Salvatore Cancemi

Salvatore Cancemi (Palermo, March 19, 1942 – January 14, 2011) was a member of the Sicilian Mafia. He would be the first member of the Sicilian Mafia Commission that turned himself in voluntarily and became a pentito, a collaborator with the Italian judicial authorities. Cancemi made controversial allegations about the collusion of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his right-hand man Marcello Dell'Utri with the Mafia, which have not been corroborated.

Cancemi’s blood family had no tradition within the Mafia, his father had set up a thriving butcher shop. Cancemi was initiated into the Porta Nuova Mafia family in 1976 at the age of 34. His godfather was Vittorio Mangano. In 1985 he substituted Giuseppe Calò as the boss of the Porta Nuova family after Calò was arrested. He replaced Calò in the Cupola (the Sicilian Mafia Commission) as head of the mandamento of Porta Nuova that included the Mafia families of Palermo Centro and Borgo Vecchio as well.

In 1976 Cancemi was sent to jail for stealing a load of meat from a butcher who had refused to pay the pizzo – protection money. In prison Tommaso Buscetta took care of the freshly initiated Cancemi. Twenty years later, when Cancemi was reunited with Buscetta at one of the many trials in the 1990s, he confessed that he had personally participated in the strangling of two of Buscetta’s sons in 1982, on the order of Totò Riina. Buscetta embraced Cancemi and said: "You could not refuse the order. I forgive you because I know what it means to be in Cosa Nostra."

Cancemi was involved in the preparations and executions of the murders on Antimafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. He acted as a look-out for the team that placed and detonated the bomb at Capaci which killed Falcone, his wife and three men of his escort. Cancemi initially denied to have participated in the murder on Borsellino, but had to admit his involvement when other pentiti confirmed his participation.

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