ROME, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) -- Italy's most notorious mafia boss, Toto Riina, died on Friday.
Riina, 87, had been in a medically induced coma for two days at the prisoners' wing of the hospital in Parma, northern Italy, after undergoing two surgeries for cancer in latest weeks.
He died in the early hours of Friday, according to Ansa news agency. His relatives had been given special permission from the Italian Health Ministry to visit him in latest days.
Riina had been jailed in January 1993, and was serving 26 life sentences under special hard-prison regime for ordering dozens of killings, including those of Italy's top anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Despite his long detention -- and the tougher conditions and isolation required by the so-called "41-bis regime" for mafia prisoners -- investigators believed he still played a role in the decisions of the Sicilian mafia.
In a wiretap talk with her wife in jail in July, Riina was caught saying that he was "regretting nothing... they would never break me, even if they give me 3,000 years in jail."
In those weeks, the lawyers of the mobster had just asked Italian justice authorities to suspend his sentences and release him due to his very serious health conditions.
The request was denied, after a court stated the care he would receive at the prison hospital's ward would be no less timely and effective than those available for him outside prison.
Toto Riina has long ruled over the Sicilian mafia -- or "Cosa Nostra" -- when this was the most powerful and dangerous of Italy's three mobs.
He was the son of a poor Sicilian farmer, and born in the small town of Corleone, a major stronghold of Cosa Nostra in the hearth of Sicily. His clan would later become known as the "Corleonesi."
He was believed to have joined the mafia in his early 20s, and went underground since early 1950s, according to investigators and senior anti-mafia reporters.
Between the late 1970s and the 1980s, Riina indisputably became one of the two leading figures of the mob, along with Bernardo Provenzano.
The murder of top judges Falcone and Borsellino was one of his most infamous acts. Both were killed by car bombs in 1992, in a strategy of direct confrontation with the Italian state ordered by Riina.
In the end, however, such strategy brought about the decline of his Corleonesi clan. Both his sons have been sentenced for mafia, and the eldest, Giovanni, is serving a life term for multiple murders.
