On this day in 1981 Stefano Bontade, a Sicilian mobster who was the boss of the Santa Maria di Gesù Family in Palermo was machine-gunned down while driving his car back from his 42nd Birthday party. The hitman was said to be part of the Corleonesi, in particular Toto Riina‘s favorite hitman, Pino Greco.

His death would spark an all-out war (The Second Mafia War) that would rage on until 1983, leaving hundreds of mobsters dead.

On this day in 1981, Stefano Bontade, one of the most powerful and politically connected Mafia bosses in Sicily, was murdered in cold blood whilst driving home from his own 42nd birthday party. Ambushed on a Palermo street, Bontade was cut down in a hail of Kalashnikov fire in what would prove to be one of the most consequential assassinations in the history of the Sicilian Mob. It was a brutal and deliberate message, and every man of honour in Palermo understood exactly who had sent it.

Bontade was no ordinary mobster. The son of Francesco Paolo Bontade, himself a respected Mafia patriarch, Stefano inherited leadership of the Santa Maria di Gesù family and rose to become one of the most influential figures within the Sicilian Cosa Nostra's ruling body, the Cupola. Charming, sophisticated, and well-connected to Italian politicians, businessmen, and the aristocracy, he earned the nickname "Il Falco" — the Falcon — and was widely regarded as a man of considerable intellect and strategic vision. He maintained strong transatlantic ties, cultivating relationships with Italian-American organised crime figures who traced their roots back to the same Sicilian traditions shaped in the era of Lucky Luciano's consolidation of American mob power.

Yet for all his influence, Bontade had made a dangerous enemy. Salvatore "Totò" Riina, the ruthless and uncompromising boss of the Corleonesi clan, had grown increasingly hostile toward the more established Palermo families, viewing their power and their moderation as obstacles to his own total domination of the Sicilian underworld. The triggerman dispatched to end Bontade's life was believed to be Pino Greco, known as "Scarpuzzedda," Riina's most trusted and feared assassin, a man whose capacity for violence was legendary even within Cosa Nostra's brutal ranks.

Bontade's murder did not intimidate his allies into submission — it ignited them. Within weeks, his close associate Salvatore Inzerillo was also killed, and the island was plunged into the Second Mafia War, a savage and largely one-sided conflict that raged from 1981 to 1983. The Corleonesi systematically slaughtered their rivals, wiping out entire factions and cementing Riina's iron grip over the whole of Cosa Nostra. Hundreds of mobsters and innocent bystanders lost their lives before the bloodshed finally subsided.

The death of Stefano Bontade marked the end of the old Sicilian Mafia order — cultured, political, and bound by long-standing codes — and ushered in an era of unprecedented brutality that would ultimately lead to the state crackdowns of the late 1980s and early 1990s.