The assassination of Floriano Conti destroys Conti’s Armored Cadillac in a two-missile strike and kills the man Don Cantarella relied on as his right arm. Its immediate violence is followed by a wider political shock: Cantarella’s fear reshapes security around Villa Colacci, while Mario Satta later judges that Conti’s death has helped make Cantarella’s mainland power impossible to restore.

Preparation and Target

The attack follows a quiet domestic moment: Conti has just finished lunch in the penthouse across the avenue. At precisely 2:30, he comes out of the lift into the basement garage with his personal bodyguard. The Cadillac is waiting with its engine running, and a black Lancia carrying four more bodyguards waits behind it. Conti settles into the back seat; his bodyguard closes the door and takes the place beside the driver. The two cars begin moving up the ramp.

Across the avenue, Giuseppe has watched a man assemble a weapon. The man joins two thick tubes, fits an attachment into a grooved slot, and loads a squat, cone-shaped missile after depressing its fins. Giuseppe, who served in the army when he was young, recognizes that the tube is sophisticated and guesses that its attachment is a sight. The man takes a second missile and goggles, then moves into a back yard and peers over the low wall facing the avenue. The attack is thus prepared in view of witnesses, but from a position that conceals the shooter until the cars emerge.

The Strike

At street level, sunlight makes the men in the cars narrow their eyes. They nevertheless see a figure rise behind the wall, goggles distorting his face and a tube resting on his shoulder. Before they can react, flame bursts from the tube and the missile speeds toward the Cadillac. The driver brakes hard, making the heavy car dip and rebound on its reinforced springs, but the missile pierces the radiator, wrecks the engine, and burns the interior. The car teeters upright on its rear fender. A second missile strikes below the front axle and throws the five-ton vehicle backward onto the Lancia.

The force of the second impact turns the following car into part of the wreckage. A rear door flies open and one bodyguard gets out on all fours. He scrambles away from the hissing, twisted metal, stands, and pulls his gun. His first instinct is to run up the ramp, but he stops and looks back at the destruction. Shock overwhelms the impulse to fight: he backs into the garage wall, sinks onto his haunches, and lets the gun fall onto the concrete. He remains there when the first police car arrives. The scene offers no composed pursuit of the attacker, only a survivor immobilized by the scale of the violence.

Cantarella’s Response

Conti’s death strikes at the center of Cantarella’s authority. Conti had been his right arm, the physical instrument through which diplomacy was carried out. Cantarella tries to hide his fear, but Maurizio Dicandia and Cesare Gravelli recognize it. They are alarmed, yet their own wealth, status, and ambitions depend on their boss, so they listen as he orders Villa Colacci fortified. A thick dossier on the man capable of such violence adds to their concern; the attack has made the threat concrete even to men accustomed to power.

Cantarella’s orders turn the villa into the focus of an extensive lockdown. He calls for floodlights on the outer walls and the area two hundred meters beyond them, and for the purchase and demolition of every building within a one-kilometer radius. The grounds are to be patrolled around the clock, guard dogs acquired, and eighteen bodyguards housed at the villa in three shifts. A roadblock half a kilometer from the gates is to search every car inside and out; no vehicle is to enter the grounds. Even another boss or emissary may enter only alone and after a thorough search.

The most revealing order concerns the orchard. Cantarella commands that more than fifteen fruit trees along the inside of the walls be cut down. Twenty years earlier, when he bought the villa, he had personally supervised their planting, and the orchard had become a source of pride. His wife had died childless thirty years before, and he had never remarried; his entourage privately joked that the trees were his children. Destroying them therefore registers the depth of his fear in a way the practical security measures alone do not. The man who had nurtured the orchard is now willing to sacrifice it to make himself harder to reach.

His precautions extend beyond the estate. Cantarella orders every point of entry into Sicily watched, including ports as small as fishing villages, airports, airstrips, and trains or cars arriving by ferry from Reggio di Calabria. The response moves from defending a single residence to trying to seal the island against an attacker. Its breadth conveys both the reach of Cantarella’s resources and the limits of his confidence: after Conti’s killing, even the routes into his stronghold appear vulnerable.

Political Aftermath

In a later discussion, Guido Arrellio challenges Satta over his dealings with Creasy, and Massimo Bellu says that although the colonel bears no personal responsibility for Creasy, he sympathizes with him and will do everything he can. Satta confirms that the colonel has been useful and identifies Creasy’s killing of Conti as the key to the changed situation. Cantarella’s panic, Satta explains, has had consequences beyond the immediate attack: the organization on the mainland is already in flux, and Cantarella will never reimpose control there. Only in Sicily does he retain power, and even that authority is slipping day by day.

The assassination therefore works on two scales. In the garage, the missiles overcome reinforced metal and leave a bodyguard unable to act; afterward, the killing overcomes the appearance of Cantarella’s political stability. Conti’s function as intermediary made him more than a passenger in a destroyed car: his loss exposes the dependence of Cantarella’s authority on a trusted instrument of diplomacy. The sweeping precautions at Villa Colacci display the ruler’s capacity to command, but their excess also makes the damage to his confidence visible.