, attempted to trade on his infamy with a range of espresso products bearing his name. Concetta created an online espresso store named Uncle Totò and said she was accepting pre-orders for espresso pods in order to raise money after police seized the family’s savings. The online store disappeared soon after being exposed by Italian media.
“This is totally unacceptable,” the mayor of the Sicilian town of Corleone, Nicolò Nicolosi, told the Guardian. “It is not right that members of a family who have killed the image of this city, a family which killed dozens of Corleonesi and Sicilians are using the name of our city for economic advantages and to make money.”
Lucia Riina declined to comment.
