A boss of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, cut off the little finger of a prison guard this summer with his teeth before swallowing it, reports the Rome newspaper Il Messagero.
Giuseppe Fanara, 60, had been serving a life sentence for nine years in the Roman prison of Rebibbia, under the special regime of article “41 bis” of the Italian Penal Code reserved for mafia.
According to information from Messagero, the inmate attacked last June seven police officers from the prison who came to check his cell.
During a clinch, on the very floor of his cell, he punched an officer in the face and then bit the little finger of his right hand. The finger was not found, which led a Rome prosecutor to conclude that the thug had eaten it, adds the newspaper.
Following this act, the prisoner allegedly threw himself on the constable’s other six colleagues using a broomstick as a weapon. “I will slit your throat like pigs”, the man allegedly yelled after being transferred to the high security prison of Sassari in Sardinia.
Giuseppe Fanara was sentenced to life imprisonment during a trial in 2009, the result of a crackdown against the mafia in 2006 in the region of Agrigento, Sicily.
The trial, which resulted in three life sentences and an 18-year prison sentence, concerned the murder of two brothers who had rebelled against Cosa Nostra’s demands, as well as the murder of three men following conflicts between mafia clans at the end of the 90s.