Four times they tried to kill me," he told AFP.īarely in his teens when he took part in his first armed robbery, he was sent at 17 to Germany, where a Hamburg-based friend of an uncle taught him how to rig poker games. "They killed my grandfather, my uncles, my cousins.
He hides nothing: he killed or organised killings, time after time, because, he says, he had no choice. At the time, internal mob rivalries were claiming hundreds of lives per year on the island. With journalist Carmelo Sardo, Grassonelli has told his story in prize-winning book "Malerba".īetween 1991 and his arrest in November 1992, Grassonelli was a leading figure in La Stidda, a group which emerged in the 1980s as a splinter from and rival to Cosa Nostra, the long-established Sicilian mafia. In the visiting room at Sulmona prison in Italy's mountainous Abruzzo region, he greets callers with a steely gaze and recounts his blood-stained life in unflinching fashion.
"Pippo", now 50, says they were necessary for his own survival and is resigned to spending the rest of his life in jail. MONA, Italy - More than two decades in prison spent studying and writing has made convicted Sicilian killer Giuseppe Grassonelli a changed man.īut the one-time petty criminal who became a player in the island's brutal mafia wars of the 1980s and early 1990s expresses no remorse for his crimes.
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