On this day‬ in 1928, in Palermo, Salvatore Lima was born. He was a member of the Italian parliament, and became the 7th Mayor of Palermo in 1958, he also had connections with the mob. These connections would result in the 1992 death of Salvo when he was gunned down in daylight after his chauffeur driven car was shot at.

Born on this day in 1928 in the sun-baked streets of Palermo, Sicily, Salvatore Lima would grow to become one of the most controversial and consequential political figures in post-war Italian history. A man who walked the razor-thin line between legitimate power and organised crime, Lima embodied the deep, often inseparable relationship between the Sicilian Mafia and the Italian political establishment that defined much of the twentieth century.

Lima rose swiftly through the ranks of Italian politics, becoming the 7th Mayor of Palermo in 1958 and serving in that role until 1963, before going on to represent Palermo in the Italian parliament as a leading figure of the Christian Democracy party. His political patron was the enormously influential Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy, and together the pair wielded extraordinary power over Sicily and beyond. But behind the polished veneer of democratic respectability lay a far darker set of allegiances. Lima was widely understood to be the political representative of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, and in particular maintained close ties to the powerful Salvo cousins, Nino and Ignazio, whose financial empire served as a crucial bridge between the mob and the political world.

Unlike the American Mafia's Five Families or figures such as Lucky Luciano — who had himself played a significant role in liaising between the American underworld and Sicilian organised crime during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 — Lima operated not with a gun in his hand but with a pen and a parliamentary mandate. His value to Cosa Nostra was his ability to deliver favours, influence judicial proceedings, and protect mob interests from within the very institutions meant to oppose them. For decades, this arrangement functioned with cold efficiency.

It was when that arrangement broke down that Lima paid the ultimate price. In March 1992, the Italian Supreme Court upheld the convictions of hundreds of Mafia members in the landmark Maxi Trial, a result that Cosa Nostra had expected Lima to prevent through his political influence. He had failed them. On the 12th of March 1992, Lima was assassinated in Palermo, shot dead by Mafia gunmen whilst travelling by car — a brutal and very public message that no one, regardless of their status or connections, was beyond reach.

Salvatore Lima's life and violent death remain a defining chapter in the story of Mafia infiltration of the Italian state, and his assassination is widely regarded as the opening shot in Cosa Nostra's catastrophic declaration of war against the Italian establishment that would consume the island throughout 1992.