Lucia Riina, 39, the youngest daughter of late Corleonesi Cosa Nostra mafia boss Totò Riina, posted some photos on Facebook last fall with the caption "new life" flagging a restaurant called after the infamous Cosa Nostra fief in Paris.
Her father, who was arrested in Palermo in January 1993, died in prison on November 17, 2017. She had long wished to leave Corleone, where she said she felt "oppressed" and "marginalised", and where she maintained that she and her family had a low income.
Now, part of the new life she posted about includes a restaurant that has opened in the City of Lights, called "Corleone by Lucia Riina".
Riina moved with her husband Vincenzo Bellomo, 44, and their two-year-old daughter to Paris, where the restaurant bearing her autograph promises "authentic Sicilian-Italian food to discover in an elegant and welcoming atmosphere".
The restaurant - located on the Rue Daru, not far from the Arc de Triomphe - is owned by an Italian S.p.A. corporation called Luvitopace, with a share capital of 1,000 euros and whose president is Pierre Duthilleul.
The young man who answered the phone at the restaurant said it wouldn't be possible to speak with Bellomo or Riina and that the restaurant is owned by two French citizens.
Lucia, reached by chat, asked for "respect for privacy" and said she doesn't give interviews.
She married Vincenzo Bellomo, a Corleone native, in 2008.
Bellomo became the focus of antimafia investigations after it was suspected he was the "Vincenzo Bellomo" referred to in a "pizzino", a handwritten note on a small slip of paper used by the mafia for passing information and directives.
The pizzino was found in the hideout of Montagna dei Cavalli, in Corleone, where mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano was arrested.
In 2017, after Lucia Riina's daughter was born, she was twice denied a state "baby bonus" welfare payment by the City of Corleone, and then once denied the bonus by the Italian social security agency INPS.
At that time, she wrote on Facebook: "We will ask the Italian president to revoke Italian citizenship both for us as well as for our daughter, so that it will be clear to the entire world how the Italy of politics and media treats its children, because they are ugly, dirty, and evil".
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