Boss of Bosses (17 page)

While Cosa Nostra’s response to these outrages was under discussion, a power struggle was developing behind the scenes. A meeting took place near Palermo in February 1992, unusual in that both Riina and Provenzano were present but particularly memorable because Provenzano turned up wearing a bishop’s robes, complete with mitre and sash. The whole scene was witnessed by a nineteen-year-old woman, who later became a collaborator. Giusy Vitale gave her mafioso brother a lift to the meeting and remembered being astonished to see a senior cleric alighting from a chauffeured car to attend a meeting of Cosa Nostra – until her brother explained it was Provenzano in disguise. Riina was reported to find the whole scene very distasteful and told Binnu not to pull any similar stunts again.

At this meeting, held in a farmhouse in the countryside near Palermo, there was a bid to push aside some of the older figures in the commission, in favour of young bloods, a movement spurred on by the ambitious Vitale brothers, Leonardo and Vito, and supported by the young Trapani boss, Matteo Messina Denaro. These young guns were all for the use of violence and self-styled followers of Totò Riina. At this meeting he rewarded the Vitale brothers by giving them control of Partinico. It was a clear message to anyone thinking of opposing him in future.

Towards the end of February another summit took place. The commission met again at the farmhouse in Enna, and here Cosa Nostra’s top representatives – Riina and Provenzano, Nitto ‘the Hunter’ Santapaola, boss of Catania, and Piddu Madonia, capo of Caltanissetta – agreed the strategy for a series of top-level assassinations.
The Corleonesi already had the blood of many on their hands: about a thousand people had died during their bid for total control in the early 1980s. Eminent representatives of the state had been shot down in broad daylight, in busy streets. Now they were planning the most devastating bomb attack ever attempted – on a moving target in an armoured car. Giovanni Falcone was not going to be allowed to destroy years of empire-building.

The supergrass Nino Calderone saw this decision as an act of desperation. ‘A spectacular public bombing is never in the interest of the Mafia . . . it is a sign of weakness.’ It was a response to a series of defeats, which the Mafia no longer knew how to tackle. ‘The Corleonesi and the other dominant Mafia families lost their heads.’

It’s tempting to imagine Provenzano trying to dissuade his
paesano
from such a risky strategy, particularly in the light of his later peaceful regime. Tempting, but wrong.

‘The leaders of Cosa Nostra were in full agreement over the decision to murder Falcone and Borsellino’, says Di Matteo. ‘So much so, that Provenzano put forward his own men in Palermo for the via d’Amelio bombing [which killed Borsellino]. Those two attacks involved men of honour from both factions: those close to Provenzano, like Aglieri, and those close to Riina, like Brusca.

‘Provenzano may not have attended every commission meeting, because of the rule that he and Riina alternated, but according to the
pentiti
who were in a position to know, he took a full and active part. It was not until he understood the reaction to the bombings that he changed his strategy.’

Riina’s godson Giovanni Brusca, who had killed many times for the organization, was outraged that Provenzano later distanced himself from the decision to wage open war on the state. He was deeply mistrustful of the Accountant’s background manoeuvres.

‘I noticed that throughout the whole preparatory phase Bernardo Provenzano and Pietro Aglieri were never to be seen. They were just like a bucket and mop: wherever one went, the other followed. They had a perfect understanding. It’s no secret that I could never stand them, because they’re the kind who let everyone else do the dirty work and think they can keep their hands clean.

‘Provenzano never came out with his opinion,’ Brusca said, ‘but before you jump to any conclusions, this doesn’t mean he was against the bombings. He just wanted someone else to do the job. I never once heard him say he was opposed to a murder.’

In private Brusca vented his frustration to his godfather that Provenzano had held back during the planning phase. Riina merely laughed, and said, ‘I tied up the dogs. They can’t say they didn’t agree to it.’

According to Brusca, there was some discussion between Provenzano and Riina about whether to kill Falcone in Rome or in Palermo. Matteo Messina Denaro, the ambitious and dedicated young capo from Trapani, was detailed to follow their target everywhere in Rome, note his movements, watch when he was alone, when he walked, when he took the car. But then there was a change of plan: Riina brought Messina Denaro back to Sicily and told him the assassination had to happen in Palermo.

Pietro Grasso, chief anti-Mafia prosecutor, believes Riina had a motive for killing Falcone in Sicily: ‘Riina’s neither ingenuous nor mad, and nor are the other bosses who made that decision with him. We can only surmise that someone gave them a guarantee: kill him by all means, but do it in Palermo. Don’t worry about the state’s reaction. There won’t be any major consequences.’

Provenzano had learned from his soundings in the corridors of power that some would not be unhappy if judge Falcone was removed. It seems improbable, to anyone who witnessed the outcry after Falcone’s death, but he was getting perilously close to a major corruption scandal, and several prominent figures were risking exposure and disgrace.

‘Falcone had turned his attention to the Mafia’s involvement in contracting’, Giuffré recalls. ‘That was too hot. But after he had completed his investigation and delivered the files, he was transferred. We breathed a sigh of relief: if he wasn’t there to see the investigation through, it was bound to stall. But we’d got it wrong: it wasn’t like other times, when people were promoted and you never heard of them again. It was much worse.’

Falcone’s files contained 990 pages of closely researched figures, payments and bank transfers, details of every named company that had
dealings with Cosa Nostra, including several run by Provenzano and his consiglieri Masino Cannella and Pino Lipari.

‘The situation got dangerous because we were afraid’, Giuffré recalled. ‘But not just us. The whole Italian machine, political and economic, was afraid. They started talking about Falcone becoming president of a new national anti-Mafia organization, and that was too much. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’

Falcone’s death sentence had been uttered years earlier, when he persuaded Tommaso Buscetta to talk: now it was time for action. Cosa Nostra’s cosy relationship with power was under threat of exposure. If members of Cosa Nostra were afraid, how much more terrifying for the politicians and industrialists who had been dishonestly lining their pockets for years. The symbiotic bond between certain Christian Democrats and Cosa Nostra had existed for decades but had changed in tenor. From agreeing to support candidates in exchange for fixing contracts, Cosa Nostra became dictatorial and threatening. Riina’s link to the party, the MEP Salvo Lima, was told to fix the maxi-trial verdicts. He was warned: ‘Stick to your promise or we’ll kill you and your whole family.’

According to one
pentito
, in 1980 Prime Minister Andreotti had flown to Sicily to meet the boss Stefano Bontate, and to protest in person against the murder of the Christian Democrat president of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella. The boss reportedly told the prime minister to back off: ‘We’re in charge here,’ he told the Italian premier, ‘and if you don’t want to destroy the [Christian Democrats], you do what we say, otherwise we’ll take away your votes.’

The confirmation of the maxi-trial verdicts was clear evidence that their contacts in the Christian Democrats were no longer any use to Cosa Nostra. After the verdicts Riina had to show his political friends that this wasn’t good enough. Provenzano claimed that he tried, in his paternal way, to protect Lima: ‘I put my hands up to stop him banging his head’, he told Giuffré. But it wasn’t enough.

Lima had a villa in the elegant beach resort of Mondello, Palermo’s marina, with excellent restaurants and palm-lined streets. On 12 March 1992 Lima was driving away from his house when he noticed two men on a motor bike in full-faced helmets heading towards him.
He scrambled out of his car and started to run, but they shot him as they drove past, leaving him wounded on the pavement. They turned and came back for him, shot him several more times and roared off. It was Riina’s personal valediction to a long and fruitful relationship with the Christian Democrats.

Falcone, meanwhile, was embroiled in a row with the magistrates’ ruling body over the nomination for the new ‘super-prosecutor’ position. While he struggled to continue with his work, Cosa Nostra was preparing its revenge. In May, when Falcone flew home to Palermo for the weekend, as he did every Friday, a series of security breaches were scarcely noticed – the police failed to check the route he was to drive into the city. A group of men in overalls had been laying a pipe under the motorway, but no one had noticed anything unusual about them. Up in the hills above, a trio sat and watched, smoking cigarettes and waiting for a signal. As judge Falcone’s motorcade swept into view, Giovanni Brusca, peering through binoculars, pressed a button on his remote control. Far below them the road, and three bulletproof limousines, erupted in a massive explosion that tore up the ground for 100 metres around. The three bodyguards in the front car were killed instantly. Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, barely regained consciousness and died later in hospital.

As news of the massacre spread, cheering erupted in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. An old enemy of Cosa Nostra had finally got his reward. The team behind the bombing met at a house belonging to Salvatore Cancemi, a mafioso who had been involved in planning the massacre. As they drank champagne and toasted their enemy’s violent end, Cancemi knew they had created a disaster. ‘This bastard will destroy us all’, he muttered to another member of the team.

Cancemi had sensed the reaction to Falcone’s murder: it was, as he surmised, an outrage that would come close to destroying Cosa Nostra. Ordinary people turned out in their thousands to pay their respects to the dead and scream abuse at the politicians who had let them down.

With a heavy heart Falcone’s friend and close colleague in the anti-Mafia pool Paolo Borsellino took his place at the prosecutor’s office in Palermo. Borsellino was marked by the Mafia as a dangerous
man – he was known for his moral rectitude and seemed to inspire trust: he had persuaded several key Mafia figures to collaborate and was accumulating vast files of incriminating evidence. He was also trespassing on Cosa Nostra’s prized public contracts.

‘The acceleration of events that led to Borsellino’s death’, said the
pentito
Angelo Siino, once the Mafia’s minister of public works, ‘was due to the fact that he was about to broach the issue of the major contracts, the management of
£
60 billion spent by Sicilian politicians with the Mafia’s agreement.’

As Borsellino worked night and day on his huge and rapidly increasing caseload, Cosa Nostra plotted to prevent him exposing their precious contracts. On a Sunday afternoon, outside his mother’s flat, on 19 July, he and five bodyguards were killed by a massive car bomb.

This time the city came out
en masse
to express its rage and disgust at the Mafia’s violence and the state’s failure to protect its own. Women went on hunger strike in the central square of Palermo to demand government action. A small group of ordinary citizens organized a mass protest in which people hung sheets over their balconies, bearing anti-Mafia slogans. The Mafia had been thrown out of the beds where it had lain, cosy and undisturbed, for so long. The Corleonesi had finally gone too far.

The government’s response, at last, was swift: in an operation named Sicilian Vespers thousands of soldiers were transferred from the north to do guard duty, protecting magistrates and other public figures and institutions, and freeing up local police and carabinieri to hunt for the killers. Young servicemen in Alpine uniform, complete with pheasant tail feather in their hats, stood guard nervously behind bulletproof glass cabins. It felt like a city at war. ‘Invite a soldier for coffee!’ said leaflets posted along the walls and on lamp posts. ‘Show them we’re not all mafiosi.’

Several collaborators have hinted that there were forces beyond Cosa Nostra at work in the massacres at Capaci and via d’Amelio. Elements of the state, allegedly, wanted Borsellino dead. On this part of the story the case has not yet closed.

Giancarlo Caselli, a distinguished, white-haired judge from Turin, had volunteered to step into the post of Palermo’s chief prosecutor, a cause for celebration among anti-Mafia campaigners – whose numbers had swelled in recent months to include most of the city. Within weeks of his arrival dozens of mafiosi were behind bars. For once there was back-up from the government: eight years after Buscetta risked his life by agreeing to talk to Giovanni Falcone a law was passed to give collaborators proper protection and to help them assume new identities.

Another sign that all was not well within Cosa Nostra was the number of prisoners turning state’s evidence. Mafiosi who opposed Riina’s strategy and had witnessed the massacre of the ‘losing side’ in the war of the early ’80s turned themselves in rather than face his wrath. Many who had enjoyed the high life under his leadership, accumulating wealth and relishing their power, could not see the point of ‘this life’ from the inside of a prison cell. After the bombings the number of
pentiti
, already higher than ever before, rose to over 400.

Salvatore Cancemi, who had been involved in the bombing at Capaci, walked into a carabiniere station and announced that he wanted to talk. He encouraged other mafiosi to take the same step ‘because Riina is a dog, a demon, a devil who has destroyed Cosa Nostra’.