 Di Pisa was born in Palermo.He was described by Norman Lewis in "The Honoured Society" as "a garish young freebooter, habitually begloved, shirted in a puce silk and with a coat of the palest camel hair – a kind of latter-day George Raft.He drove a butter-coloured, gadget-festooned Alfa Romeo, and with his dandified presence he was anathema to the mafiosi of the old school …."