Mario Iovine was unwilling to accept passively the murder of his brother even if that brother had performed the most reviled and despicable acts on earth not merely because of the family tie which around here is especially strong even in such a disgraced family but especially because he considered it a personal insult that demanded to be cleansed with blood he called Antonio Bardellino in Santo Domingo and asked him to teach his nephew a lesson but Bardellino claimed that it was Mimmo who was in the wrong and that what had happened was bound to happen Mario Iovine however was not the kind of person who is willing to listen to reason and in any case he could not accept his brother’s murder and so encouraged by Sandokan as well he decided that Antonio Bardellino had to die by now relations were poisoned and murder was only the next logical step because in fact for a while now Mario Iovine had been nurturing the desire for revenge against the man who had long been considered the smartest member of the group the charismatic leader and now the explosive charge of resentment and envy that had been building up inside him could finally be detonated it was as if you could smell it in the air that after everything that had happened there was only room for one of the two and now the time had come for one of them to die

there are many who believe that Mimmo’s murder was an ambush laid by Sandokan to give Mario Iovine a justification for eliminating Antonio Bardellino and that it was Sandokan who persuaded Antonio Bardellino to authorize the elimination of Mimmo by telling him that Mimmo’s brother was in favor of that solution because Mimmo was a carabinieri informer and had helped the prosecution prevail in a trial but once Mimmo had been murdered Sandokan convinced Mario Iovine that Mimmo hadn’t deserved to be killed and so they plotted to murder Antonio Bardellino they traveled together to Brazil though there are those who claim that they killed Antonio Bardellino in Santo Domingo and then moved his body to Brazil where it was found there are numerous doubts on this point and in fact when his corpse was found some said that it wasn’t him at all but the corpse of a black man who more or less resembled him and that the whole thing was a cunning trick on Antonio Bardellino’s part to persuade everyone that he was dead so that he could carry on with his business affairs undisturbed

as always however telecapèra provided eyewitness accounts and confirmed that the corpse really was Antonio Bardellino’s dead body and told the story of how the group of select killers led by Mario Iovine and Sandokan went to Brazil where they killed him and left his corpse on the beach they killed him by strangling him with their bare hands and then they mutilated his face which is why doubts arose and some ventured the theory that the corpse wasn’t his another version is that on Sandokan’s advice Mario Iovine conveyed to to Antonio Bardellino the false report that Interpol had tracked him down in Santo Domingo and was about to arrest him and that he did this to induce Antonio Bardellino to travel to Brazil and when he arrived there at his beach house which was the clan base house there Mario Iovine and Sandokan were waiting for him in ambush but Mario Iovine’s pistol jammed so Sandokan stepped in and hit him at the base of the neck with a sledgehammer then hit him again repeatedly shattering his skull and then they wrapped the body in a carpet and buried it in a hole they dug on the beach