 In October 1997, an arrest warrant was issued against Contorno for drug trafficking, together with his cousin Gaetano Grado.In November 2004, Contorno was arrested again for extorting a former fellow cellmate, but the charges were dropped.According to the writer Leonardo Sciascia, Contorno lived inside the world of the Mafia "the way the rest of us live inside our own skin, as if the Mafia were a state into which you were born and always remained a citizen of."