Michele Cavataio

Many appeals would follow. In 2007, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano went on trial for their role in the Viale Lazio Massacre that resulted in Cavataio and his men's deaths. Riina is accused of ordering the massacre and Provenzano is accused of taking part in it. In April 2009, nearly 40 years after the attack, they were both sentenced to life imprisonment.

The killers entered the office of the construction company of Girolamo Moncada, the builder who had been connected with Angelo La Barbera and now with Cavataio. Cavataio was able to shoot and kill Calogero Bagarella and wound Caruso before Provenzano killed him with a Beretta 38/A submachine gun and earned himself a reputation as a Mafia killer with the attack. However, according to one of the participants who turned government witness in 1999, Gaetano Grado, it was Provenzano who messed up the attack, shooting too early. In the office 108 bullets had been fired.

In September 1972, the trial for the Viale Lazio massacre took place; 24 defendants had been rounded up. Filippo and Angelo Moncada, the builder's sons, were at first imprisoned on suspicion of being part of the plot. In hospital, where he was interned for his gunshot wounds, Fillippo started talking about his father's meetings with notorious mafiosi, and described how Cavataio had gradually become the real boss in Moncada's firm.

Cavataio and three of his men were killed on 10 December 1969 in the Viale Lazio – a modern street in the smart new northern area of Palermo – by a Mafia hit squad including Bernardo Provenzano, Calogero Bagarella (an elder brother of Leoluca Bagarella the brother-in-law of Totò Riina), Emanuele D'Agostino and Gaetano Grado of Stefano Bontade's Santa Maria di Gesù Family, and Damiano Caruso, a soldier of Giuseppe Di Cristina, the Mafia boss of Riesi. The attack is known as the Viale Lazio massacre (Lazio Street Massacre).

Cavataio then participated, along with Pietro Torretta, Buscetta and another Acquasanta capo, in several car bomb attacks on the Grecos and their allies, considered enemies because of their intrusion in the wholesale produce market. He was responsible for a car bomb that exploded near Greco's house in Ciaculli on 30 June 1963, killing seven police and military officers sent to defuse it after an anonymous phone call. The outrage over the Ciaculli massacre changed the Mafia war into a war against the Mafia. It prompted the first concerted anti-Mafia efforts by the state in post-war Italy. The Sicilian Mafia Commission was dissolved and of those mafiosi who had escaped arrest many went abroad. Cavataio was arrested.

Cavataio was arrested in July 1963. He received a four-year sentence at the Trial of the 114 against the Mafia in Catanzaro in December 1968, despite an indictment for ten murders. He was sentenced for criminal association and soon left jail when in appeal his sentence was reduced to two years.

Cavataio was one of the protagonists of the first Mafia War in 1962-63. According to the pentito Tommaso Buscetta it was Michele Cavataio who deliberately escalated a dispute between different factions. The conflict erupted over an underweight shipment of heroin. The shipment was financed by Cesare Manzella, the Greco cousins from Ciaculli and the La Barbera brothers. Suspicion fell on Calcedonio Di Pisa, who had collected the heroin and had organised the transport to New York.

The case was brought before the Mafia Commission, but disagreement on how to handle it led to a bloody conflict between clans allied with the Grecos, headed by Salvatore "Ciaschiteddu" Greco, and clans allied with the La Barberas – in particular when Di Pisa was killed on 26 December 1962. The Grecos suspected the La Barberas of the attack.

In 1955, the bosses of the Acquasanta Mafia clan, Gaetano Galatolo and Nicola D’Alessandro were killed in a dispute over the protection rackets when the fruit and vegetable wholesale market moved from the Zisa area to Acquasanta, disturbing the delicate power balances within Cosa Nostra. The killer of Galatolo was never identified, but Cavataio was suspected. Cavataio became the new boss of the clan and had to agree to split the profits of the wholesale market racket with the Greco Mafia clan of Ciaculli, who traditionally controlled fruit and vegetable supply to Palermo wholesale market.

Cavataio was seen as an exponent of a 'new' Mafia of Americanised gangsters that appeared in the mid 1950s. After World War II, he made his fortune selling petrol that was stolen from the Italian Navy. From the modest position of a taxi driver, he accumulated a considerable fortune in a few years, according to a report of the Parliamentary Antimafia Commission. The Acquasanta Mafia family controlled the docks of Palermo that were situated in their area. They acted as strike breakers against the dockworkers, and did not hesitate to shoot at the strikers if necessary.

Michele Cavataio (18 March 1929 – 10 December 1969), also known as Il cobra (The cobra) was an Italian mobster and powerful member of the Sicilian Mafia. He was the boss of the Acquasanta mandamento in Palermo and was a member of the first Sicilian Mafia Commission. Some sources spell his surname as Cavatajo.