Boss of Bosses (25 page)

But when Forza Italia was founded in 1993, Provenzano saw a new political party on the landscape and recognized that a number of its local politicians were willing to do business. ‘From then on’, recalls Giuffré, ‘our people had to forget about their old friends in the Christian Democrats – it was all Forza Italia.’

‘Tell the others they mustn’t talk inside their cars or anywhere near them, and at home they must be careful as well, they mustn’t talk loudly near any houses, construction sites or abandoned buildings.’

This letter from Provenzano to one of his managers followed a tip-off that police had bugged their meeting place – a farm office out in the country.

Provenzano was obsessive about security. Wherever he went, he carried a little backpack, a sleeping bag and a wand for detecting bugging devices, and he was constantly on the look-out for new and more secure meeting places.

Giuffré described a meeting with Provenzano and Pino Lipari in which the main topics were security issues. As Giuffré recalls, he reminded them repeatedly ‘to be careful never to talk about certain things, to try and find some protection against being bugged, for example with one of those instruments that locates bugs, and at the same time to try and find new people, with no record, who could move freely without being spotted by the forces of law and order, to protect both fugitives and people who shouldn’t be seen in contact with them’.

With so many penitent mafiosi revealing the organization’s darkest secrets, Provenzano had to find a secure means of communication, to stay ahead of police investigators.

‘New technology is a minefield for anyone with security worries’, points out General Angiolo Pellegrini, who was tracking Provenzano
in the early 1980s. ‘Mobile phones can be pinpointed, landlines are no longer secure; we put bugs in their cars, and we can follow them with GPS, e-mails can be intercepted, computers can be taken apart. Anything they do we can intercept. By the time it’s legal to plant listening devices in houses, well, at this point, the less we talk, the better. So I write a note on a piece of paper, and I send it to you.’

Provenzano’s simple method of communication, no more sophisticated than the one used by schoolchildren in class before mobile phones, revolutionized the running of Cosa Nostra.

Provenzano kept the
pizzini
circulating, come what may – as symbols of his authority and reminders of his continual presence – advising, answering, cajoling and, occasionally, making demands. He used code numbers and initials to conceal the identity of the addressees. ‘Zio’ (‘Uncle’) signed on and off in similar, generic vein, avoiding any personal detail that could have identified the recipient.

He advocated extreme caution in business dealings, as an essential part of his no-risk, no-noise policy. He wrote to Brusca, who had invited him to join a drug deal: ‘This is the second time you’ve invited me to invest in this deal with you, and I thank you for it, but if you would listen to my advice, at this moment in time, if we can’t hand-pick the people we are doing business with, we should do nothing. The people who you are in contact with are fine, I know who they are. But what about the people they are in contact with? We don’t know them, so I don’t want any part in this.’

Brusca recalled this rebuttal years later: ‘He insisted that before we made any kind of investment, he wanted to know who we were doing business with, where we were going, what it was all about . . . he wanted to know the whole story from A to Z.’

If any of his men proposed to make political contacts without the necessary caution, they could expect the same grilling. Provenzano sent his man in San Giuseppe Iato, Salvatore Genovese, a chilling rebuke.

‘You tell me you have a high-level political contact who would put you in a position to manage major projects, and before going ahead you ask me what I think. But without knowing this person, what do you want me to tell you?

‘I would need to know their name, and who their contacts are. These days we can’t trust anyone. They could be a trickster, a cop, an infiltrator. They could be wasting our time or plotting our downfall. More than that, I can’t honestly say.’

Provenzano had been highly disciplined and autonomous, even in earlier days on the run. Brusca remembers: ‘I would say that man is prudence personified. We would go out and about, taking the usual precautions, usually in the early morning, but he was capable of going to ground for months at a time. He walled himself in. When we saw him again, his skin was as white as paper.’

Provenzano never let even those closest to him know where he was staying. He was good at letting the people think that he was staying in the place where they met. His driver would be from that village, and his associates would naturally assume he was staying there. That was what he wanted them to think.

Although they were close associates, there was a deep-seated, quite mutual, sense of caution. ‘If he had ever needed somewhere to stay as a matter of urgency,’ said Giuffré, ‘I of course told him he could stay with me. But he didn’t know where I lived because I didn’t tell anyone that . . . not even Provenzano. He did ask me once but I didn’t tell him, because he didn’t need to know. There are some things you don’t ask.’

‘How can you ask for a discount, when our people are inside? You are like a rock in the middle of the sea, with the wind battering against you from all sides. Please, stop getting in the way of what I’m trying to do and sort this out for me.’

Provenzano had set up a fund for imprisoned members of Cosa Nostra, paid for from the profits of racketeering. When Palermo capo Nino Rotolo asked permission to give one of the businesses in his territory a discount, Provenzano chided him for neglecting his brothers in prison.

The new boss had no military power, and a diminishing number of capos. He had to deal with a decimated, demoralized, even traumatized,
army, and his first priority was to stop any more mafiosi turning state’s evidence. By giving prisoners their due, Provenzano showed he was prepared to pay attention to the old way of doing things. It was important to reinstate the old rules and the old way of managing Cosa Nostra – such as the mutual fund for all the families in Palermo.

Provenzano proved a master at combining old and new: modern business methods with old-fashioned typewritten notes; new business strategies with old-fashioned patronage. In the process of rebuilding an army, he combined the knowledge of the old guard with the energy of the new.

‘The apparent equilibrium within Cosa Nostra rests entirely on the recognition of Bernardo Provenzano’s authority’, a secret service report notes. ‘He continues to be the connecting link between the traditional Mafia and the more aggressive factions.’

After Bagarella’s arrest Provenzano called a summit. Present were senior men of honour Provenzano knew he could rely on. ‘All the men on this new-style cupola were so old,’ wrote the examining magistrates in their report, ‘it should have been called a Senate.’

Provenzano restored a sense of hierarchy. He recruited the old guard who had been out of the country, or out of favour, for a decade, and who were appalled by the turn Cosa Nostra had taken under Riina.

‘Provenzano’s strength’, explains Nino Di Matteo, ‘has been his ability to surround himself with apparently respectable people perfectly capable of interacting with the institutions of power, to discover what he needed to know.’ Di Matteo observes that Provenzano rebuilt the commission on new guidelines, avoiding old clan enmities and feuds: ‘Provenzano gathered together a close group of men, often not even formally affiliated with Cosa Nostra, a group that comprised members of several families, across different
mandamenti
.’

In so doing, he revived a culture of working together for a common aim. It was not always easy to do. In Palermo there were some, such as Rotolo, who found it impossible to forget the past and unite. ‘We must do it for everyone’s good’, Provenzano wrote to him.

Political and business contacts appreciated the change of regime and understood that these were people they could do business with, without jeopardizing their careers.

The magistrates investigating Provenzano’s supporters described his successful process of recovery and rehabilitation: ‘A Cosa Nostra, directed by Provenzano, fully operational, run on a hierarchical model, whose ruling group, once they have processed the fall-out from the “mistakes made” in the recent past, acknowledge the need to stitch up old wounds, in order to mend their “broken toy” and get on with achieving their goals: wealth and Mafia power.’

C
OSA NOSTRA’S DESERTION
of its traditional political allies the Christian Democrats did not assist the Mafia cause. New anti-Mafia laws passed by Giulio Andreotti made life very uncomfortable for the prisoners and their families, who were now separated by Perspex screens on their monthly visits and body-searched on their way in and out. The authorities seized their businesses and – more painful still for those, like Riina, of peasant stock – their land.

‘What do they think, that the prime minister’s forgotten they voted for the Socialists? They were a thorn in his side, and he’s got rid of them’, Salvo Lima scoffed to Angelo Siino.

Riina had put too much pressure on his political contacts, who had ultimately snapped. ‘He had pulled the rope too tight,’ said Giuffré, ‘particularly in connection with control of public works contracts. The politicians got irritated; they felt bullied and threatened.’

Although Provenzano had never set much store by any of the parties, he needed a new political alliance to consolidate his position and realize the next phase of his plan. While he consulted his contacts in search of new political partners, in early 1990 Leoluca Bagarella, always inclined towards the dramatic, started taking an interest in the idea of a coup d’état. He asked Tullio Cannella, a contractor, to seek out any separatist tendencies and find out if they were serious. Cannella duly spent some months and a lot of money founding a new separatist party. He later confessed: ‘I worked on the plan to build an independence movement that would hand Sicily over to Cosa Nostra.’

Among those he canvassed for selection was a prince who had expressed an interest in starting a Southern League. At supper with the
prince, who liked to be addressed as Your Royal Highness, Cannella told him bluntly that if they were going to get him elected, they would have to do a deal with the Mafia bosses, to ‘kiss some hands’, as he put it, however disagreeable this might be. At this point His Highness paled and politely declined, and said, ‘We never had this meeting.’

The attraction of a separatist movement was, to Provenzano, the ideal of controlling a political party from the inside. Cosa Nostra had a new ambition, ‘in which men of honour would be able, directly or nearly, to make their voices heard and impose their will’. But such a movement could take years to get going, and the man at the helm of Cosa Nostra was in a hurry. Just when he was running out of money, Cannella was contacted by Bagarella, who said that they had a solution, more concrete and immediate than the project he’d been working on, and he should not waste any more time on it. ‘Bagarella told me they were supporting a new party, Forza Italia. Apparently there were members of Cosa Nostra who had links to some of the candidates, who had made some kind of electoral pact, had undertaken a commitment, so they were going to vote for them.’

Provenzano’s top priority was to get the anti-Mafia laws changed, to lessen the power of the
pentiti
and to soften the harsh conditions for mafiosi in prison. In January 1993 Provenzano summoned Giuffré and told him he had found a new political reference, one that within a decade would have made all the concessions they demanded. As the judges later put it: ‘The new political line was good news for anyone who needed to move vast amounts of capital, and would raise the threshold of impunity.’

‘The leaders of Cosa Nostra had made contact with a very senior figure in Berlusconi’s entourage, someone beyond suspicion’, the informer Gino Ilardo told his carabiniere handler, Maresciallo Riccio. ‘In exchange for their support in the elections, I was told they had received certain guarantees.’

So, Riccio asked, who was Berlusconi’s man at the meeting? Was it Marcello dell’Utri?

‘Ah, Maresciallo, nothing gets past you!’ Ilardo replied.

Dell’Utri had been a banker and was now director of Berlusconi’s advertising agency, Publitalia. In a clever stroke for a football-mad
nation he came up with the idea for a political party called Forza Italia! (Go Italy!). Prosecutors dated dell’Utri’s links with the Mafia back to his days as a football coach in Palermo in the 1960s, and he had hired a man of honour, Vittorio Mangano, to work at Berlusconi’s country estate in the ’70s.

It was later claimed that dell’Utri hired Mangano in the 1970s not for his skill with animals (he could not even ride a horse, and as one mafioso put it, ‘Cosa Nostra doesn’t clean stables for anyone’
²⁶
), but as a representative of Cosa Nostra, to protect Berlusconi and his family from kidnapping. Berlusconi has insisted that he had no idea about Mangano’s links with Cosa Nostra and recalled that, as estate manager, he was exemplary.

For the rich, kidnapping was a real threat at that time: after the commission outlawed his favourite way of making money on Sicilian soil, Luciano Liggio had moved his operations to the north. ‘First we threatened them, then we offered them a guarantee of safety; it worked every time’, said collaborator Francesco Di Carlo, capo of Altofonte, who was later arrested in London for drug trafficking.