To the fury and dismay of relatives of Mafia victims, pages posted on the social networking site Facebook idolising notorious Cosa Nostra Godfathers have generated thousands of supporters in Italy.

The fan sites offer tributes not only to Salvatore (Toto) Riina, jailed in 1993, and Bernardo Provenzano, his successor, arrested two years ago, both from Corleone, but also to Matteo Messina Denaro, the Mafia boss from Trapani in Sicily who is said to be the current capo dei capi (boss of bosses).

Maria Falcone, the sister of Giovanni Falcone, the respected anti Mafia judge murdered in 1992, said she was outraged. ”Unfortunately, evil still fascinates our young people” she said.

Messina Denaro, 46, has a reputation as a Mafia playboy with a love of computer gadgetry, designer sunglasses, glamorous women and fast cars. He has been on the run since 1993 after murdering a rival Trapani boss and strangling his girlfriend, who was three months pregnant.

Some of the Facebook sites are in the names of people purporting to be the Cosa Nostra bosses. Facebook users accepted as ’friends’ by people posing as Messina Denaro post messages telling them they are ”honoured by his friendship”.

One fan site dedicated to Riina, 78, who is currently serving twelve life sentences for murder, has over 2,000 subscribers who left him messages wishing him a Happy Christmas, told him he was ”great” and even posted videos praising him.

A site dedicated to Provenzano, 75, who was captured at a dilapidated farmhouse near Corleone after more than four decades on the run, has some 200 subscribers calling him “Number One” and claiming to ”honour someone who tricked the state for 40 years”. The site is running a competition to find Provenzano look-alikes.

They also claim they communicate with each other by using pizzini, the folded notes - often in code - sent by Provenzano to his Mafia lieutenants with instructions relating to murder, extortion rackets and other Mafia crimes. 150 of Provenzano’s Facebook admirers have signed up to a call for him to be made a saint immediately (”santo subito”), an echo of demands for the swift canonisation of Pope John Paul II on his death in 2005.

Relatives of Mafia victims said that the phenomenon reflected a lack of public and state support for the victims of Mafia crimes, and a glamorisation of the perpetrators. Giovanna Maggiani Chelli, of the Victims of Via Georgofili Association, named after the site of a Mafia bombing in Florence in 1993, said: ”Subscribers to these groups are going crazy over the Mafia bosses and laughing at extremely serious crimes”.

Ms Maggiani Chelli told ANSA that given the indifference toward Mafia victims and the isolation in which they found themselves, it was quite logical for subscribers to Facebook to write ’Riina is great’ or to look for Bernardo Provenzano clones. "At the end of the day, they’ve won,” she added.

Ms Falcone said films which glamorised the Mafia did not help. La Repubblica, an Italian daily newspaper, pointed out however that fan pages on Facebook dedicated to victims such as Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, another anti-Mafia judge also murdered in 1992, were significantly more popular than those of the Mafia bosses, with 184,206 subscribers.

Two weeks ago anti Mafia police carried out extensive raids against the Sicilian Mafia in Palermo with the aim of “decapitating” Cosa Nostra’s leadership structure, known as the cupola (dome), or The Commission. The cupola, which under Riina authorised the murders of Falcone and Borsellino by remote-controlled car bombs, has been in abeyance since the arrest of Provenzano, but had reportedly been revived under Messina Denaro.

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