Giuseppe "Don Pippo" Calò (30 September 1931–) was the Mafia boss of Porta Nuova from 1969 to 1985, succeeding Giuseppe Corvaia and preceding Salvatore Cangemi. Commonly known as "the Mafia's cashier" due to his deep involvement in money laundering, Calò was responsible for the 1984 Train 904 bombing which killed 16 and injured more than 200 people, and he was sentenced to life in prison during the Maxi Trial.
Biography[]
Calò was born on 30 September 1931 to an Italian family in Palermo, Sicily. A mafioso since his youth, Calò became a man of honor in the Porta Nuova family in 1954 after murdering a man as revenge for his father, and by 1969, he'd become the boss, leading many men beneath him such as his best friend Tommaso Buscetta. A member of the Commission, Calò moved to Rome in the early 1970s seeking new financial opportunities, and he used a fake identity to invest in real estate and launder illicit money through it. During his time in Rome, he built relationships with the Banda della Magliana, Neo-fascist groups, Italian intelligence agencies and the Camorra. When Salvatore Riina kicked off his campaign against the Palermo Mafia clans in 1981, Calò joined up with Riina and helped him carry out the murder of several important Palermo bosses, such as Rosario Riccobono and Salvatore Scaglione, and he also killed Tommaso Buscetta's sons, which led him to become a friend of the State. In order to divert attention away from the breaking news of Buscetta's intel, Calò set up the 23 December 1984 Train 904 bombing where a bomb was placed in a train arriving to Milan from Naples, and the casualties included 16 dead and 267 injured. The authorities caught up with the fugitive Calò on 30 March 1985, when he and fellow Palermo boss Antonino Rotolo were captured together in a villa in Poggio San Lorenzo, and Calò was charged, tried and convicted at the Palermo Maxi Trial, being sentenced to 23 years in prison in 1987 before being found guilty in the Train 904 bombing and given a life sentence.