Boss of Bosses (2 page)

‘Shortly after that, a package was delivered to the cottage that looked like it could be a television set. We said, Oh my God! One of them comes up with an aerial, the other one turns up with a television, there’s got to be someone living inside, and it could be Bernardo Provenzano.’

Early on the morning of 11 April 2006 the shepherd opened the door as usual, and just for a fleeting moment the observers up on the mountain saw an arm reach out from inside. It was all the proof they
needed. The police unit got into position: the leader, Renato Cortese, moved up to a point 4 km away with eighteen men; the chiefs waited in the cover of the nearby forest.

‘Go!’ Bloodhound’s voice came over the radio, loud and clear. Everyone knew what to do; they’d been rehearsing this moment in their sleep.

When Cortese burst into the little farm building, the old man tried to slam the door in his face, but he threw himself against it, smashing the glass with his fist. For a moment the old man looked like a trapped animal, then he composed himself to face his captor.

‘You don’t know what you are doing’, he said in a low voice. He spoke quietly, with a strong Sicilian accent. Cortese thought he might be trying to say they’d got the wrong man. He checked for the scar on the old man’s neck: there it was. He had been told of another identifying sign: the Boss would be wearing three silver crosses on a chain. Sure enough, they were hidden under his shirt. There was no doubt, it was Provenzano. After forty-three years on the run the Boss of Bosses had finally been caught.

‘I looked into his eyes, and I knew it was him’, Cortese said.

One of the agents, nicknamed ‘the Director’, had recorded the build-up to the arrest on a hand-held camera. Seeing the lens turned on him, Provenzano hid his face. When he finally lowered his hands, he was composed, fixing his visitors with a scornful expression, an inscrutable half-smile, offering his hand and his congratulations.

Outside the cottage the agents hugged each other and wept, whooped with euphoria and phoned their loved ones. In the midst of this scene of wild celebration Gualtieri followed Cortese into the hut. ‘He wore a knowing smile, as though to say, “You think you’ve won, but you haven’t. Capturing me doesn’t change anything. Cosa Nostra isn’t beaten.”’

The place they found Provenzano, in the mountains above Corleone, was known as the ‘triangle of death’: a couple of miles away were the ravines and forests where Provenzano’s earliest victims had met their violent ends. He had come home.

The massive international media coverage and frenzied analysis that followed Provenzano’s arrest was largely due to the fact that, until that
moment, very little was known about the boss of Cosa Nostra. He was one of the most powerful criminal leaders in Europe, and hadn’t been seen in public for over forty years. The mystique that had built up around him made his arrest an object of fascination world-wide – yet even then there were no easy answers. People watching the news all over the world were shocked at the humble circumstances in which Provenzano was living: the tiny shepherd’s hut reeked of rotting vegetables and urine, his diet of bread and onions . . . how had the Boss of Bosses, at the age of seventy-three, been reduced to this?

‘He’s living in this dump’, said the Sicilian crime writer Andrea Camilleri. ‘He’s got candles, because maybe the electricity goes off . . . but he knows he’s got power. He’s a multi-billionaire. Provenzano is the living embodiment of the Sicilian saying
meglio commandare che fottere:
it’s better to rule people than to screw them.’
¹

The old man living in a cramped shepherd’s hut was, in spite of appearances, the centre of Cosa Nostra’s operations. People sent for his advice, his blessing, his introductions, his judgement. ‘People weren’t looking for him to arrest him’, wrote journalist Salvo Palazzolo. ‘They were seeking him out to ask his considered opinion.’

Not one bulldozer moved without his say-so. Multi-million-dollar deals were made on his word. And all these instructions were contained in little Sellotaped notes, banged out on a manual typewriter and carried from hand to hand. After his arrest the hideout was searched inch by inch, every carrier bag inspected and noted down. But the more they found, the more mysterious, if anything, his personality became.

‘You could think he was a peasant living in the country’, observed assistant prosecutor Michele Prestipino, who had been on Provenzano’s trail for eight years. ‘He had all the props – the cheese, bread and onion, the simple pious lifestyle – he had constructed a whole rustic image, but then we discovered he had a wardrobe full of silk jackets, cashmere sweaters, clothes from the most upmarket stores in Palermo. He led us to think he’s a rough countryman, when all the time – and this is my theory – he’d been staying in a massive apartment in the middle of Palermo, living the life of a bourgeois pensioner.

‘He had seventeen cases containing his stuff: winter pyjamas, summer pyjamas, four vanity cases with manicure sets and very nice products. It was clear that living in this shepherd’s cottage was not his normal life. His possessions, the products he uses, would not have seemed out of place in any professional’s house. This was no peasant living rough.’ Provenzano even had a battery-operated device for trimming nose and ear hairs: he was clearly not a man who lived his whole life among peasants.

‘Provenzano is a chameleon’, says Giuseppe Gualtieri. ‘You’d see him in an immaculate suit in the finest drawing-rooms in Palermo, and he’d look as if he belonged there. You’d see him in the country, in an old pair of trousers and an anorak, looking like a shepherd. There are one or two collaborators who say they’ve seen him dressed as a priest – and apparently he looked the part. Provenzano’s great skill is this ability to adapt . . . it is also his greatest weapon.’

From one viewpoint the cheesemaker’s hut in Corleone was a perfectly calculated last staging post for the Boss of Bosses. The message implied by this improbably humble setting was: if this malodorous hovel is where the godfather has been holed up, the Mafia can’t be as powerful as we thought.

Provenzano was acutely aware of the importance of messages and symbols in the Mafia’s secret communication system, and of the uses of propaganda. Whatever message his circumstances sent out was intended.

Provenzano had rescued Cosa Nostra from disaster. He had taken over the organization when the Mafia’s political connections were losing traction and its leaders were trying to impose their will on the state by means of extreme violence.

Under the leadership of Luciano Liggio, Provenzano and his brothers in arms had transformed the Corleone Mafia from a machine that guaranteed the status quo into an expansionist force determined to dominate Cosa Nostra. They broke every rule of the old Mafia and blew apart the families that had run Palermo for generations, with an audacity and savagery that had never been seen before. The partnership between Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, who took over as joint leaders after Liggio’s conviction, was greatly feared: Riina had
muscle and determination; Provenzano had a political mind and contacts. And at the same time both were fugitives, scarcely known outside their own circles: under cover they wreaked devastation by setting families against each other.

But the differences between them became increasingly marked, and Riina, maddened with power, ceased to listen to his old friend. Provenzano remained in the shadows as Cosa Nostra waged war on the state, and as the tide turned against them, he began to keep his distance from Riina, building his contacts, counselling prudence, taking a long view. And when the strategy of violence backfired, threatening to destroy Cosa Nostra, Provenzano finally emerged to take control.

After years of political assassinations, internecine fighting and hundreds of arrests, the Mafia capos were disoriented. The soldiers were suffering from trauma, and many had ‘repented’ and confessed their role in the organization. These so-called
pentiti
were the greatest threat to Cosa Nostra. Terrible things had been done in the name of the organization, and it badly needed a new way forward.

‘Provenzano became head of Cosa Nostra not because he was the last godfather left standing’, wrote Michele Prestipino and Salvo Palazzolo, ‘but because he was the only one capable of forging the new Cosa Nostra, adapting it to the demands of the time.’

Most mafiosi had never seen him. Investigators had long believed him seriously ill. More than once over the years since his disappearance in 1969, Provenzano had been pronounced dead. The most recent announcement had come just two weeks before his arrest, when his lawyer had made an extraordinary announcement. ‘Bernardo Provenzano has been dead for years. The Mafia has created a phantom.’
²

The conspiracy theorists and Mafia watchers puzzled over the significance of this. It seems his lawyer was announcing the death of the bandit who sowed terror in Corleone, the wild beast who killed at least forty people with his own hands, the unstoppable criminal known as ‘the Tractor’. These were shadows, ghosts, the lawyer seemed to declare. The old Provenzano no longer existed.

The new model of the Mafia boss was a far more sophisticated version. ‘The new founding father of Cosa Nostra, the great reformer’, one recent book calls him.
³

‘Provenzano’s role?’ mused the Boss’s former right-hand man, Nino Giuffré, on the witness stand. ‘I could tell you exactly what it was: he gave the orders. But it was more complex than that. He came up with a new strategy for Cosa Nostra. He wanted to preserve the rules of Cosa Nostra, which had been corroded. And he had an impressive number of contacts in every area of Italian life.’

Provenzano’s rescue of Cosa Nostra from the brink of defeat is an extraordinary story, from which the heads of corporations have much to learn. The culture he instilled, and his successful restoration of old values with new methods, could be a fruitful management guide in some industries – and I have included a chapter (‘A management handbook for the aspiring Mafia boss’) that lays out his guidelines for turning around a failing business.

Over the days that followed his arrest, satisfaction at the capture of the man who had been a persistent embarrassment to Italian justice was quickly replaced by angry questions about why he had been allowed to live freely for so long without ever straying far from home. It seems likely that his ‘contacts’ in high places allowed him to remain at large because he created an organization they could live with.

‘He was protected by professionals, politicians, businessmen, law enforcers’, said chief anti-Mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso. ‘We have found them all represented in our investigations, so we had to conclude that he was protected not just by a criminal organization but by entire sectors of society. I believe that it isn’t a single politician who has protected Provenzano all these years but a political system.’

‘Provenzano believed that Cosa Nostra could co-exist with the state, cohabit with it, that there was no need to destroy it’, says assistant prosecutor Alfonso Sabella. ‘He recruited followers among those who played a role in civil society, and infiltrated the organs of state with his own people. His philosophy was, I’ll get inside the state and take what I can. I don’t need to take it all.’

‘He is the Mafia: they’re one and the same’, says Sabella’s sister Marzia, also an assistant prosecutor. ‘He is a great mediator. A little obsessive-compulsive . . . He is capable of great thinking. If he hadn’t been a Mafia boss, he could have been a lawyer, a businessman. He
doesn’t give a damn about killing someone over an act of disrespect; he’s much more concerned about making money.’

‘He kept himself below the radar’, recalls General Angiolo Pellegrini, a carabiniere who has spent years on Provenzano’s trail. ‘He rarely saw anyone, or let himself be seen. He didn’t stick his head over the parapet. In the end the others all followed his line – they realized his ideas were right.’

Provenzano is the only Mafia boss we have come to know so intimately through his own words, and through the words (either intercepted or spoken on the witness stand) of his former friends and advisers. Other bosses before him have been revealed only through the words of their enemies.

We have access to a personal and political profile of Provenzano, thanks to his friend, traitor and unofficial biographer Nino Giuffré, boss of the mountain-top town of Caccamo (dubbed the Switzerland of Cosa Nostra, because so much Mafia money ran through it). Giuffré has revealed his likes and dislikes, his anxieties, ambitions, friendships, his pity and generosity. Men who would rather shoot than talk had to admire Provenzano’s skilled mediation, his quiet authority.

There is, of course, a human story behind the political intrigues of organized crime – a story of friendship betrayed, of great personal loss, of relationships destroyed by the demands of Cosa Nostra: the officers working seven days a week on the trail of the fugitive, who sacrificed their personal lives for their duty; the boss’s sons, who had terrible problems trying to create a relationship with their father and to lead their own lives; the wife, who stuck by her man through the years, only to be sent away, for the safety of her children; the old man, sick and alone, deserted by friends, betrayed by his closest advisers.

Giuffré has revealed details of how the long-term fugitives lived – sometimes in luxury, sometimes in reduced and pitiful conditions. He has recalled the small kindnesses they showed each other – a cake at Easter, boxes of citrus fruit at Christmas and their favourite pasta sauce. Under examination in court Giuffré was asked to interpret a note on which was written, ‘Thank you for the bottles of sauce’. Was it code for money? A concealed weapon? No, Giuffré replied, the guy
likes home-made tomato sauce, so I sent him some. Sometimes a bottle of tomato sauce is just . . . tomato sauce.’